Why Did Climate Progress Stall? It's Called Conservative Ideological Activation

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There has been much reaction to this weekendโ€™s Elizabeth Rosenthal New York Times pieceโ€”โ€œWhere Did Global Warming Go?โ€ Clearly, the issue has fallen out of the news, and off the political agenda. The reasons for this are numerous: Politics, the recession, and media coverage are all at play here. But I think the New York Times piece does a stellar job of skirting the truly obvious explanation: aย conservative denial machine was whipped up by โ€œClimateGate,โ€ leading to a whole new and destructive brand of climateย politics.

Recall the year 2007. Al Gore and the IPCC win the Nobel Peace Prize. The climate issue is riding high. Many of us assume that the next president will solve the global warming problem forย good.

There was already much political resistance to climate action in the U.S. at that time, and right wing think tanks were sowing vast amounts of misinformationโ€”as was Fox News. But the tide had clearly turned against the delayers and deniersโ€ฆfor good, many of usย thought.

Then came a little event that the New York Times analysis does not evenย mentionโ€”โ€œClimateGate.โ€

It drew dramatic media attention. And while it may not have had a massive impact on public opinion as a whole, it served as a rallying cry for one key slice of the public in particular. As I reported in Mother Jones:

Climategate had a substantial impact on public opinion, according toย Anthony Leiserowitz, director of theย Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. It contributed to an overall drop in public concern about climate change and a significant loss of trust in scientists. Butโ€”as we should expect by nowโ€”these declines were concentrated among particular groups of Americans: Republicans, conservatives, and those with โ€œindividualisticโ€ values. Liberals and those with โ€œegalitarianโ€ values didn’t lose much trust in climate science or scientists at all. โ€œIn some ways, Climategate was like a Rorschach test,โ€ Leiserowitz says, โ€œwith different groups interpreting ambiguous facts in very differentย ways.โ€

What did โ€œClimateGateโ€ do for the right? How did conservatives interpret the issue, and how did this drive ourย plight?

To understand this, you need to understand a psychological process sometimes called โ€œseizing and freezing.โ€ Conservatives, who were losing the climate issue before โ€œClimateGate,โ€ needed somethingโ€”anythingโ€”to show them they werenโ€™t all wrong about it, and that the fight wasnโ€™t over. โ€œClimateGateโ€ย thus furnished the perfect rallying cry. Conservatives seized on the idea that this scandal proved, once and for all, that climate science was bunkโ€”and they froze on this notion. Now, as a consequence, all you hear in Congress is about ClimateGate, and it is used as an excuse for complete dismissal of modern climate science knowledge, as well as the need for urgentย action.

Granted, this is utterly irrational. โ€œClimateGateโ€ didnโ€™t prove anything of the sort. But it only matters that many conservatives thought it didโ€“many seizing on little more than an out of context quotation, โ€œhide the decline,โ€ which served as a heuristic deviceโ€“and they linked it in their minds with an utter debunking of any validity of global warming concernsโ€”forever, for good. The absurdity of climate science is now a matter of certainty on the right wing. It’s just a big hoax, they think. And if you donโ€™t believe me, see this Rush Limbaugh commentary on climate changeโ€“and what Limbaugh says deeply matters, for he is followed faithfully byย millions.

This was all happening, notably, as an intense conservative ideological activation was also occurringโ€”the Tea Party movement. Fear over the recession, and outrage directed towards President Obama, were allowing angry conservative voters to channel their rage into the equivalent of a populist anti-government uprising. The climate issue became central to this movement, perhaps the leading exhibitโ€”after โ€œObamacareโ€โ€”demonstrating that the U.S. was lurching towardsย โ€œsocialism.โ€

Therefore, paradoxically, even as climate science grows ever stronger and more worrisome, conservative denial of scientific reality increased, as did overall partisan polarization over the climateย issue.

Now, it would be one thing if we had a media that never printed false claims about climate change or ran phony โ€œbalancedโ€ stories about itโ€”and things would also be different if we had a president who had decided to take on the fight nonetheless, or an organized environmental movement that matched the Tea Party in ideological intensity or singleness of purpose. But we donโ€™t have these things. What we do have, though, is a conservative movement that’s full of passionate intensity on global warming. The issue has, indeed, become like abortion and gunsโ€”the New York Times gets this rightโ€“and that is the key reason why we canโ€™t get anywhere onย it.

But another reason is the failure to bluntly acknowledge that this has happened. So let’s say it again: A conservative populist movement has rallied around climate denial, and spread the utter conviction that global warming isnโ€™t real and human caused, and that attempts to address it reek of socialism. These claims are, by any serious standard, nonsensical and not worthy of serious consideration. But they are firmly held and present a massive roadblock to getting anything doneโ€“especially so long as the passionate wrongness on the right is not matched by a passionate devotion to accuracy in the media, or a passionate willingness to fight back effectively on theย left.

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