Hey, next time I am not worry about making rent, or paying off my student loans, or having money for some unforseen accident, I’ll make global warming a top priority. But right now, I’m more worried about tomorrow the 10 years from now.
If you want people to worry about climate change, you are going to first have to solve their immediate problems that are impacting them right now. Give me 54,000 dollars to pay off my student loans, and I’ll have time to worry about climate change. Pay for my daughters pre school, and I’ll have more time to worry about climate change. Make sure that my medical expenses don’t bankrupt me or that the next financial crisis doesn’t destroy my 401(k), and I will have more time to worry about climate change.
Heck, make sure kids aren’t being put in cages while you are at it.
Climate change is important, but that doesn’t mean it’s an equally pressing issue for all people. It’s a hot potato that no one wants to hold, but it’s something that can be dealt with after we win the election.
Matt_W
4845
There will always always always be something more pressing than climate change… until there isn’t. And then it will be too late. (It probably already is too late.) We’ll know when we start to see crops fail on a global scale and have water rationing. When energy costs spike to the stratosphere and we all of a sudden can’t afford to drive anywhere and all the food in the supermarket is both ludicrously expensive and locally grown. We’ll know when the bodies start to pile up and whole swathes of the country become uninhabitable because there’s no water. When every fall brings hurricanes that batter the east coast and forest fires that decimate the west coast. Our kids’ prospects will just gradually get slightly worse every year until they’re dramatically worse and we wring our hands about “immediate problems” as they drag us out to hang us from the lampposts.
In other words, we’re fucked.
Sure, there will always be something, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do climate change. It’s just something we shouldn’t run on. We should run on the things that are part of the platform and winners.
You got to pair climate change with ways to improve the lot of us small folk. Job programs that emphasis green techs. Reduce oil subsidies and paid it with credits for reducing energy use.
Heck, reduce cattle and corn subsidies, and pair of with more money for water management for farmers.
I am all for transferring wealth from the wealthy to, the poor in middle class in a way that emphasizes environmental prospects.
Tim_N
4847
I think I understand your overall argument, that people have day to day needs being unmet and climate change is a ‘far-off’ issue. But what do these day to day problems amount to? Wanting to live a comfortable life and give your kids a future. Climate change may not affect the former (depending on your age), but is far more important for the latter than even whether your kid will be able to go to college.
Anyone with kids should have climate change as their number 1 issue, as no parent in actual fact wants to work hard for their kids education only to see them live through misery for the remainder of their life, a kind of misery that dwarfs the struggles of today’s lower-middle class (although I am not trying to diminish such things).
But the Democratic party don’t want to try and get Repub or undecided parents to vote for them to literally save the second half of their children’s lives, because reasons.
Well, it would be nice if the kids survived long enough to make climate change an actual issue. If you are a parent, and your kid gets shot by a police officer or by a crazed White Supremacist, or by a Boeing cashing to the ground, or by polio, then climate change might just be on the back burner.
When all these threats have become more common, I could see a lot of low information voters just tuning out when it comes to climate change.
And let’s face it, who are you going to persuade by tough talk on climate change, that isn’t going to show up to the polls already? Is there a hypothetical voter out there that won’t show up or would instead vote for Trump? The Democrats already have that vote locked up.
It’s the people that want to see solid progress on other issues that I’m worried about. We start talking about the real series needs of climate change, without throwing them some real relief of their immediate needs after 4 years of oil drilling, tariffs, tax breaks for the wealth, but 0 trickle down to them, and they are going to stay at home.
The Green New Deal had a point. It was the New Deal, but Green.
Tim_N
4849
Regarding your first paragraph, I understand that when people are in horrible situations (like most African Americans in the USA or you live with HIV in Africa and can’t afford medication) they won’t care so much about future problems.
Yet, there are many lower-middle class people in the USA who: a) aren’t about to get killed by police officers or white supremacists, b) have financial problems but aren’t voting based on that anyway, and c) vote R or stay at home on election day. What do most of them have? Kids. While they may not care one iota about the existence of any other human being or any other animal species or rainforest that is thousands of years old, they care about their kids.
It boggles my mind that the propaganda machine of the republicans on climate change is never challenged. Yeah, we get scientists giving facts and predicting how bad things will be, but many people stop reading any sentence that doesn’t start with some variation of ‘Celebrity X said…’.
