Americans and global warming, continued
AS A follow-up to last week's post wondering why Americans don't care about global warming, I wanted to mention a few things drawn from the comments and elsewhere around the web. One theme from commenters was that they're not concerned about climate change because they don't believe in climate change. This is exactly the view that infuriates some people who do believe in climate change. However, let's keep in mind that there's a lot of variation within the group of climate-change sceptics. Similarly, as Matt Ridley points out on his blog, to the extent that there's a consensus about climate change, it's a consensus that admits to differing views about the likely causes and consequences. As the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change put it, for example: "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." (Emphasis from Mr Ridley.) A related concern was the politicisation of scientists. As commenter RestrainedRadical pointed out, most of the prominent climate hawks are Democrats. On its face, that looks awfully political, although there may be a causal confusion (if people who care about the environment become Democrats). The New York Times had an article last week about a conference for social psychologists in San Antonio, where Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, based on a show of hands in a ballroom, estimated that 80% of the people in the room were liberals: This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity, Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a tribal-moral community united by sacred values that hinder research and damage their credibilityand blind them to the hostile climate they've created for non-liberals. He was talking about social psychologists in particulara group that we would assume would be more interested in squishy issues than a random sample of Americansbut other academics have found that university professors are overwhelmingly Democratic. It's pretty interesting to think about the possible reasons for thatand maybe it's a discussion we can have in the future on this blogbut for the current context, let's just note that sceptics aren't being unreasonable to suspect some bias. This doesn't mean that people should give up worrying about climate change, but it does suggest that the issue is overly polarised between the believers and the sceptics. Some commenters had the provocative thought that environmentalists should emphasise the effect (climate change) rather than the cause (anthropogenic). I was mulling this before the first post; in the Rasmussen poll linked there, there's a segment of people who believe in climate change but not that it's man-made. Presumably they would be particularly prone to dropping out of the debate if the emphasis on anthropogenic climate change discredits scientists in their eyes. However, if climate change is indeed caused by human behaviour, then it could be important to bring that forward, as slowing climate change would likely necessitate changing human behaviour. Any more thoughts on that? Moving on, the World Bank has a cross-country poll of views on climate change. Their results for the United States roughly correspond to Rasmussen's, and do show Americans being less exercised about climate change than other countries. The poll also suggests a logical inverse relationship between levels of carbon emissions and levels of concern over the environment. On particularly American issues, Tzimisces was the first commenter to pull out an assumption implicit in the idea that America is more committed to heavy carbon use than most statesthat America has a car culture most states do not. Tzi points out that cars are a symbol of freedom and autonomy, and that they're the only viable mode of transportation for a lot of working people. "Why don't Americans care about public transport?" is another question, one answer to which is that America's physical size and settlement patterns make public transportation an implausible way to commute in all but the densest metro areas. The United States also has a structural issue that affects its international participation, which is that the Senate has to approve international treaties by a two-thirds vote. Following on from that, note that the original post, "Why don't Americans care about global warming?" is one of the most-discussed items on the entire website this week, a category typically filled with major news stories and caption contests. This suggests an additional question: "Why do people care so much about why Americans don't care about global warming?" A few possible answers suggest themselvesmaybe people love a chance to pick on Americabut the most plausible is that people care about America's views on the issue because, as I suggested in the earlier post, America is big enough that its involvement may be necessary for a global fight against climate change. This is a dynamic that persists in other issues and suggests a hypothesis: hegemonic states are prone to lag on collective-action problems, because other states value their activity more highly than they do. For a different take on global leadership, or the lack thereof, see Nouriel Roubini, writing today in Slate. (Photo credit: AFP)