It’s no coincidence that this year of climate catastrophes — from horrifying fires in the Amazon to Hurricane Dorian’s pulverizing of the Bahamas — is also seeing significant shifts in the number of Americans who view climate changes as a crisis. Even coming decades later than it should have, the turn in public sentiment towards consensus is good news in a 2019 of very bad climate news.
A new poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation is the latest to document this movement. The top-line results suggest that Americans should be receptive to actions necessary to slow and stop global warming: 38% say climate change is best described as a crisis, another 38% say it’s best described as a major problem, and only 8% say it’s not a problem at all. What’s even more hopeful are the results based on party affiliation. Some 60% of Republicans agreed that climate change is due to human activity. This is a heartening figure, all the more so because of the relentless war on climate science conducted by the right for decades now; that reality is beginning to cut through the propaganda is reassuring.
Yet, as Dave Roberts describes in a Vox piece, the GOP’s leadership is very far from consensus on the importance of acting on climate change. Indeed, the dominant party line remains one of denial of the basic facts of the existence of global warming. But as Roberts details, some in the GOP are beginning to realize the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change — not simply for the survival of the human species, but for that equally important objective: the survival of the GOP. I was startled to read that none other than Frank Luntz, the GOP pollster and propagandist who pressed the party to use the term “climate change” rather than global warming many years ago, and who urged the party to keep alive questions about the science behind the issue, has done a 180-degree reversal. Not only does he admit that he was wrong about the magnitude of the threat, he’s arguing that Republicans risk electoral disaster if they ignore the support in the party rank and file for action.
Luntz recently polled support for a carbon dividend tax, under which revenues raised by a carbon tax would be directed to taxpayers. The results were startling; the policy “got 2-1 support among Republicans, 4-1 support overall, 6-1 support among Republicans under 40, and 8-1 support among swing voters under 40.” Roberts cautions against placing too much reliance on this single survey, but he points to other Luntz-led surveys that further evidence a sea change in the GOP:
58% of Americans — including 58% of GOP voters under 40 — are more concerned about climate change now than they were only one year ago. The appetite for seeing real action is palpable to voters of both sides.
Three in four American voters want to see the government step in to limit carbon emissions — including a majority of Republicans (55%).
69% of GOP voters are concerned their party is ‘hurting itself with younger voters’ by its climate stance.
Let’s pause for a moment to note how significant and remarkable this overall shift is. Republican leaders, in concert with oil and coal interests, have engaged in a decades-long campaign to cast doubt over whether human-caused global warming even exists in the first place. A generation of GOP politicians followed in lockstep as the policy of denialism became the official party position. Yet reality is breaking through, particularly to the younger Americans on whom the GOP’s hopes for the future necessarily rest. And so Luntz and others grasp that the war on the planet is also a war against their own party’s survival.
Against the Luntzian effort to sound the alarm about the GOP’s failure to keep up with its base on this issue, enter Grover Norquist, the GOP powerhouse whose absurd anti-tax pledge all GOP politicians feel enjoined to take. In the face of early talk about support for a carbon tax, Norquist is laying down the party line — that opposition to such a tax, as to all taxes, is absolute.
At a purely pragmatic level, it’s hard to overstate what a golden opportunity this nascent Republican civil war is for those who want the Democrats to take a decisive role in fighting climate change. Too many GOP politicians have committed themselves to an absolutist stance on both global warming and the changes necessary to tax and spending policies for any shift in the party’s stance to be easy or quick, let alone even possible. That opposition to new taxes is such a stumbling block on climate change action points to even larger, structural impediments to a GOP about-face. The party is ideologically opposed to the sort of large-scale government action that global warming requires; and the Trumpian direction of the party also means that the sort of American leadership and internationalism necessary to the effort are being wrung out of the party on a daily basis. Beyond this, the GOP, particularly in its embrace of Trump, seems committed to an ethos of greed above all other considerations — against the long-term good, against patriotism, against democracy itself. Even when Trump is gone, such rotten ideas will linger in the party for some time to come.
On the near-term question of defeating the current president, the latest polls on rank-and-file GOP attitudes shows why climate change is a huge opportunity for Democrats even in the short term. The Post-KFF poll found that while a scant 9% of GOP voters disapprove of the president’s performance overall, 23% disapprove of Trump’s handling of climate change. While this issue may not be paramount for most Republicans, it would be foolish to treat either its relative importance or this already-high disapproval number as static. It’s noteworthy that Republicans are dissenting from the president’s policies in relatively high numbers on an issue where the evidence of their own senses contradicts the president’s own casual dismissals of extreme weather events.