What we need instead are ads that show kids being raised in a loving home in the USA heartland, then the ad jumps 25 years and the now adult kids step outside of their house only to see a vast array of apocalyptic landscape. They turn to look at their now-old parents and say ‘why didn’t you do anything to stop this?’ Fear is a powerful tool in political campaigns, and for once the good guys can use it with a clear conscience.
Alstein
4850
This stuff will not happen in our lifetimes, at least in the US. Things will suck, but they won’t be that bad for at least the next 40-50 years. Millenials are the ones most worried about climate change, because they are the first generation that will truly have to deal with the fallout in a daily way. Even Gen X will be in retirement homes (or dead due to income inequality) by the time shit really hits the fan.
Poor countries are going to suffer 90% of the impact, and they’re going to be the ones sold out to solve the problem. (I expect a genocide)
And in the Charlotte metro area (even at Applebee’s!), at least, they do know how to make fried fish better than people up here in the PNW, at least judging from a few meals I ate there in early June.
I think that Democrats are right…from a political perspective…not to focus on climate change as a primary issue. Here’s why.
A voter who cares about climate change does so for three reasons: they have empathy (probably for kids, possibly also future generations in general), they believe scientific research, and they have foresight to think long-term. Anyone missing any of these finds it very easy to ignore climate change and focus on pretty much any other issues rather than the extremely difficult and painful climate change. So it would be politically poor tactics to focus on climate change for these people.
But anyone who does meet all three of those criteria is not just going to care about climate change. For those exact same reasons, they’re also going to have strong feelings about universal healthcare, income inequality, civil rights, and so on. So it would be politically savvy for these people to appeal to a broad range of issues that they care about, rather than focusing primarily on climate change.
Now, obviously this doesn’t mean you ignore climate change. You talk about it, but as an additional topic after you’ve hit the issues with the wide-ranging appeal. Which is exactly what most of the Democrats are doing, because they’re better politicians than me and have already figured this out.
A little history of on the fate of climate change legislation in the US the last time Democrats held all three branches of government. If climate change keeps getting relegated as a second tier problem because it’s too politically challenging, it will remain a second tier issue. It becomes another negative feedback loop. Failing to galvanize a significant portion of the public will always result in legislative failures or meaningless tinkering on the edges. [Meanwhile, immigration gets elevated to some sort of existential threat when at best it’s a regional issue. Funny how that works.]
[Article is dated but largely still relevant. Spoiler for length.]
Summary
The roots of this crisis go back to 2009, when Democrats held unified control of the White House and Congress. The end of the last decade was a unique moment in climate politics: Thanks to a string of intense hurricane years, and the unexpected success of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, public support for addressing climate change through legislation was higher than it had ever been.
Democrats responded with the American Clean Energy and Security Act, widely known as “Waxman-Markey,” after its two sponsors, Congressmen Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts. The bill proposed creating a carbon-emissions trading market across the United States. Under its terms, the government would have distributed a number of “right to emit carbon” credits to companies, which they could then have bought and sold to each other. As the years passed, the government would allot fewer credits, forcing the price of emitting carbon to increase, which would—in theory—ultimately decrease the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.
Though more than a little technical, a pollution market was a proven idea in U.S. environmental law: George H.W. Bush established a similar “cap-and-trade” system during his presidency to reduce the pollutants that create acid rain.
In June 2009, Waxman-Markey passed the House. But as that summer wore on, the bill’s prospects floundered. By August, the Tea Party rose to command more media attention, and public opinion turned against Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—focused on passing what would become the Affordable Care Act—declined to take the climate bill to the Senate floor. By the middle of the next summer, Waxman-Markey was effectively dead. Only a few years after it opened, the window to pass climate legislation had already shut.
Even in defeat, Waxman-Markey cost the party dearly. More than two dozen congressional Democrats who had supported the cap-and-trade bill lost in the 2010 midterm election. The casualties included Rick Boucher, a 14-term veteran of Congress whose district included much of southwest Virginia’s coal country. Boucher had negotiated concessions for local coal companies into Waxman-Markey, but this could not save his seat. Ten House Democrats, including Boucher, voted for Waxman-Markey and against the Affordable Care Act. Six of them lost their seats in 2010.
Indeed, Democrats seemed to prevail only when they ran against the climate bill. Joe Manchin, then the Democratic governor of West Virginia, won a special election that year to serve in the Senate, but only after he ran an ad that showed him shooting a pile of paper with a rifle. “I sued EPA, and I’ll take dead aim at the cap-and-trade bill,” he said in the commercial, which received wide media coverage.
