SEVENTEEN
In recent years, opinion experts plumbing public attitudes toward climate change have argued that after decades of relative indifference, climate change has become a matter of urgent concern for a majority of Americans. But how urgent? The answer, unfortunately, is not that much. Consider the last debate between President Trump and Joe Biden that took place two weeks before the 2020 election.
The good news for those concerned with climate change: the debate moderator, Kristen Welker, put the issue to the candidates. The bad news: the Biden campaign’s reaction to one comment in the debate suggests that his advisers believe that Americans are still not ready to deal with the issue. Biden made a remark about transitioning away from oil, not a particularly radical suggestion. Trump gleefully jumped on the remark, saying, “He’s going to destroy the oil industry …. Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?” Biden could have doubled down and said, “Climate change is already costing Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. We cannot deal with the threat without moving away from fossil fuels.” Instead, his campaign panicked.
Biden surrogates went into furious spin mode—stressing that Biden was talking about a slooow transition and that oil and fracking will be with us for a long time. The notion that it is political suicide to talk about reducing our reliance on fossil fuels might have made sense thirty-four years ago, when the recognition of global warming first burst upon the scene. But now? The debate took place even as the latest and worst of a series of hellish fires torched the West.
No party nominee for president before Biden made climate change a major theme of his or her campaign. There are many reasons why global warming has failed to gain traction with the public, including a well-funded campaign of obfuscation by deniers, competition for mind space from other pressing issues such as terrorism or the economy, and the very nature of the issue itself. The threat derives from hard-to-explain photochemical processes in the atmosphere, and sometimes it seems that every human activity contributes to a warming globe.
Given these headwinds, only an inspired leader might get the public to vote for action. Many have tried, but none has found the right message. Billionaire Tom Steyer made climate change a centerpiece of his 2020 campaign and gained a couple of delegates after spending $191 million just on advertising. Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, also put climate front and center and also came up empty.
If the public was sufficiently educated about climate change, the scandal of the debate might have been Trump’s bizarre remarks on the subject. Everything he said was either nonsensical (that Biden was promoting “little, tiny, small windows”), wrong (wind energy is “extremely expensive”), or both. Instead, much of the follow-up coverage was about how much damage Biden might have done to himself through his awkward comment about oil.
While the focus for much of the press was whether Biden’s “gaffe” on transitioning away from oil would hurt him in Pennsylvania and Texas, the far bigger problem for humanity is that more than two generations after global warming became an issue, a candidate for president still has to treat it like a hand grenade with the pin out.
Of course, the United States and the world have to transition away from fossil fuels! Moreover, that transition is already underway. In the years before COVID-19 hit, the global economy grew by roughly 3 percent a year, while carbon dioxide emissions grew by only 1 percent a year. Some of this decarbonization comes from the switch to renewables and some because of increases in efficiency, but if the world is going to head off the most disastrous impacts of climate change, the trend has to accelerate because the global economy is still adding greenhouse gases to an overburdened atmosphere.
Only the federal government can enact the carrots and sticks (and negotiate with other nations) to speed this transition. That’s not going to happen if an incoming administration waffles on the issue. Most disheartening about the Biden campaign’s backpedaling is the implication that Biden’s advisers still fear that there’s more to be lost by bold statements on the need to move away from oil than there is to be gained.
Alas, the wisdom of this was born out in the general election. After four years of dismissing climate change as a hoax, installing climate deniers in key agencies involved with studying and regulating climate change, countermanding or defanging regulations related to reducing CO2, promoting coal and other fossil fuels, and innumerable other efforts to make sure that the United States could increase its releases of greenhouse gases, Trump received eleven million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016.
This surge of turnout for a climate change denier occurred just a year after Greta Thunberg, a Swedish schoolgirl, addressed the United Nations and became an international sensation. She and others spawned a global uprising of the young, who expressed their outrage at the older generation whose heedlessness about climate change put their future at risk. The feelings expressed are profound and real; psychiatrists call it “climate grief,” and it has caused great numbers of young people to assert that they are not going to have children for fear of the world in which they would have to survive.
Clearly, something powerful was causing voters to ignore these public expressions of climate dread.
If the top five issues for the voting public listed by FiveThirtyEight’s opinion survey actually determined voting patterns, the results of the election would have been very different. Certainly, Biden got the votes from people who were deeply concerned about climate change, COVID-19, the threats to Obamacare, and racial inequality, and a good deal of the votes from citizens worried about Trump’s handling of the economy. But those numbers were not nearly as large as the ones that showed up on surveys. Trump voters seemed to be worried or moved by factors not captured by those polls.
