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| Picture by me! |
Last month, President Trump finally came to a decision on the United States’ role in the UN Paris Climate Agreement of 2016, opting to pull the nation out of the deal. As one might expect, the move was met with a firestorm of criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, as well as from around the world: at the G20 summit in early July, the 19 other world leaders at the conference chose to move forward with the climate pact despite Trump’s dissent, delivering a swift blow to the US' international stature as a leading player in climate progress. Since then, the news headlines have been taken over by other chaos from the White House and its never-ending stream of Russia-related incriminations, so I felt it was appropriate to pull the climate issue out of the mud and find ways to improve the conversation surrounding it.
The current state of Americans’ knowledge on climate change is, at best, embarrassing: according to a rigorous study conducted by the Pew Research Center and published last October, while most have accepted global warming as a real phenomenon, only 48% believe that it is caused by human activity. In response to questions about whether global warming would result in wildlife/habitat harm, storm increases, droughts and water shortages, forest damage and sea level rise, the average percentage of respondents who said yes to each turns out to be only 42%. Perhaps even more appalling was that only about 27% of the people surveyed believe that climate scientists understand the causes and solutions to climate change. Trust in the much-discussed scientific consensus on the matter was also at 27%. Given that the United States has the world's largest GDP, invests more money than any nation on aid to developing countries, and spends about 40% above the OECD average on education, our ignorance on what has repeatedly been called “the greatest threat to humanity” is both depressing and terrifying.
There are many possible reasons as to why we are so illiterate on this contentious issue (and why there is even any contention to begin with), not the least of which is the collective effort by lobbying firms such as Heartland and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to cast a shadow of skepticism over the findings of climate scientists. Masquerading as “think tanks” conducting honest scientific research, these institutions are in fact propaganda machines whose gears are well-oiled by handsome sums of money from corporations like Exxon and Koch Industries. Their task is to destroy the credibility of evidence linking human activity to global warming, and then vilify all of the associated scientists before crowds of easily-deceived voters. Their methods include reproducing climate reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), except with modified data that softens or contradicts the original conclusions, effectively dismissing the “alarmist hysteria” that seems to have preoccupied most of the scientific community; more often, however, these organizations host public rallies where speakers shower their impassioned audiences with nuggets of American conservatism (“free enterprise," “limited government”) in order to repudiate the “liberal elites” trying to slay these cherished ideals with the swords of science.
Such strategies have successfully poisoned the air in the chambers of Congress with the toxic odor of denialism: in the 2010 midterm elections, numerous Senators and Representatives were forced to surrender their support for environmentally progressive programs (such as the cap-and-trade system, which failed to get signed into law) as well as their general acceptance of human-caused climate change, all under the looming threat of losing campaign funds from crucial donors like Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers. This carried on into the 2014 midterms, where at least five climate-concerned legislators lost their seats to climate deniers. Today, 53 out of 100 Senators and 232 out of 435 Representatives, the majority of whom are Republicans in either house, deny the science of climate change or reject action against it. Among them is the current chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works – I’ll let the irony here speak for itself.
And so, given all of this evidence, it becomes rather tempting to assail politicians and fossil fuel companies for prioritizing their wallets over the planet and blinding so many Americans to our climate emergency with their obscurantism. This is especially true in the age of Trump, who in addition to tearing away at numerous Obama-era climate policies, has nearly emptied the halls of his government of those who believe in the science of climate change and filled the resulting vacancies with people like EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, a man who cannot even get himself to admit that carbon emissions are at all related to atmospheric temperature increases. The former Oklahoma attorney general, who seems to have lent his entire legal career to the interests of the oil industry, spent years suing the very organization that he is now responsible for leading. Legend has it he's using issues of Nature magazine as toilet paper.
However, what’s interesting is that the recurring statements made by climate change deniers are almost amusingly easy to refute. What follows is a list of the more popular attacks on climate science and their rebuttals, most (if not all) of which you readers will have seen before:
Global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese to cripple the U.S. economy.
