Climate Change Gets Personal
Is Action on the Horizon?
Published in The EarthSphere Blog
Former US Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill coined the phrase “All Politics is Local.” Perhaps future action to mitigate the effects of climate change will rest on his insight. If local communities are not concerned about climate change, there will be no groundswell demanding action — people won’t worry about problems that do not affect them. But when personal security and livelihoods are threatened by extreme weather, wildfires, droughts, and floods, people will demand action from the ground level up. Communities will push local and state governments to respond, and politicians elected to represent those communities at the federal level will feel the heat from their constituents.
Political will for change seems to be on the rise globally, according to a Pew Research Center survey sampling 20,000 people in 17 countries. Still, unfortunately, the level of concern in the US remains the same as in 2015. As would be expected, US opinions on threats posed by climate change split along the red-blue ideological divide.
Whether opinions will shift after another summer of heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and catastrophic tropical storms remains to be seen. Impacts from these events were widespread this summer. Heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest blew away…