Cognitive scientist George Lakoff has written about “deep framing,” a phenomenon through which messaging attaches political parties or particular people to archetypal values or repulsions and gives such emotional power to these associations that appeals to reason don’t have a chance. If the messenger is illegitimate, then the message received is not the message intended. When candidate Biden talked about climate change as an existential crisis, a good portion of viewers thought, “Oh great, here’s another liberal know-it-all telling me what to worry about.”
The power of such framing is almost impossible to overestimate. During the COVID pandemic, Trump supporters who bought his spin that the disease was like the flu embraced that belief so fervently that some coronavirus patients refused to believe the disease was real even in the moments before they died of it. Jodi Doering, a South Dakota ER nurse, told CNN that some patients would refuse to call family or friends because they thought they were going to be fine right up to the end. Others’ last words would be, “This can’t be happening. It’s not real.” If someone can embrace an alternative explanation so fiercely that they refuse to abandon it even as they are dying of what they deny, then it’s easy to understand how those who think climate change is a liberal fantasy can ignore decades of evidence to the contrary.
Those trying to communicate the scale of the climate threat know this, of course. They’ve seen decades of different attempts to invest the global warming message with some emotional oomph fail to move the broader public. To try to communicate more effectively, delegations of scientists and writers have met with editorial boards (I’ve been part of some of these efforts), numerous universities have established programs to better translate the complexities of the science into a form that the public might understand, high-powered marketing and advertising wizards have volunteered their time to better shape global warming messaging, and corporate leaders and major financiers have put serious money into attempts to galvanize the public.
These are not trivial exercises. Hedge fund titan Jeremy Grantham dipped into his personal fortune to fund a blizzard of initiatives to try to bridge the gap between the urgency of the problem and the relative apathy of the public. Yale sponsors a climate film festival and has several other programs attempting to communicate climate change science and news. Columbia University also has several programs related to bringing climate science to the public in digestible form, as well as a Climate Decision Forum, an interdisciplinary effort with one sector devoted to studying the social scientific issues involved in communicating the climate threat. I’ve participated in climate change messaging conferences that brought in linguists, psychologists, and experts on semiotics. Smaller universities such as Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, have put together programs to engage local communities on the issue.
Big foundations such as Hewlett, the Bullitt Foundation, and the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors have poured money into web presences such as Climate Nexus, Climate Central, and Inside Climate News, all of which try to crack the code of how to galvanize the public about the scale of the danger and report on possible pathways to reduce its potency.
Major movie stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio have picked up the baton from Al Gore and participated in documentaries about global warming. Author-turned-activist Bill McKibben has organized thousands of demonstrations around the world. CliFi—shorthand for “climate science fiction”—has emerged as a genre, and global warming is showing up as a regular leitmotif of feature films such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and Snowpiercer. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, assembled Hollywood A-listers including Matt Damon, Jessica Alba, and Harrison Ford to host episodes for a Showtime series on climate change.
Both in the United States and globally, the scale of the effort has been massive, expertly targeted, and social media savvy. And almost everybody has gotten better at it. Remembering previous efforts to sell the public on the danger of global warming, Bud Ward, the founding editor of Yale Climate Connections, remarked wryly, “If you wanted to tell the public that climate change was a faraway threat long in the future, there was probably no better symbol for the threat than the polar bear.”
Demonstrably, fine-tuning the outreach efforts has not been enough. As the 2020 election shows, this colossal campaign to communicate the problem has only worked with those ready to receive the message. The problem is not information; we’re drowning in new examples of the disruptions and distortions resulting from our changing climate. The problem is a frailty in the American psyche that makes very large numbers of people more receptive to truly lunatic conspiracy theories (e.g., the QAnon belief that Democratic elites are running an international cannibalistic pedophile ring, an insanity believed by half of Trump supporters according to a poll conducted by YouGov just before the election) than to the tsunami of reporting on global warming by the mainstream media.
The New York Times collaborated with Siena College to poll voters on attitudes toward climate in the battleground states of the 2020 election. They asked voters in Florida, “How worried are you that rising sea levels from global warming will have a significant impact on your life?” The vast majority of Biden voters were either very worried (40 percent) or somewhat worried (38 percent). When it came to Trump supporters (Trump won the state) only 3 percent were very worried and 19 percent somewhat worried. The vast difference in attitudes toward something that already affects life in the state suggests that many Floridian neighbors filtered and interpreted the evidence of their own eyes in radically different ways depending on their party affiliation.
A question put to Arizona voters about whether they were worried by rising temperatures produced similar differences. About 90 percent of Biden voters were very or somewhat worried. Only 22 percent of Trump supporters voiced concern.