This famous gem hails from the vast library of bullshit that is Donald Trump’s Twitter archive. One need not look far beyond a Google search to disprove it: the past three years have consecutively set the record as the hottest for our planet, continuing the unprecedented rate of global temperature increase that we have seen for the past several years. Accepting this still leaves the second half of the above argument intact, although it too was handily crushed by a statement from the Chinese foreign minister last November assuring us that no, China did not invent the concept of climate change to hobble its top trade partner.
It’s snowing outside! What is this ‘warming’ you speak of?
A position so ridiculous as to border on satire, yet broadcast with a straight face before the U.S. Senate by the snowball-wielding James Inhofe of Oklahoma (and, to little surprise, Trump in this 2013 tweet). The truth is within the grasp of a child: simply, climate and weather are not the same. Weather refers to short-term local conditions in precipitation and temperature, while climate refers to long-term weather patterns over a larger geographic area.
Scientists don’t agree on global warming.
They most certainly do. Among climate scientists from over 80 countries actively publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals, there is about a 97% consensus that climate change is occurring as a predominantly human-caused phenomenon.
Global warming is caused by the Earth’s natural cycles.
This argument is admittedly more worthy of a rational discussion than the above three, though just as wrong. It refers to three cyclical processes corresponding to the Earth’s orbit around the sun, collectively referred to as the Milankovitch cycles: the “wobble” of the Earth’s axis (precession cycle), the angular variation of the Earth’s axis between 22.1° and 24.5° perpendicular to its orbital plane (tilt cycle) and the expansion/contraction of the elliptical shape of the planet’s orbit (eccentricity cycle). Each cycle fluctuates between periods of warm and cool terrestrial temperatures on intervals between 26,000 and 100,000 years. Currently, all three cycles are moving towards cooler temperatures, and yet the Earth’s average temperature continues to rise to record heights. This confirms that there is a different force at play here, accelerating the warming of the Earth beyond its natural cadence. Given what we know about the relationship between carbon dioxide and the global greenhouse effect, the various sources of anthropomorphic CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) emissions – coal-burning power plants, petroleum usage/traffic congestion, deforestation, etc. – and the alarming rate at which said emissions are increasing, it is rather obvious that human activity is the leading contributor to climate change. Even if this evidence was somehow proven to be wrong, the “natural cycles” argument would remain doomed.
Climate change will only affect other species, not us humans.
Setting aside the lapse in ethics that must be committed in order to disregard the suffering of millions of different plants and animals around the globe, it is also dishonest to hold this view in the context of our own species. To consider just one point of contact: a mere two feet of sea level rise will amplify most hurricanes to categories 4 and 5, and shrink the intervals between floods in the Pacific Northwest alone from every hundredth year to every single year. Another notable example is Florida, a state teeming with Trump voters (and home to his weekend abode for presidential laziness, Mar-a-Lago), where increases in sea levels will see most of its southern coast get swallowed by the ocean.
We should spend more time worrying about the spread of infectious diseases and starvation.
What advocates of this position fail to realize is that worrying about climate change already entails concerns about starvation and infectious disease. Current projections show devastating shortages of food and water supply in regions where both are already pitifully scarce, such as much of sub-Saharan Africa (which is home to over 800 million malnourished people). Global temperature increase will exacerbate the droughts in these zones even further, thus displacing hundreds of thousands of climate refugees into neighboring countries where most are unwelcome due to sheer capacity. Warmer temperatures also allow for parasitic diseases like malaria to thrive in greater concentrations, where they are currently scourging over 200 million people each year.
Shifting to renewable energy sources is economically detrimental.
