Whatchamacolumn: Presidential campaign ignores climate change
Here’s a bit of political contradiction:
A majority of Americans (52 percent), taken from a September 2023 opinion survey by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “see climate change as a critical threat to the vital interests of the United States in the next 10 years.”
And yet, after a presidential debate in which neither candidate had much to say about greenhouse gas emissions or bolstering clean energy, climate historian Leah Aronowski was quoted by ABC News saying, “I think what we learned last night is that climate really is not on the ballot this fall.”
Here in the Northwest, where climate-driven catastrophes are rare, we still can mourn the loss of life, property destruction and community devastation from Hurricane Helene. We can be shocked by reports this week that FEMA lacks sufficient funding to get through the current hurricane season.
But is climate change even on our personal or lifestyle radar? The most important question this year asks why our two major political parties have such divergent levels of angst over climate change?
Key findings from the 2023 opinion survey include:
Seventy-five percent of Americans feel it is somewhat or very important for the United States to be a world leader in combating climate change; 70 percent favor making businesses pay for environmental modifications in their operations; two-thirds or higher favor mandates on such business practices as recycling, packaging only with recyclable materials and sealing methane gas leaks from oil wells; most support humanitarian, economic and disaster aid to countries disproportionately affected by climate change, while splitting 50-50 on support for accepting climate refugees (51%).
That’s understandable, given decades of communications such as this from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration:
“There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause … The current warming trend is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.”
Here, from the Chicago survey, is where things get weird:
“Eight in 10 Democrats (82%) see climate change as a critical threat, while just 16 percent of Republicans see it the same way; Independents meet them in the middle, at 51 percent. This is the greatest partisan divide (a difference of 66 percentage points) in the perception of the threat posed by climate change ever noted in a Chicago Council Survey.”
Please read that paragraph one more time.
Republican leaders — Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon — championed environmental causes up to the 1970 creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. GOP support for those causes, driven by expensive impacts of EPA regulations on business, waned, and opinions about climate change became strategies to retain political power instead of universal concerns about the future of humanity.
For reference, here is the Biden Administration climate page: https://www.whitehouse.gov/climate/. And being unable to locate an official Trump position on climate change, here is one news agency’s report: https://tinyurl.com/TrumpOnClimate.
Americans agree; politicians not so much.
Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.
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