In other words, as marshaling a national and global effort to stop and ultimately roll back global warming rises as a public priority, the Republican leadership will likely find itself unable to accommodate quickly-shifting public sentiment. Meanwhile, the Democrats are already being pushed by growing political movements on the left to propose large-scale action, now. This hardly means any of us can start breathing easier. The Democrats are still far from the commitments necessary to the moment, much less from holding the political power necessary to make such changes. And the Post-KFF poll contains cautionary news for Democrats: while Americans trust the Democratic Party over the GOP to handle climate change by 38% to 17%, some 35% say they don’t trust either party on the issue, including 56% of independents. Additionally, even though 66% percent of Americans surveyed agreed that Trump is doing too little, 56% had the same response when asked about the Democrats. Such results suggest that the Democrats can gain politically from unambiguous and bold action.
The Post-KFF poll also reveals challenges to forming a response to global warming that would seem to favor the Democrats over Republicans, even as it provides evidence that political savvy and a larger effort toward economic equality will be required. The results show clear limits, at least at present, to how much Americans are willing to sacrifice economically in order to save the planet. Almost half indicated they would pay a $2 monthly tax on electricity to fight global warming, but only around 25% would pay $10 extra each month. Yet 68% favor raising taxes on the rich to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and 60% support raising taxes on companies that use fossil fuels. Democrats need to understand that political justice and political reality dictate that the climate fight must be largely funded by those who can best afford it, and by those who have outsize responsibility for the perilous place we’re at. As advocates of the Green New Deal have been saying, there’s no separating out issues of climate change from issues of economic fairness. At bottom, it’s just political common sense: we can’t expect ordinary Americans to sacrifice if the rich and powerful aren’t made to sacrifice commensurate to their ability and responsibility.
The GOP has plenty of vested interest in denying climate change simply based on the economic priorities of the rich and powerful, but Democrats and progressives need to be aware that the economic and social disruptions due to climate change can easily be used by right-wing and authoritarian movements to bolster their claims to power. There will be millions upon millions of climate refugees worldwide in the coming years; a cryogenically-preserved Donald Trump would doubtless use the purported menace of so many of these people wanting to come to the United States as ammunition in his war to end immigration by the non-lily white of the world. So would other authoritarians around the globe; and it’s not hard to see a vicious feedback effect taking hold, in which every nation looks out for itself, choosing conflict in place of cooperation.
(From this perspective, the hundreds of billions of dollars going to the U.S. defense budget every year can be seen as a massive misunderstanding of what we must “defend” ourselves against; we build military might to triumph in future wars over the dwindling resources of a dying planet, when the actual defense we need involves massive investments in renewable energy, environmentally resilient urban planning, and remediation of natural systems like forests and marshland that will help mitigate and eventually stop rising temperatures.)
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But if the Democratic Party has the potential to claim leadership on climate change on the American political scene, a large challenge faces the party: navigating the fact that any full-scale effort will need to emphasize not just protecting Americans, but protecting millions of people around the world facing far more catastrophic futures than we are. From island nations facing disappearance due to rising seas, to areas of the world becoming too hot for human habitability, global warming means that Americans need to step up and help protect not only fellow citizens, but simply our fellows, based on our common humanity. Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix have written a great essay that gets right to this point; they argue that our ecological crisis calls for a revival of the idea of solidarity, a concept that may not have a single settled definition, but involves seeing fellow human beings as our equals in the name of working for a larger, shared cause:
Unlike identity, solidarity is not something you have, it is something you do — a set of actions taken toward a common goal. Inasmuch as it is something experienced, it is not a given but must be generated; it must be made, not found. Solidarity both produces community and is rooted in it, and is thus simultaneously a means and an end. Solidarity is the practice of helping people realize that they — that is to say, we — are all in this together.
This suggests to me a further challenge and necessary goal for Democrats in the coming years: embracing a solidarity with people around the world who are also threatened by climate change, while also defending national interests and finding the balance in what sacrifices Americans can be asked to make for the greater national and international good.
Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix have many nuggets of wisdom and insight, but their summary of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s early studies of solidarity caught my attention, in how it provides a clue to how solidarity can be better woven into our everyday politics:
Durkheim also set out to discover what created solidarity and held societies together. Durkheim writes that solidarity is generated through a shared sense of the sacred. Every society, he observes, has a set of rituals around what its members consider sacred or profane. And these rituals — these sets of collective actions — knit us together. [. . .] But these inchoate understandings of social belonging soon began to erode under the corrosive pressures of modern industrial life. Modernity made the individual sacred, producing a paradoxical effect that still hangs over us. We are held together by our recognition of individual rights — yet our individualism is overpowering our sense of community and starting to eat away at the fabric of society.
This makes me wonder if the challenge to our very existence on the planet has brought us all face to face with having to understand what is sacred in our world, and to the unavoidable conclusion that what should be sacred and central to how we all live is that which promotes life itself. Confronted with a planetary doom of our collective making, we are being returned to questions of first priorities and meaning. Self-interest and collective interest would seem to coincide; there is no saving ourselves without saving each other, a conclusion that reaches beyond logic to a more intuitive and even spiritual dimension.