This is a myth of greater magnitude than any described above, and seems to be the chief culprit deterring even educated minds aware of climate science against the movement from fossil fuels to green energy sources like wind, solar, etc. There are consequently several prongs to the counterargument, the sharpest being the remarkable job increase that renewables can provide. According to a report published by the Environmental Defense Fund earlier this year, the number of jobs in the sustainability sector is growing at 12 times the rate of the entire U.S. economy, and has added 100,000 new jobs annually over the past six years. This stands in stark contrast to Trump’s current attempts to bolster job growth: for example, his executive order authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was purported to add “28,000 new jobs” although the real number is less than a seventh of that estimate. Additionally, his efforts to revive employment in coal, oil and natural gas industries will almost certainly prove futile, as the rate of job increase in the fossil fuel sector declined by 4.5% between 2012 and 2015 and is projected to continue doing so. Finally, there’s the news from earlier this year that China is ready to invest at least $360 billion in renewable energy sources, which would result in at least 43 million new jobs opening up over the next 3 years and could potentially outcompete the US in the renewables market, given the path on which our nation’s leader has currently opted to take. It would seem, therefore, that the country that Trump accused of inventing a problem in our climate is now poised to reap the fruits of its solution.
This famous gem hails from the vast library of bullshit that is Donald Trump’s Twitter archive. One need not look far beyond a Google search to disprove it: the past three years have consecutively set the record as the hottest for our planet, continuing the unprecedented rate of global temperature increase that we have seen for the past several years. Accepting this still leaves the second half of the above argument intact, although it too was handily crushed by a statement from the Chinese foreign minister last November assuring us that no, China did not invent the concept of climate change to hobble its top trade partner.
It’s snowing outside! What is this ‘warming’ you speak of?
A position so ridiculous as to border on satire, yet broadcast with a straight face before the U.S. Senate by the snowball-wielding James Inhofe of Oklahoma (and, to little surprise, Trump in this 2013 tweet). The truth is within the grasp of a child: simply, climate and weather are not the same. Weather refers to short-term local conditions in precipitation and temperature, while climate refers to long-term weather patterns over a larger geographic area.
Scientists don’t agree on global warming.
They most certainly do. Among climate scientists from over 80 countries actively publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals, there is about a 97% consensus that climate change is occurring as a predominantly human-caused phenomenon.
Global warming is caused by the Earth’s natural cycles.
This argument is admittedly more worthy of a rational discussion than the above three, though just as wrong. It refers to three cyclical processes corresponding to the Earth’s orbit around the sun, collectively referred to as the Milankovitch cycles: the “wobble” of the Earth’s axis (precession cycle), the angular variation of the Earth’s axis between 22.1° and 24.5° perpendicular to its orbital plane (tilt cycle) and the expansion/contraction of the elliptical shape of the planet’s orbit (eccentricity cycle). Each cycle fluctuates between periods of warm and cool terrestrial temperatures on intervals between 26,000 and 100,000 years. Currently, all three cycles are moving towards cooler temperatures, and yet the Earth’s average temperature continues to rise to record heights. This confirms that there is a different force at play here, accelerating the warming of the Earth beyond its natural cadence. Given what we know about the relationship between carbon dioxide and the global greenhouse effect, the various sources of anthropomorphic CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) emissions – coal-burning power plants, petroleum usage/traffic congestion, deforestation, etc. – and the alarming rate at which said emissions are increasing, it is rather obvious that human activity is the leading contributor to climate change. Even if this evidence was somehow proven to be wrong, the “natural cycles” argument would remain doomed.
Climate change will only affect other species, not us humans.
Setting aside the lapse in ethics that must be committed in order to disregard the suffering of millions of different plants and animals around the globe, it is also dishonest to hold this view in the context of our own species. To consider just one point of contact: a mere two feet of sea level rise will amplify most hurricanes to categories 4 and 5, and shrink the intervals between floods in the Pacific Northwest alone from every hundredth year to every single year. Another notable example is Florida, a state teeming with Trump voters (and home to his weekend abode for presidential laziness, Mar-a-Lago), where increases in sea levels will see most of its southern coast get swallowed by the ocean.
We should spend more time worrying about the spread of infectious diseases and starvation.