Anthony Leiserowitz and Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University–based political scientist who has decades of experience studying opinion on climate change, rightly note that the “issue public” for climate change dramatically expanded in numbers during the latter parts of the 2010s. Despite this uptick, the issue still lacks the political potency to drive a national election. Will the issue public continue to expand sufficiently to drive action on climate now that Biden has replaced Trump as president? After all, smoking never drove a presidential election as an issue, and yet the public turned away from cigarettes. Seat belts never drove a presidential election, and yet the public now wears them without complaint. And recycling has never been a major issue in a presidential campaign, yet almost everyone now separates plastics, metals, and paper from garbage.
Even if it didn’t arouse sufficient passion to break through the partisan filters of Trump supporters, concern about the threat of climate change has reached a threshold where Biden will have a receptive public when he reverses the myriad pro-greenhouse-gas actions of the Trump administration. One of his very first acts was to have the United States rejoin the Paris accord on climate change; he has begun reversing the scores of regulatory changes through which the Trump administration attempted to promote the unfettered use of coal and other fossil fuels (as well as many toxic compounds); and we can expect that Biden will promote new initiatives to hasten the transition away from fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, because of the nature of carbon dioxide, we cannot simply pick up where we left off when Trump took office. Just as retrograde action on climate change during the George W. Bush administration narrowed the window for subsequent administrations to deal with climate change, so did the Trump administration’s undermining of climate initiatives further raise the burden of CO2 for Biden.
A story by Christopher Flavelle in The New York Times reported that the Trump administration actively tried to sabotage the administration’s own report on the outlook for climate change. It tried to soften language and introduce qualifications and then dumped the report on the public the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it wouldn’t be noticed. Testament to the dedication of the scientists who put out the report is that all the various attempts to derail or defang it largely failed. Flavelle quotes Thomas Armstrong, who led the previous administration’s research efforts on climate change: “Thank God they didn’t know how to run a government.”
Still, the two Bush administrations and one Trump administration since 1988 have done a staggering amount of damage. For half of the thirty-four years since climate change became a mainstream issue, the executive branch of the largest economy on the planet has been trying to delay, if not outright sabotage, action on global warming. To those sixteen years, you can add the eight years of Reagan administrations, during which climate change was ignored. For much of that time, the United States found willing accomplices in the leadership of Australia, Canada, and other supposedly enlightened nations, as well as the support of the petro-states. Yes, China and India bear much responsibility for the path of energy development they chose, but criticism from the United States loses force when our elected leaders have derided the threat for half the climate change era.
Still, the damage might have been far greater. Despite the Trump administration’s active promotion of coal and feverish deregulation, emissions remained virtually flat for the first three years of his tenure (as wind and solar continued to take off and electric power companies switched from coal to natural gas) and then actually dropped in 2020 as the COVID-19 epidemic greatly slowed economic activity.
The Rhodium Group estimated the pandemic cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent (globally, estimates for a COVID-related reduction range around a 5.8 percent reduction for 2020 according to the International Energy Agency). Thus, even as the United States pulled out of the Paris climate accords on November 4, 2020, the dramatic decrease in GHG emissions gave the United States the opportunity to meet the targeted reductions for 2025 that they had just abandoned. Ironically, Donald Trump’s bungling of the U.S. response to the pandemic proved more consequential for climate than all of his pro-fossil-fuel actions, almost all of which would be undone by the incoming Biden administration. As Dana Nuccitelli wrote in Yale Climate Connections, even a 10 percent drop in emissions (the original estimate for U.S. COVID-related GHG emissions reduction) meant that the Biden administration would have to decrease emissions by 2.8 percent a year from 2021 to 2025 to meet the Paris targets. Not an easy feat, but certainly achievable.
This would be quite good news but for one small detail: the Paris accord’s targeted reductions would only slow, not stop, the world’s march toward global warming greater than 2 degrees Celsius, with all its unknowns, dangerous thresholds, and tipping points. Various studies have estimated that if the targets laid out in the original agreements were achieved, temperatures would still rise by between 2.7 and 3.7 degrees Celsius. It is not alarmist to say that a temperature rise of 3.7 degrees Celsius would put several billion people at risk of starvation and endanger or collapse virtually every major ecosystem on the planet. And the 3.7 degrees Celsius figure lends a patina of specificity in predicting the relationship between increased GHGs and a degree of warming that is entirely unwarranted. No one can say with confidence at what point a warming Arctic might trigger an unstoppable feedback loop in which the melting permafrost releases methane and CO2 that produces more warming that releases more greenhouse gases.
This is one Achilles’ heel of the Paris accord, regarded by many as the signal achievement on international action on global warming during the 2010s. Another is that its targets are goals, not enforceable requirements.
