Corruption, Not Communication, Is The Real Hurdle On Climate Change
Ever since I started following the general conversation on climate change, there’s always something that seems to come up pretty often as the reason for why we haven’t acted yet:
We just don’t know how to talk about it.
That the ‘climate communicators’ need to learn better ways to relay the seriousness of the issue as well as the action we need to take.
I’ve seen this criticism make some of the most amazing climate communicators question the effectiveness of their work, like Kate Marvel in her essay The Truth Sometimes Hurts.
I have a confession: I have no idea what I’m doing. I believe that publicly funded scientists owe the public an explanation of their research and why it matters. I also have a belief, informed by years of research, that climate change is frightening and requires immediate action. Science communication is more important now than ever. I’m afraid I don’t know how to do it.
Now Marvel is one of the most prominent and effective communicators in the climate communicator community. Her essays in Scientific American are frequently shared and cited on #ClimateTwitter as nuanced, honest and effective approaches to communicating the urgengy of climate change. But she’s doesn’t know if her efforts are effective and thinks there might be better ways to communicate that urgency.
So is she right? Are scientists and other climate communicators really failing to communicate the urgency of climate change?
The answer is hell freaking no.
Let me explain.
Why We Blame Communication For Climate Inaction
When Al Gore released his film “An Inconvenient Truth”, he hurled climate change into the mainstream.
The key theme of that film that ‘as a society, we weren’t aware that our planet was slowly becoming dangerous and unlivable due to our massive use of fossil fuel’ and that ‘we needed to start a conversation and activate the masses in order to create action on climate change’
That conversation grew from climate communicators, including politicians, scientists, journalists and activists. But as these communicators helped grow the conversation, we only made small process on climate change.
So because they became the face of the movement, they became scapegoats for our political action.
But is that accurate, has the conversation these communicators fostered really failed?
Again, the answer is hell freaking no.
The Conversation Worked: There’s Now Broad Support for Action on Climate Change.
We live in the age of extreme political partisanship. There’s barely any issues that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
Or so it seems.
Because after all of these years of climate communication, there’s now majority of American’s who support for action on climate change!
Check it out: below are the results of the Yale CC department’s national survey where they ask policy questions on steps we can take to fight climate change.
And what do you know, both Republicans and Democrats support some form of climate action!
We can also see this sentiment in a recent poll of likely voters, where even 55% of moderate Republican’s believe that Global Warming is mostly caused by Human Activities!
After all these years, there is infact broad support for action on climate change. In my eyes, that’s because of the conversation brought on by those communicators. They did their job, albiet slower than they would have liked.
So the question becomes, why haven’t we acted yet on climate? Well…
Political Corruption is the Real Reason for Our Climate Inaction
While the American public now believes in taking action on climate change, our political system is corrupt enough to allow it’s ruling party (the GOP) to ignore the will of the voters in favor of corporate interests.
I mean, if we actually had a representative democracy, the GOP would be a much more nuanced party. It would be one where it’s members would vote with their Democratic colleagues on issues like Gun Control (67% general support stricter gun laws) and Healthcare (55% worry about affordability of healthcare) where there’s over-arching support for political action.
I mean, for f*cks sake, there’s 73% support for protecting Dreamers from deportation! But Trump and the Republican party used them as a bargaining chip to try to get restrictive immigration law passed.
How can a party take on such unpopular stances and still exist? Well those officials and party leaders are funded and influenced by big corporate donors who keep the party functioning.
Lets just look at the top Fossil Fuel company donors during this midterm election cycle. (The red bars are the amount of donated to Republican candidates, and the blue bars are for Democrats.)
See any blue in those bars? I see maybe a couple of slivers, but it’s just a sea of red.
Our government’s lack of campaign finance law & regulation have allowed fossil fuel companies and polluters to blatently influence our politicians (that graph, which is from of August 2018, shows those companies donated over $21 million to the 2018 midterm’s election cycle.)
That money, along with issues like gerry-mandering and voter suppression, created the political environment ripe for a Climate Denial party to thrive.
In 2017, Vice found that a majority of the current GOP members (53 senators and 232 house representatives) had either expressed climate denial sentiments or voted for climate denial policies.
All of this corruption shows that if we’re to finally get action on climate change, we don’t need to convince more of the public of the importance of the issue. We just need to fight for a democracy that actually represents it’s peoples beliefs, not it’s corporations.
Once we do that, we’ll get what a majority of the country is asking for: some freaking action on Climate Change.