What advocates of this position fail to realize is that worrying about climate change already entails concerns about starvation and infectious disease. Current projections show devastating shortages of food and water supply in regions where both are already pitifully scarce, such as much of sub-Saharan Africa (which is home to over 800 million malnourished people). Global temperature increase will exacerbate the droughts in these zones even further, thus displacing hundreds of thousands of climate refugees into neighboring countries where most are unwelcome due to sheer capacity. Warmer temperatures also allow for parasitic diseases like malaria to thrive in greater concentrations, where they are currently scourging over 200 million people each year.
Shifting to renewable energy sources is economically detrimental.
This is a myth of greater magnitude than any described above, and seems to be the chief culprit deterring even educated minds aware of climate science against the movement from fossil fuels to green energy sources like wind, solar, etc. There are consequently several prongs to the counterargument, the sharpest being the remarkable job increase that renewables can provide. According to a report published by the Environmental Defense Fund earlier this year, the number of jobs in the sustainability sector is growing at 12 times the rate of the entire U.S. economy, and has added 100,000 new jobs annually over the past six years. This stands in stark contrast to Trump’s current attempts to bolster job growth: for example, his executive order authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was purported to add “28,000 new jobs” although the real number is less than a seventh of that estimate. Additionally, his efforts to revive employment in coal, oil and natural gas industries will almost certainly prove futile, as the rate of job increase in the fossil fuel sector declined by 4.5% between 2012 and 2015 and is projected to continue doing so. Finally, there’s the news from earlier this year that China is ready to invest at least $360 billion in renewable energy sources, which would result in at least 43 million new jobs opening up over the next 3 years and could potentially outcompete the US in the renewables market, given the path on which our nation’s leader has currently opted to take. It would seem, therefore, that the country that Trump accused of inventing a problem in our climate is now poised to reap the fruits of its solution.
As I said, there’s probably more than a familiar line or two in the points above; after all, they have been ceaselessly repeated on air and on paper by news outlets like The New York Times, politicians like Bernie Sanders, and beloved science communicators like Bill Nye, who has taken to the masochistic habit of debating (and probably educating) men like Tucker Carlson on television about global warming, but to no avail. This raises a key question: if the facts about global climate change (and proof against contrary opinions) are nakedly available on the Internet and on newspapers to the eyes of any audience, even that of Fox News, then why are so many people still drawn to patent falsehoods about the matter, and why are others so reluctant to act? A series of maps published by Yale University’s Climate Communication program surveyed people from across the United States to geographically illustrate the distribution of opinions about various issues pertaining to global warming. While about 70% agree that global warming is occurring, only a narrow majority of 53% believe it to be human caused. Here’s what this difference looks like on a map:
As for the question of whether most scientists believe global warming to be happening, only 49% said yes:
And if we take a look at which counties voted for Trump in the 2016 election, here’s what we get:
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| From BrilliantMaps.com |
This data clearly shows a geographical overlap between disbelief in human-caused global warming (as well as its scientific consensus) and support for Trump. Of course, while there are many issues besides the environment that are likely to have tipped voters in Trump’s favor, these maps still raise the question of how the man’s preposterous notions about the climate remain impervious to the abundance of scientific information available to many of the people living in these territories. What makes this even more confusing is the amount of support that renewable energy investment is getting:
The map above, which looks as if it’s literally bleeding with approval, illustrates an average of 82% of Americans backing green energy investment. Even in majority-Republican, Trump-supporting regions, the average is about 70-75%. This suggests that the real issue lies less in the actual rift between climate facts and climate opinions and more on how this difference is being communicated, if at all. There is additional data that further attests to this…
Here is the contrast between Americans who believe global warming will harm their fellow citizens, and those who believe it will harm them personally:
The above maps from Yale were included in a New York Times report analyzing the researchers’ findings. The article’s authors summarized the glaring disconnect quite succinctly:
“Part of this is the problem of risk perception. Global warming is precisely the kind of threat humans are awful at dealing with: a problem with enormous consequences over the long term, but little that is sharply visible on a personal level in the short term. Humans are hard-wired for quick fight-or-flight reactions in the face of an imminent threat, but not highly motivated to act against slow-moving and somewhat abstract problems, even if the challenges that they pose are ultimately dire.”
