Do government "elites" make our decisions?
by David Atkins
While the climate crisis keeps getting worse, at least public opinion is starting to move in the right direction:
After several years of finding that fewer and fewer Americans believed in man-made climate change, pollsters are now finding that belief is on the uptick.
The newest study from the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which is a biannual survey taken since fall 2008 and organized by the Brookings Institute, shows that 62% of Americans now believe that man-made climate change is occurring, and 26% do not. The others are unsure.
That is a significant rise in believers since a low in spring 2010, when only about 50% of Americans said they believed in global warming, but still down from when the survey first began, when it was at around 75%. The pollsters talked to 887 people across the country.
What’s caused the sudden rise? Mostly the weather.
“People, for good or for bad, are making connections in what they see in terms of weather and what they believe in terms of climate change,” said Christopher Borick, co-author of the survey. He is an associate professor of Political Science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Pennsylvania. His co-author is Barry Rabe, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a professor at the University of Michigan.
The news is a week old, but it's significant. There hasn't been a major, dedicated push of the Inconvenient Truth mold to shape public opinion. It's mostly just changing weather patterns influencing people's opinions. A few cold snaps, and it will likely change back again.
Scientific studies and actual data, meanwhile, don't seem to matter to very many people. It was more about their local weather phenomena:
This shows how fickle public opinion can be. For instance, when people who say they believe in climate change were asked if the idea of “drought” affected their decision, their answer depended on their own experience. If they lived in places like Texas, Oklahoma and the South, they were about 15 to 17 points more likely to say drought affected their beliefs than other believers in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.
The danger, of course, is that neither individual weather events nor even an entire season of strange weather are any indication of long-term trends. Those who believe that the planet is warming did say that factors beyond weather, such as polar bear decline, did affect their decisions. In general, however, scientific studies weren't high on the list of influences among people polled.
“People specifically pointing to scientific studies only make up about 1 in 10 of the population,” said Borick. “That doesn’t meant that science doesn’t weigh in, but it tends to be down the list of factors. And significantly behind things like observations of warmer temperatures in their home areas.”
As anyone halfway versed in the problem of climate change knows, we're already past the point of no return on runaway greenhouse gases. If the world waits to act until everyone in every locale realizes there's enough of a problem to ask their government to do something, it will already have been way too late. It will be game over for billions of people, and likely for civilization itself as we know it.
If federal decision-making reverts to states as the Republicans would so dearly like, then states that happen to have droughts will start to decide that maybe they might want to to take climate change more seriously, while states with big cold snaps might do the opposite. And then, of course, there's the effect of paid climate deniers, who have greater degrees of ideological control over the conservative base (which happens to coincide with drought-stricken areas, dampening enthusiasm for tackling climate change.)
And this is why we have a representative democracy. This is why we hire educated individuals to spend their lives in the creation of public policy. Because it shouldn't be up to the average person to ask themselves "is it hot today?" and then use that criterion to make public policy. The best science should inform the decisions of wise policy makers, who are then prepared to make those decisions to look out for the longer term health of the public.
Of course, there's a problem with that idea, and it's obvious in economics. Even science is subject to corrupting influences and academic fads, as has become evident in economics. Austrian and Friedmanist economics are pseudoscience based on utopian anti-inflationary theory and a demonstrably false rational actor model. Yet they've taken the world by storm, leading to the upper tier of educated elites demanding austerity all across the globe.
Incidentally, when it comes to enforcing austerity measures, negative polling doesn't seem to matter much to policy makers, who insist that they must look to economic long-term health to reduce deficits, even at the expense of short-term pain. This, even though the "science" on reducing deficits is bunk.
And yet, make the same argument about climate change and politicians quiver in fear.
So in the end, it's not really about whether educated government elites make these decisions or not. Austerity policies benefit the ultra-wealthy. Anti-climate change policies don't--at least, not right now. A rational person might point out that that, and nothing else, is the only real basis for how decisions get made.
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