The Top 5 Keys to Communicating with Right-wingers About Global Warming
Public opinion polls show substantial differences between Democrats and Republicans on global warming (which is sometimes called “climate change,” though these terms have different meanings).
According to Pew, 78% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners but only 21% of Republicans and Republican-leaners say “climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.” This is nothing new. Enormous disparities between the left and right pervade the history of polling on the issue.
Here’s what left-wingers can do to communicate with the political right about global warming.
1) Discuss the fossil fuel industry’s role in creating skepticism about global warming.
Many right-wingers are not merely unconcerned about global warming — they are snarkily skeptical. On Facebook, the laughing emoticon is routinely one of the most common reactions to articles posted by news organizations about global warming. Often, there are sarcastic remarks in the comment sections that suggest global warming is an issue propagated for monetary purposes.
This was exemplified by a remark made by the president of the United States, Donald Trump: “With the global warming…it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax, it’s a moneymaking industry, it’s a hoax.”
In these comments, there are seldom specific claims about what entities are responsible for the supposed moneymaking hoax. To illustrate this, I sample several comments from social media.
For some, it’s climate scientists: “97% of climate scientists agree that you need to pay them to solve this crisis.”
For some, it’s the government: “Tax people to save the world and put money in corrupt politicians’ pockets.”
For others, it is multiple entities: “a political/religious tool to increase the power of the government and enrich cronies of the ruling class…”
Many right-wingers suspect that powerful interests have ulterior, monetary incentives to encourage concerns about global warming.
Many left-wingers suspect the same about powerful interests that have incentives to discourage global warming concerns — namely, the fossil fuel industry.
These left-wingers believe that the real global warming conspiracy is not that government conspires to concern people about global warming but that the fossil fuel industry conspires to propagate the former conspiracy theory to reduce concerns about global warming, thereby reducing the likelihood of regulation.
Many on each side (perhaps more right-wingers) are not aware of the ulterior incentives that the other side suspects turn a scientific issue into a political one.
Upon closer inspection, the latter conspiracy theory makes more sense. The former conspiracy theory is really no cohesive theory at all — just a jumble of vague conjectures that differ from person to person.
The idea that additional taxes increase the government’s authority is naïve. The U.S. government has demonstrated that it does not need concomitant tax revenue in order to increase spending. Instead, it engages in deficit spending, often after tax cuts.
Additionally, the entities concerned about global warming are unlikely to successfully conspire. There are so many climate scientists and little (if any) monetary benefit to any one of them from concerns about global warming. This leads to a variation of the bystander effect: The more people who can satisfy an obligation (for example, make campaign donations so that the government will fund environmental endeavors), the less likely it is for any one of them to do so.
Furthermore, it is unlikely for a nascent industry such as alternative energy to successfully lobby the government to favor it when it directly challenges a tremendously powerful and entrenched industry, such as the fossil fuel industry.
It is much more likely, a priori, that the fossil fuel industry uses its authority to reduce concern about global warming in order to prevent regulations and taxes and to crush start-ups that challenge the industry.
Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe alone has received over $2 million from the industry. Inhofe once brought a snowball to Congress as evidence against global warming.
The Edison Electric Institute and Big Coal made payments to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign that are considered instrumental in, respectively, leading Bush to rescind his campaign promise to cap carbon dioxide emissions and order the Justice Department to drop lawsuits against power plants that burned coal illegally.
The fossil fuel industry also played a role in crushing the electric car industry a decade before the emergence of Tesla.
And the fossil fuel industry has given millions of dollars to Donald Trump, who promised during his campaign to “drain the swamp.”
Correspondingly, Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Change Accord; ended the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to reduce coal-fired power plant emissions; and rolled back the Obama administration’s regulation that reduced methane emissions.
One analyst has said of the fossil fuel industry under Trump, “It’s hard to identify any industrial sector that has ever had this much success with any administration in modern history.”
The last two Republican administrations (Bush and Trump) have also appointed fossil fuel lobbyists, such as Philip Cooney and Scott Pruitt, to lead the government’s environmental organizations.
In some cases, nonscientists of these organizations have edited reports to downplay global warming.
Perhaps as a consequence of these efforts, surveys over the past couple decades have consistently found that the percentage of Americans who consider global warming a serious threat is lower than that of most countries.
There are numerous components to the case for anthropogenic global warming.
But the appeal to right-wingers should start with the fossil fuel industry’s economic incentives to reduce public concerns about it.
Otherwise, a Republican who suspects global warming to be a hoax will be skeptical of the evidence in favor of it, thinking that authorities invoked are in on the corruption and the data cited are cherry-picked or otherwise untrustworthy.
And a Republican who does not suspect global warming to be a hoax but, rather, thinks of the issue as scientific will blow off the other points, thinking that he or she will leave the issue to the scientists.
In fact, it is not a scientific issue anymore — it is a political one.
And that point must be made before the rest of the case begins.
2) Use authorities who have credibility with right-wingers.
Democrats and Republicans vary substantially in who they view as credible.
Specifically, Democrats are more likely to view scientists as credible, while Republicans are more likely to view business leaders as credible.
