Coming Soon to a Wide Audience: The New Politics of Climate Change



By Mick Womersley, Interim Provost and Associate Professor



Now that both the movie by Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, and the Stern Review on the economics of climate change are both freely available to a wide audience, the effort by climate scientists and environmentalists in general to ramp up public understanding of climate is poised to move to a new level. Public presentations of Gore et al, and/or Stern et al, have increased by at least an order of magnitude since Christmas. Thankfully, something is finally moving faster than carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

Barbara Boxer became Chair of the key congressional environmental committee. A select committee was appointed, bypassing a certain democratic Congressman from Detroit. Soon we will finally see national legislation on climate change that has a strong likelihood of passing both houses of Congress. Well and good. About time. ThereÕs a lot to do, though, for this to become a reality, and plenty of scope for slip, twixt climate science cup and American public lip.

In particular, enough American public understanding of climate change has to be generated so as to prevent a backlash, particularly one that fuels some last-ditch Republican climate Alamo and/or a presidential veto. Money is one problem. Potential backlashers have quite a bit. Oil giant Exxon Mobil, flush from $60 a barrel prices, has thus far funded quite a bit of the backlash, as have from time to time other US energy corporations. The Saudis are likely involved somewhere along the way. Recent signals suggest Exxon is ready to throw in the towel as far as funding the nay-sayers. Being nice about non-mandatory provisions doesnÕt mean they wonÕt fund a huge effort to derail mandatory emissions reductions or a carbon tax.

ThereÕs not much can be done about the funding, simply to point out publicly over and over the incredible irresponsibility and civic disengagement of such action. Shame on the purveyors of climate pseudo science and backlash politics wherever they are. They are likely some of the least redeemable characters in this whole sad play anyway. Shell and BP to their credit got out of the nay-saying business some time ago and began positioning themselves for a new energy millennium, figuring out how to cap and trade and deal with mandatory reductions. Exxon Mobil deserves to be pilloried for its continual and cynical manipulation of the issue.

Something can and is being done about public understanding.

Stern and Gore, Gore and Stern. Through the auspices of a twice-failed presidential candidate (some would say one who had his chances twice stolen), through the UK GovernmentÕs top social welfare economist and the firm backing of the past and future British kings, messrs. Blair and Brown, through the National Wildlife Federation (one of the most respected American conservation groups), and through a large number of volunteer presenters, a very great effort to convince Americans about climate change is finally underway.

ItÕs going to run into some trouble here and there. For one thing, itÕs hard to teach people a theory of the planetÕs climate behavior based on 900,000 years of ice core record and 4.5 billion years of geological record if they donÕt believe that the planet is that old. Bishop Usher, long dead in Ireland, has a surprisingly large following of Americans. For another, the language, and the underlying mathematical concepts, are very challenging. Feedback leads to exponentiality, which leads to potential tipping points. What did I just say? If you donÕt know what it means, should you be voting?

Finally, and possibly the fatal flaw in the entire script, is that America, not unlike Britain, is not an intellectual nation at heart. The greatest, most effective, and ultimately most beloved leaders in either country were not dry academics like Stern-Gore, but fireside chatters like Franklin Roosevelt, or trenchant orators like Churchill. The climate issue, for all its public high mindedness and civic virtue and potential for international cooperation, lacks its Lincoln, and its Gettysburg address. GoreÕs movie, for all its rationality and good presentation, may not cut it in Peoria.

Two things will help here. One is that the Republican party is currently having to decide once more, has it has had to decide every two and four years for twenty six years since the Reagan revolution, if it likes being an unhappy loose conglomerate of Christian social conservatives, southern closet racists, and neoclassical economic ideologues. With a few uncomfortable rock-ribbed northern and western libertarians sprinkled liberally here and there in the none-too-firm matrix. As the Democrats found out recently, more sensible Americans abound and just need to be given a party sensible enough to vote for and they will do so in droves. If this means that various left-radicals have to be bound and gagged and left in back rooms, itÕs not a great loss given what is at stake. Republicans, if not completely in disarray, are politically vulnerable, and they know it, and the more sensible of them such as Colorado Senator John McCain or Mainer Susan Collins, have already staked out their turf in the sensible climate center. A bipartisan coalition is clearly possible.

The other great help will be that there is an active network of American evangelical climate believers. It doesnÕt take an insider to the US environmental movement to have caught on to the buzz about Christian environmentalists lately, but how many have noticed that evangelical Larry Schweiger, head of NWF, is on the Board of Al GoreÕs new Climate Project group. Schweiger is there because he believes. In God and Gore both, it seems. And he can help organize the Christian environmentalists.

Not much can be done though, about the complexity of the issue. GoreÕs approach, and by default SternÕs, since both are at root much the same plea to much the same audience, is intensely academic. Hopefully a deeper national conversation about climate can ensue, at least among those who naturally take time to consider more difficult issues in thoughtful ways. Professionals, educators, the growing crowd of bloggers, students everywhere can and likely will participate. How much of the voting population is that? Will it be enough? What is enough?

Many others, we should recognize, will not be bothered. If your usual media fare is video games or MTV, if you canÕt find Iraq on a map, never mind understand an exponential function, if you are not a participant in any kind of intellectual debate, then how likely are you to start now?

What we have to hope for is that we still live in representative democracies, where legislators can from time to time be made to take their responsibilities seriously. It will be the elected officials in the end that make the decision, in the various state houses and the one great national legislative body. In the absence of a climate Churchill or Lincoln, we are all probably going to have to depend on these folks we just elected to do their job. But they do have addresses, telephones and emails, so we can at least remind them. And we can watch to see they donÕt take money from the backlash.