Guest essay by Eric Worrall
One of the more amusing climate dramas in the wake of the Trump victory, is watching Liberal attempts to construct a theory of Conservative climate “denial”, so they can figure out which button to prod to make us all support carbon pricing.
This one weird trick will not convince conservatives to fight climate change
Clever new arguments are beside the point.
Updated by David Roberts @drvox david@vox.com Dec 28, 2016, 9:10am EST
Conservative climate denialists are a source of immense frustration to scientists and liberals — and have been for decades. As long as I’ve been writing, there’s been a perpetual quest to find just the right argument to appeal to conservatives and pierce their denial.
This has led to periodic flurries of headlines in the climate journosphere around various social science studies that purport to finally crack the nut, to find the argument that works. Dozens of “easy ways to get conservatives to care about climate change” have floated through the media over the years; oddly, with all these easy ways to change their minds floating around, conservatives continue denying climate change
The latest chapter of this unending story began a few weeks ago, when a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that purported to show a way to change pro-environmental attitudes in conservatives.
The studies were conducted online. Study participants were exposed to various messages about climate change (and other social problems) and then rated their feelings about the urgency of the problem.
The results showed that “past comparisons” — comparing the damage climate change has done to the past purity of ecosystems — do more to increase conservatives’ pro-environmental feelings than warnings about the future. “Past comparisons largely bridged the political divide in addressing global warming,” the authors write.
“Our studies describe in words and pictures what the past used to be like, an almost Eden-like version of the planet, one with clean forests and little traffic and pollution. Then we draw a comparison to today, without any references to the future,” Matthew Baldwin, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Cologne and one of the authors, told Climate Progress. “It is much harder to avoid the reality of change when the comparison is to the beautiful planet in its ‘untouched’ form.”
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Only conservative elites can change conservative climate beliefs
The literature on how public opinion is formed and influenced is fairly clear. I summarized it (drawing on this great Jerry Taylor post, which in turn draws on John Zaller’s The Nature & Origins of Mass Opinion) here:
One, most people have no coherent ideology and no firm opinions on “issues,” as they are defined in politics.
Two, partially as a consequence, “elite discourse is the most important driver of public opinion.”
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How can conservative elites be persuaded to think and communicate differently about climate change? That’s a subject for another post, but here’s a spoiler: The answer won’t be found in clever arguments or skillful persuasion, but in money, power, and material interests.
Read more: http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/28/14074214/climate-denialism-social
The abstract of the published paper referenced by the article;
Past-focused environmental comparisons promote proenvironmental outcomes for conservatives
Conservatives appear more skeptical about climate change and global warming and less willing to act against it than liberals. We propose that this unwillingness could result from fundamental differences in conservatives’ and liberals’ temporal focus. Conservatives tend to focus more on the past than do liberals. Across six studies, we rely on this notion to demonstrate that conservatives are positively affected by past- but not by future-focused environmental comparisons. Past comparisons largely eliminated the political divide that separated liberal and conservative respondents’ attitudes toward and behavior regarding climate change, so that across these studies conservatives and liberals were nearly equally likely to fight climate change. This research demonstrates how psychological processes, such as temporal comparison, underlie the prevalent ideological gap in addressing climate change. It opens up a promising avenue to convince conservatives effectively of the need to address climate change and global warming.
Read more: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/52/14953.abstract
Hasn’t buying off Conservatives already been tried? That plan failed, as I recall.
There are enormous potential financial opportunities for rich elites who support carbon pricing, to skim money from the misery of poor people through rent-seeking – using their capital and influence to force ordinary people to buy their expensive green energy.
The fact such rent-seeking schemes have been vocally criticised and largely rejected, in many cases by people who stood to make billions had they been implemented, demonstrates that at least some people in positions of influence still give a damn about doing the right thing. You can’t buy off everyone, David Roberts.
The whole idea of “buying” off conservatives stems from a simple starting point. They look to see what would cause them to change, and then project.
I reject, utterly reject, the belief that being skeptical of CAGW means I’m not an environmentalist. Those are NOT diametrically opposed points of view. Since this whole screed starts with this mistaken premise, anything and everything about it can be ignored. If you start from a faulty assumption, your conclusions are bound to be wrong.
Indeed–the most destructive force ever arrayed against true environmentalism is CAGW, which has sucked more good will, money, and manpower from the proper stewardship of planet Earth than anything.
It really should be a crime to support Obumbler’s notion of “climate change”.
TomB,
When I was a child, there was a need for environmental actions: a river caught on fire, a hepatitis outbreak happened at my school (supposedly caused by a canal and raw sewage swam in by patient 0) and the sky was a uniform brownish gray (US midwest), etc. Those issues were almost universally cleaned up in the US by the late 1970s. So, I too would say I am an environmentalist in that I support the basic concepts of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Where I am considered a heretic in environmentalist circles is that I don’t agree with almost anything done in the name of those acts since 1980. The problem as I see it is the environmental agencies and NGOs have a romantic view of nature as some nirvana that has never existed in the real world. We are now enforcing cleanliness standards that nature itself can not support, thus I can not support them.