Indeed, it appears that most Americans are already aware of how dire those challenges really are. 70% of respondents in Yale’s poll agree that global warming will harm future generations:
It seems, however, that there is one more crucial dimension to this psychological perplexity. According to the New York Times, only 18% of Republicans consider the environment to be among their major considerations when voting – a number that has steadily dropped since the early 2000’s. However, about 59% of Republicans believe that addressing the environment, specifically the issue of climate change, will bring about major changes to Americans’ lifestyles, according to the Pew poll I cited earlier. These data points seem to be the final puzzle pieces that complete what I believe to be a reasonable conclusion about our climate perception issue: most Americans agree that global warming is real and poses consequences for future generations. Most Americans also consider it prudent to invest in renewable energy sources to combat this problem. However, the issue is not a top priority for most Republican voters, and many are unwilling to shoulder the responsibility of accepting global warming to be caused by human activity. Therefore, many are reluctant to accept the potential changes to their lifestyles that will result from tackling climate change head-on.
This is where the line is drawn between addressing climate change in principle and addressing it in practice. Within scientific circles, we engage with seemingly endless troves of data that reaffirm all of our so-called “alarmism” about climate change, and yet these numbers prove utterly unconvincing in the face of the farmers, coal miners and factory workers that we need as allies in our push towards renewable energy. One of the frequent arguments used by politicians and lobbyists in protest of President Obama's 2012 Clean Power Plan was that it would only benefit well-educated coastal elites with the money and connections to develop renewable products, while leaving blue-collar employees (predominantly coal miners) to languish under the rug.
That sentiment is not entirely unfounded, as coal demand has been declining for decades and took an especially big hit after Obama’s plans were unveiled. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), coal consumption in 2016 was at a meager 15%, eclipsed twofold by natural gas (29%) and petroleum (37%) while renewable energy was steadily catching up at 10%. Numerous coal companies went bankrupt by that year – one of the few left standing was the conglomerate Murray Energy, whose CEO Bob Murray became one of Trump’s leading campaign advisors. The passion with which Murray and other pro-coal advocates fight for their industry’s survival stands in curious contrast with the actual size of the coal sector: it currently employs a little over 69,000 workers total, about a fourth of whom are actual mine workers – this amounts to only 0.02% of the entire US workforce. Furthermore, an op-ed posted in The New York Times pointed out that much of today’s “coal country” in America is in fact more of a nostalgic cultural mindset than an active economic region; a large portion of their labor is being outsourced to automation, which means that not even the most potent strain of Trumpian populism can really deliver on promises to save those jobs. And yet Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by over 3 to 1 in states like West Virginia, traditionally known for having the largest coal mines in the country. This peculiarity underscores an important truth about the coal industry: it may be small, but its cultural identity is a powerful weapon in presidential politics.
It would help to better understand this cultural force by putting a face to some of the coal industry’s longtime workers and get a proper snapshot of their sentiments towards America’s changing energy demands. Take the case of Homer Hickam, a retired coal miner from West Virginia whose memoir recounting his time in the job was adapted into the acclaimed 1999 drama October Sky. His interviewer on NPR pointed out the spectacular dangers of working in a coal mine – since the 1940s, over 100,000 workers have died while on the job with upwards of 1,000 casualties per year – and inquired about what exactly allures workers to stay in the caves for so many years amidst such risks. Hickam responded with some useful clarity:
“Well, again, they love it. They're highly trained, it's what they know best, it's their world. And to take the skills that they have and go somewhere else and apply them, well, they probably wouldn't have as much fun. I know a lot of people who think that that's strange for me to say, but coal miners actually have fun with what they do. (…) Every day is an adventure. (…) Every day there's something new, there's some challenge to overcome. There's some special things that they have to do to get the coal out and also keep themselves safe. So, every day at the end of the day, they're able to say, hey, we loaded x number of tons of coal, we all got out safely, so they have a sense of satisfaction that they did something important. You know, that goes a long way toward the quality of life.”
