How to Tap Latent Conservative Support for Climate-Change Policy

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/republicans-framing-climate-change/360911/

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Both last month's Senate Climate Talkathon and Tom Steyer’s $100 million dollar pledge to back environment-friendly candidates indicate the same thing: Democrats are getting serious about global warming again. But even when Democrats have managed to close ranks behind previous legislative efforts like Waxman-Markey, Republicans have stymied them. Can the left forge a coalition to tackle the problem?

The environment was once a bipartisan issue. The 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1972 Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act were all passed with bipartisan support, as was legislation strengthening those acts in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the environment has become increasingly divisive. Data from the Pew Research Center show that the decrease in support for environmental protection is not only very recent but also one-sided:



Despite that decline, Republican support for environmental causes is stronger than it might appear. Two Ph.D. students at the University of California Santa Barbara, Phillip Ehret and Aaron Sparks, found that a quarter of individuals self-identifying as “very conservative” or “conservative” support environmental regulations, even if they risk harming the economy. A Yale Study finds that 85 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans favor “regulating CO2 as a pollutant" and majorities from both parties favor investing in renewable energy. If Republican voters are concerned about the environment, haven’t we seen an action?

One explanation is that the framing of environmental issues is often anathema to conservatives. Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer’s important paper on the subject, “The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes,” finds that liberals view environmental issues as moral concerns informed by a harm principle, while conservatives view environmental issues through the lens of purity, and particularly for religious people, stewardship.

[MisterP]

1. that red line's sharp drop is definitely dangerous, and speaks to the corpos' sheer power

but it also shows how shallow the change is, no matter how broad: we could say "see how high it was under Reagan?"

interestingly whenever someone proposes HSR (even Bachmann and ) half the GOPers' responses are Angry White Males thundering that "Sedgwick County, Colorado is NOT gonna pay for her soft urbanite lark!" or anarcho-capitalists saying that this is French and they're twice as regulated and taxed as Freedomland and/or that America can't do it because we're twice as taxed and regulated as France

but the other half are all "why don't we have this yet? who's blocking it?" (because of course they wouldn't know)