Americans holding out for federal climate change legislation that would hypothetically be adequate to address the scale of the climate crisis at a national (forget global) level to be legislated and passed into law by the US Congress are delusional.
I say this in the kindest way possible, but let’s look at the statistics.
According to the Yale Climate Opinion 2021 map, 72% of Americans believe that climate change is happening. 57% believe that climate change is caused mostly by human activities, and 65% report being worried about global warming.
A study from Pew Research Center conducted in 2020 indicated that a similar 65% of Americans believed that the Federal government was doing too little to pass climate change.
In recent years, it feels like an impossible phenomenon to get 65% of the American public to agree on anything. Only a simple majority is required for Congress to pass legislation. I have managed to avoid taking a single math class for all four years of my college career, but the last time I checked, 65 is greater than 51… So what is the hold up with climate action?
As it turns out, I am still terrible at math. 65 is not, in fact, greater than 51 in the world of American politics when one accounts for the partisanship.
Pew Research Center found that in 2020, 72% of Democrats said that human activity was contributing a great deal to climate change. Only 22% of Republicans agreed with the same statement. 83% of Democrats think that climate change is impacting their communities, but only 37% of Republicans agreed. 89% of Democrats said that the government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change, and only 35% of Republicans agreed.
The majority of the American public might be ready for climate action, but our two-party system is not. The disconnect between the people and our representatives only deepens when one factors in the current media landscape, which plays an enormous role in maintaining the partisan divide and determining our national shortfall of political capacity on the federal level to take immediate and necessary action on the climate change issue.
Over the course of this semester, we have discussed important media concepts and practices which are shaping the climate change issue debate. Many of these practices serve to isolate climate change activists from deniers and ideologically push both groups away from one another.
As we have discussed in class, most Americans consume their media and inform their worldview through a lens which confirms their preexisting beliefs. This practice, which is called confirmation bias, helps to create isolated media environments which often fail to transcend the partisan political divide. Liberal and conservative Americans, therefore, are often drawing on completely different sets of information and framing of issues in order to form their understanding of the climate crisis. Furthermore, there is a large section of the public which is entirely disengaged from the political debate on climate and uses party identification as a heuristic to form their opinion without a significant requirement for effort.
Recognizing the existence of these media consumption practices and the resulting toxicity of the partisan divide in our current political landscape is a crucial first step to revolutionizing the way that we consume information and approach national debate. Addressing these issues requires a massive overhaul of how the American public approaches media and politics, which requires a great deal of time, education, and informational resources. The climate crisis, however, is an existential threat that will not wait around for the American public to overcome media bias and partisan heuristics.
So what then? If our federal legislative body is indefinitely gridlocked on the climate crisis, what can we do in order to implement the environmental policy changes that the majority of the American public agrees should be realized?
Here, we must look to the great American tradition of finding loopholes around congress. It is important to emphasize the potential for non-government organizations to play a role in shaping the trajectory of the nation as we navigate the climate crisis. Grassroots climate activism is a useful tool in that it can literally meet Americans where they are and provide education and tools to spread best practices on reducing our environmental impact.
However, almost all experts agree that governments should be the societal institutions leading the climate change fight. Governments have the greatest capacity and authority to create human and corporate behavioral changes necessary to combat climate change on a massive scale and enforce those changes with the command of law.
Congress aside, this leaves executive action as the nuclear option for federal legislation on climate change. Under the current administration, the executive has established a generally progressive position on the climate change issue, but could be doing more in terms of executive action in order to create incentives to transform our society into one that prioritizes the issues of climate change.
This week, the Biden administration demonstrated a flakier commitment to legislating the climate movement by approving the Willow Project, which would generate enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of carbon pollution into the air every year.
The refusal to fight the Willow Project in court by the Biden Administration is beyond disappointing to climate change activists and is significantly detrimental to the climate change movement. Wavering faith in the administration aside, the following two actions are examples of steps I believe Biden should take to reaffirm his commitment to the cause and work to establish a stronger presence of the federal government in the climate movement:
- Establish the United States as a global climate leader and create new international agreements to reduce emissions. More specifically, I would urge Biden to begin with an agreement among nations to set an international minimum price on carbon and penalize high-emitting countries. I would also propose that this agreement include aid to developing nations in meeting emissions standards and developing climate-friendly infrastructure.
- Declare climate change a national emergency. This would open up military funding to be put towards renewable energy and expand our national renewable energy technologies without having to get congressional approval.
Although these two executive actions will not solve the crisis, it is crucial that the American president establishes a norm of drastic, federal, and far-reaching climate change action as soon as possible because the American public and congress are not going to be able to come to that conclusion and agree on climate action in a timely manner.