There’s a distinction between saying climate change is a first-tier problem and we need drastic action to counter it and saying we ought to try to get elected by campaigning on that drastic action. The former seems right to me, while the latter might be suicidal.
I’m not a political operative so obviously I don’t know. But it seems to me if the issue is buried because it’s too politically sensitive and then Democrats win the WH and Senate (and somehow remove the filibuster and then somehow convince the Bluedog Senators to go along with aggressive climate action) the public might not respond all that well. Why are you doing climate when you promised to do X? (I mean I think we can all agree there’s a metric crapton of shit that needs fixing and they’re all important but public support is vital or the inevitable backlash ensues )
But this isn’t an idealogical issue, we need to act now because that’s what science it telling us we need to do. I don’t know how to overcome a decade of media either ignoring it or framing it as if there’s a valid debate on whether it’s an actual problem, but it seems to me trying to hide it because some other issue is more appealing or easier to articulate is ultimately counterproductive.
I don’t think the issue is buried. I think pretty much every Democratic candidate believes / has said that climate change is a crisis and that action on it is urgently needed. A debate about it among the candidates, though, will inevitably lead to one-upsmanship of the kind that only hurts the issue, similar to the way the question would your plan eliminate private health insurance has hurt candidates in health care. Each candidate will feel the need to try to distinguish themselves from the others on the stage, which inevitably means to offer more extreme plans, in ways that will not help produce good legislation and — even worse — might doom the eventual candidate.
Far better IMO to agree to agree on the issue during the primary, and save the campaigning for the general election, when the issue can be cast as I’m a reasonable person who believes in science and my opponent is a madman who lies about it.
I don’t think there is anything you can do in a primary campaign that would have the effect of moving the actual sitting members in the House or the Senate when it comes to enacting legislation. Even if you win the primary because of your climate change focus, you’ve won a contest decided largely by the people who agree with you, not a mandate from the larger population, and it will not translate into a mandate you can rely on if you manage to win the general election. You’re still going to be constrained by what the most conservative Democrats in the Senate can stomach.
I think the larger point of the debate is to force the media to give it attention and begin the process of educating the pubic on the necessary actions required to mitigate the worst affects of climate change. That can’t happen in 30 second sound bites, nor will it happen in the general when the election becomes all about president Goodbrain and the issues he wants to demagogue (and the media will be happily complicit.)
That said, the most likely outcome of Democratic victory in 2020 with regards to climate action is executive orders and we wont’ see a whiff of any kind of legislation because there will always be the next campaign and Democrats will always be urged to run on something else.
This is what the presidency is supposed to be for. That’s the time to tell the tough story: After you’ve won.
There are in fact Democrats who are running / will run on climate change, in Congressional districts and States that are safely blue where they have a constituency for it, and a mandate. I don’t have any doubt that, should Democrats take legislative power, there will be some legislation on climate change. What gets through the Senate will depend on 1) whether they’re willing to blow up the filibuster, and 2) how conservative the 51st Democratic vote for the bill is. That means it will best case be small-ball, and that will be true no matter what is said about it in this primary.
CraigM
4859
Then we’re fucked because people are too shortsighted and stupid to think more than 2 months into the future.
Not at all. This is a real issue, but who are you trying to win over by making it a center piece of the campaign?
The campaign isn’t about persuading people that certain issues are vital. It’s about letting people know that you will tackle the issues that have already been deemed vital, and are up to the task when knew vital issues come up.
If you want the public to care about the environment, then you should give money to the environmental groups and push them to make it front and center in the public consciousness.
Heck, get out on the street and start a march! Be part of the action.
Personal, I don’t think campaigns are about creating issues, it’s about solving the issues that the general population already understands and wants to tackle.
Matt_W
4861
I have this feeling that we’re all gonna be really surprised. When global petroleum prices spike due to scarcity, that will set off a chain reaction that will cause most of the global economy and trade networks to collapse. Climate change will exacerbate the fallout and we’ll be facing the prospect of billions of people starving to death, which won’t happen peacefully. I think it will be rapid and unexpected and could easily happen in the next 10-20 years.
Oghier
4862
I could not agree with this more. Well put.
Climate change is an emergency, but declaring it your top priority makes it harder to win in the general. Win first, then work to educate the public how critical it is. But win first.
This will not happen. There’s plenty of supply, there’s not going to be any scarcity. That’s one of the problems. Supply will remain high, prices will remain low, and we’ll keep putting more carbon in the atmosphere.