These compromises were likely necessary in order to get the accords to be adopted by all 196 nations that are signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). By itself, this was significant, as it is the only United Nations agreement that was signed by every nation on earth—until the United States temporarily backed out. And, despite the compromises, the agreement represents progress toward global action. It establishes monitoring mechanisms and allows flexibility in achieving reductions. The very nature of the agreement creates peer-group pressures toward compliance, and the world has already seen the fruits of this pressure as numerous nations have announced goals that exceed the agreement’s expectations. Nations that have set a target for net-zero emissions include the entire European Union, China, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and, so far, fourteen other nations that taken together account for a majority of the world’s GHG emissions. The list should include California. It’s not a nation, of course, but it is the fifth-largest economy in the world, and its target is to be carbon neutral by 2045.
Most important, the agreement can be strengthened. Voluntary targets can be lowered, and enforcement can become mandatory, either inside the agreement or through climate tariffs. Many countries in the European Union are already lobbying for tariffs on nations that fail to try to limit carbon emissions. Leaders from France and Spain have aggressively lobbied for such tariffs, and France has already threatened to impose tariffs on U.S. goods in response to the pullout from the Paris accord. John Kerry, who led U.S. negotiators on the Paris accord during the Obama administration, told Politico, “It’s not a question of whether it’s going to happen; it’s going to happen.” As climate impacts worsen, it’s likely that nations will be grateful for the Paris accord for providing a framework for negotiating such tariffs as an alternative to multiple trade conflicts popping up around the world.
The pandemic dominated the year 2020. Were it not for COVID, the main story would probably have been climate change. Climate was in the news first because of the record fires and then because of record hurricanes, with thirty named storms in 2020. For only the second time, the National Hurricane Center ran through the alphabet and had to resort to Greek letters for names. A capstone to the extraordinary year was Hurricane Iota, which formed in November, making that the first time two hurricanes had formed in the Atlantic that late in the year. Iota represented the latest date an Atlantic hurricane ever reached category 5 intensity.
One final important development of the 2020s has been that the mainstream press finally seems to understand that every climate-change-related story doesn’t need to include a quote from a climate denier—not that the deniers have laid down their weapons. When Texas suffered a historic and protracted deep freeze in February 2021, a series of blackouts forced millions of people to cope with single-digit temperatures without heat and water. The governor, Greg Abbott, and Congressman Dan Crenshaw immediately singled out frozen wind turbines as the culprit, while Fox News blamed the turbines and green policies no fewer than 128 times over the next few days (as tabulated by Media Matters for America). The Wall Street Journal also weighed in, warning that such blackouts were the future if Americans adopted green policies. The accusations were flat-out lies—top executives from the state’s power grid immediately pushed back, noting that wind power outages accounted for only 13 percent of the power losses, and that the overwhelming preponderance of the outages came from problems related to fossil fuel facilities and pipelines. Most of the mainstream press picked up on this, nipping this meme in the bud before it got traction. Even more heartening, many in the mainstream media noted that the characteristics of this freeze—its protracted nature and the breakdown in the polar vortex that allowed the cold to spill south—bore hallmarks of similar episodes in recent years that were attributed to shifts in the Arctic related to climate change.
I’m continually amazed, though, by the knee-jerk tendency of conservatives to jump on any opening to demonize alternative energy. Texas politicians such as Abbott and Crenshaw are flunkies for the state’s massive oil and gas interests, but less understandable are the positions of Fox and The Wall Street Journal. After all, a wind turbine is just a piece of electrical generating equipment; it’s not Democrat or Republican. It either works or it doesn’t, and in Texas, wind has worked very well. Most likely, this is another case of the messenger outweighing the message; it’s not the technology that arouses ire but those perceived as championing alternative energy. Given the misery they have suffered, it will be interesting to see how long Texas voters continue to buy into the energy policies the GOP has been selling them.
If COVID often displaced climate change in the news, it also propelled the climate change story in unexpected ways. Apart from temporarily reducing GHG emissions, the pandemic’s impact on economic activity gave citizens of the world’s most polluted megacities a glimpse of what life could be like. In New Delhi (where air pollution shortens life expectancy by an astonishing twelve years), many millions of people could see the Himalayas for the first time in their lives. China saw similar temporary pollution reductions in many of its megacities.
A taste of clear air gave hundreds of millions of emerging-nation city dwellers a glimpse of the possible, and with renewables now competitive with all fossil fuels, those who wanted to preserve that clarity had alternatives to point to as sources of power as economies rebound. Indeed, Amory Lovins believes that COVID might be the stake in the heart of the financing of future fossil fuel projects precisely because alternatives are ready to pick up the slack. Says Lovins, “We saw peak coal in 2013, peak auto sales in 2017, peak fossil fuel power generation in 2018, peak fossil fuel use in 2019. Then COVID crashed the global economy. When it rebounds, renewables will provide the power. The cost of capital will rise for fossil fuel projects, and the fossil fuel lobby will lose political clout. We’re going to see a lot of stranded fossil fuel assets.”
If Lovins is correct, the ill wind of COVID may have blown some good.