Republicans are very skeptical about academia, only partly because of the liberal prevalence among college professors.
The Republican perspective is summed best with the aphorism: “Those who can’t do, teach.”
Last year, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg was invited to speak before several governmental bodies throughout the world, including the U.S. Congress. She turned into a star of the left and was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019.
While Greta is regarded as a hero among liberals, it’s not them she’s trying to convince.
So, how do right-wingers view her?
They don’t take her seriously. She’s never participated in the business world. They think she’s a naïve child who is being taken advantage of — by her parents and by society.
Alternatively, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, Tom Steyer, and Mark Zuckerberg are among the billionaires who have invested millions of dollars (including $10 billion by Bezos and $500 million by Bloomberg) to fight global warming.
This is not even close to an exhaustive list of billionaires who have publicly expressed concern about global warming.
And these business leaders are credible to many right-wingers — more credible to them than Greta Thunberg.
The scientific consensus is also worth pointing out. In five comprehensive reports over the past thirty years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found with increasing certainty that global warming occurs due to human activity. Their findings have been endorsed by dozens of scientific societies around the world, including those located in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
According to six recent independent studies, 90% to 100% of publishing climate scientists agree that the recent global warming is caused by human activity.
In 2017, the United States’ Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, and 10 other federal departments collaborated on a comprehensive report finding “that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Congress should ask for public testimony from these business leaders and scientists.
The business leaders are most important in appealing to Republicans. Though they have little financial incentive to propagate a hoax, they have paid millions of dollars to address global warming.
If global warming were a hoax, all of them would have to be among the hoaxed — something right-wingers are unlikely to believe. They are, therefore, more likely to take the issue seriously.
3) Don’t lead with talk about temperatures. Instead, discuss the greenhouse effect.
The absolute worst way to lead into a conversation about global warming is to talk about how temperatures are going up.
Most right-wing responses to articles about global warming seem designed to counter the simple argument that temperatures have increased and that these increases must, therefore, be due to human activity. And right-wingers are correct that if that were the only reason to suspect anthropogenic global warming, it would be a weak argument.
But the theory of anthropogenic global warming has grounding in the greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect is the process by which some solar energy is absorbed by gases such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane. It has been understood since the 1800's.
Discussing the greenhouse effect helps clarify that scientists didn’t just observe warmer temperatures and seek an explanation. Instead, warmer temperatures were predicted on the basis of two simple observations:
a) Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane trap heat from the Sun.
b) Human activity, particularly the fossil fuel industry, is generating more of these greenhouse gases.
Theoretical and empirical support for this prediction accumulated in the first half of the 20th century.
A landmark report filed by the Johnson administration in 1965 expressed concern about anthropogenic global warming caused by greenhouse gases.
A study by John Sawyer in 1972 was prescient.
Global warming deniers sometimes point to claims in the 1970’s that human activity would lead to global cooling. However, most peer-reviewed papers of the era that foresaw temperature changes predicted global warming, not cooling.
The empirical case for human-made global warming is summed excellently by Seth Miller in the best post I have ever read on Medium.
4) Discuss the potential ramifications of global warming.
The average person just does not appreciate the significance of a temperature increase of two or three degrees. A 78-degree Summer day would feel just as nice as a 75-degree Summer day. Considered this way, it is easy to be unconcerned. But the adverse effects of global warming include more intense and frequent hurricanes, crop yield loss, more wildfires, more tornadoes, and extreme floods.
Indeed, rising sea levels threaten to put under water areas home to hundreds of millions of people around the world, including many areas in the United States.
As the adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: Stanford University researchers have estimated that the economic costs of not meeting the Paris Climate Agreement will exceed $20 trillion by the turn of the century — within the lifetimes of many people living today.
One of the talking points promoted by the fossil fuel industry is that the effects of global warming are overestimated.
It is, therefore, pertinent to make the point that some effects are occurring twice as rapidly as scientists had anticipated. And that millions of people in the United States alone are at risk.
5) Discuss positive feedback.
Many people are under the vague impression that global warming has led to increases in the frequencies of hurricanes and floods.
But positive feedback means things are much more dangerous than that.
Positive feedback refers to factors that are both effects and causes of global warming, such as water vapor; loss of albedo due to sea ice loss; and melting permafrost.
Because of positive feedback, warming leads to more and more warming, with the potential for runaway global warming.
Where does it end?
Stephen Hawking, perhaps the world’s most prominent physicist, said in 2006 that he is “very worried about global warming” and that he is afraid that the Earth “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.”
Venus had likely been habitable but experienced global warming due to a runaway greenhouse effect.
Hawking was only the most well-known scientist to be concerned that global warming would make the Earth uninhabitable. Numerous other scientists share the same fear.
In sum:
To convince right-wingers about global warming, start with the fossil fuel industry’s influence over public discourse about the issue. Point to business leaders who have credibility with conservatives. Discuss the theoretical grounding offered by the greenhouse effect. Talk about the increases in flooding, wildfires, and hurricanes. And how positive feedback risks making the Earth uninhabitable. These are the stakes.