The true environmentalist position is to raise the dangerously low levels of atmospheric CO2 as Plants over time have nearly consumed all the CO2 in the atmosphere. So called Greens do not even recognize such a danger; and are NOT in any measure or kind, genuine real environmentalists.
America after 40 years of hard effort, has proven that both Clean AIR and Clean WATER can coexist in an advanced civilization. We only need to declare victory to make it official. Only that type of advanced western civilization can both be restoring CO2 to a level that the death of the Plant Kingdom is averted; and cleansing the environment of Pollution is possible.
I’m with ya all the way stas: time to declare war on plants. Evil bloody things, stealing all our vital global fluids.
Let’s look at how conservatives and liberals view governmental intervention in the economy, and how that shows a need for further intervention, or less of it.
The War on Poverty is a good example.
Liberals think it has been a success, because the poor can now get free housing, free food, free health care, free schooling, free legal representation, free cell phones, free access to public services, ..etc.
Conservatives think it has been a failure because instead of less people living in poverty we have more. And they are trapped in poverty to a greater degree than ever before, because as they try to work their way out of poverty, the freebies are removed. This gives them the short term feeling of working for free. They work and now pay for the stuff they used to get for free.
Liberals tend to think that good intentions will always overcome bureaucratic incompetence, political graft, cronyism, and outright fraud. Conservatives know better.
The best way to convince people you are right is to simply stick to the facts. You lay all the cards on the table face up and after that. there is nowhere to hide. Admittedly it won’t work for everybody, but it will work for the vast majority, leaving but an insignificant minority that can be ignored.
This works 100% of the time. It may take time, but eventually it works.
When it does not work you should ask yourself why your cards aren’t good enough. You do not ask yourself why, for the very first time in human history, people can’t read your cards.
The intellectual dishonesty of True Believers like David “war crimes trials for these bastards” Roberts is truly astounding. He takes straight from the Climatist playbook with his conflation of actual pollution and the fake “carbon pollution”, and it’s all downhill from there. Consistent to the end, you’ve got to give them that.
From the article:
One, most people have no coherent ideology and no firm opinions on “issues,” as they are defined in politics.
Two, partially as a consequence, “elite discourse is the most important driver of public opinion.”
(A third item note is needed); THIRD, those people that believe and depend upon items One & Two will continue to be very confused as to how someone like Trump became president.
Why are they attempting to sway the conservative elites?
Why not sway China and India who are rapidly increasing their CO2 output and have no intent on cutting back on their rate of increase any time soon (if at all)?
That’s the thing – people on the opposite side of the aisle aren’t sheep. Independents like myself deserted the Left when they started going control-freak nuts.
Let’s just make sure that we understand what the author really means by “liberals and scientists”. The inference is that liberalism is scientific. What a pathetic joke that is. Then the use of “denialist” is just an acceptable way to call those not approved of “ni99er”. The author relies completely on bigotry, dehumanization, and assumes superiority no less than some southern cracker racist in exploring why we uppity skeptics just won’t cooperate and go along with the obvious superiority of “liberals and scientists”. What a pathetic corrupt article.
My new year wish is that climate evangelists lead by example and return to their “Eden-like” world.
They can start by stopping using any carbon-based fuels for transport or electricity or communications or health care, and go live in the country producing their own food while protecting the environment at all times. And the rest of us can get on enjoying our own lives without being constantly harangued by idiotic idealogues.
Well.. the only way they are going to make me a confirmed avid believer in global warming is caused exclusively and only by the burning of fossil fuels is by actually proving it – not just producing models which have rather studiously avoided reality for a few decades now!
However, I no longer identify with conservatives or liberals so appealing to the ‘political’ side of me won’t work either. I’m a realist, and neither political point of view seems to reside much in reality anymore.
Dear Mr. Baldwin (fellow of psychology),
Your climates on earth change during every second of time, all the time, since it began.
When did any of those climates stop changing ?
I deny that climates do not change and everyone is unable to disagree with that statement.
Your problem seems to be … well … YOU.
If you need to understand how it works, you have only to ask and you shall have the answer.
How can conservative elites be persuaded to think and communicate differently about climate change? That’s a subject for another post, but here’s a spoiler: The answer won’t be found in clever arguments or skillful persuasion, but in money, power, and material interests.
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So how does that any good to army veterans.
How does this any good to police officers without ‘Occupational disability insurance’.
Where are the police unions that work on the countries abilities.
Huh
“Only conservative elites can change conservative climate beliefs”
These people have bought into the notion that conservatives are mindless sheep led by Rush Limbaugh. In reality, conservatives saw the one-sided bias in the mainstream media. Wikileaks, which exposed egregious acts of collusion between the MSM and DNC such as the NYT consulting the Hillary campaign on which stories to run about her and CNN asking the Hillary campaign which questions to ask Donald Trump in the debate between him and Hillary Clinton, only validates the slanted reporting that conservatives has known about for decades. Liberals can’t seem to grasp that their media outlets drove conservatives to alternative media. The “conservative elites” are not pied pipers mesmerizing conservatives into following them.