Hickam’s remarks are one out of a countless number of such insights provided by coal-country natives, but work as an accurate summary of why many of his people fall in love with the character of coal work. It connects them with skills that they are well-adapted to, and the satisfaction achieved after a hard day’s work proves emotionally salient for most of their lives. Therefore, it would appear that the true cause for concern among coal miners towards Obama-era regulations is not callousness towards the environment, but the fear of a deep cultural harmony getting ruptured. Pennsylvania coal miner Todd Brunsak provided further testimony of this in an excerpt from an interview from March:
“Every day it was something new,” Brunsak said of the Obama era. “I felt like [the government] was attacking me personally, me and my family.”
It is quite evident that clearing this cultural hurdle will require a different plan of attack.
Moving forward, the major implication for scientists, politicians and climate activists is that there is a crucial yet oft-overlooked theater on which to wage the war on climate change: rhetoric. As much as I despise charges of “elitism," I believe it is imperative to admit that reaching over the aisle and convincing followers of Trump’s climate-agnosticism to shift their views cannot involve a language of complex graphs and hundred-page documents of research, but one of practical lifestyle changes and their cultural impacts. As clear as our climate data may look to us “coastal elites," it is equally clear that its message is not reaching the ears of those who need to hear it most: the vast numbers of rural populations and blue-collar employees whose political representatives are leading the push against environmentalism.
This may seem like a bizarre or superficial approach, if not insulting to all the scientists we have to thank for this seemingly “ineffectual data”. However, I know of several rather compelling cases for its potential success, most of which have been neatly compiled in a story for the New York Times business section aptly titled “Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’”. Readers of the article are first treated to the environmentally-progressive farming techniques of Doug Palen, a Kansas native who has led an influential movement within his community for the practice of no-till farming, or the planting of crops without significant damage to the land’s topsoil. In a region of America beleaguered by drought, no-till farming has proven to conserve up to 80% of the water that would have otherwise been lost to evaporation under tilled soil, and is estimated to achieve up to 15% of the total reductions in carbon emissions necessary to stabilize the Earth’s climate. Not once do terms like “climate change," “global warming," “Antarctic ice shelf” or “green energy” appear in the vernacular of locals to Palen’s town of residence, and yet no-till farming has become commonplace throughout the area. I have little doubt that following Palen’s example elsewhere in the Midwest will go a long way in improving the climate change consensus among farmers in the region, which is currently at a measly 8%.
More direct efforts were also documented in the story: for instance, Carl Priesendorf, a teacher who is also based in Kansas, has labored to square his knowledge on climate change with the deeply religious, anti-scientific attitudes of most of his students by working his way up from simpler scientific topics like electricity. Annie Kuether, a member of Kansas’ state legislature, has set herself apart from her climate-denying colleagues by amassing a coalition of farm-based voters in support of wind power. A project is now in place to build a transmission line that can deliver 4,000 megawatts of wind-generated electricity into states east of the Mississippi and into the Appalachians. This region, too, has seen some progress thanks to the efforts of Gil Gullickson, an Ohio-based magazine editor who has been putting the spotlight on global warming for the past two-and-a-half years. Clearly, there is hope to be found among our common citizens even amidst the failures in Washington D.C.
This is not to say that a better PR campaign in red states is the ultimate solution to climate change – it is simply what looks to be a viable means of getting our fellow Americans more involved and informed. There remains the malevolent force of political manipulation on the part of powerful corporate executives and lobbyists, who have left many of our elected representatives too docile to stop the White House from crumbling in ineptitude or take any action of their own. Of course, the climate has many more influential companies on its side – Tesla, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft to name a few – and the tireless campaigning efforts of concerned politicians, activist groups, schools, celebrity figures and, above all, scientists themselves. But our outreach must gain a firmer grasp upon territories whose climate movement isn’t as momentous, which won’t happen so long as we attempt to engage them on the terms of our own echo chambers. Our energy economy is shifting to a greener direction, which means that the fossil fuel industry is faced with a hard but absolutely necessary transition to the renewables sector. The first step in making all this possible is to ensure that we are all on the same page.
Thanks for reading!
- Tejus
