We don’t always see eye to eye, do we Newt?
But we do agree our country must take action to address climate change.
This is an ad from 2008.
Yeah, it raises a lot of questions. Why is that couch outside?
Isn’t it a little wet for outdoor furniture?
And Republicans and Democrats wanting to work together on climate change?
Fast forward to 2011:
That was a striking ad for me, a striking ad for I think a lot of Republicans.
First of all, that’s probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.
So you’ve just got to kind of relax and go: that was dumb.
Were you being held hostage?
Democrats and Republicans have spent the last two decades
moving in opposite directions on climate change.
But if you go back in time, the environment wasn’t always so partisan.
I mean, it was the Nixon administration that formed the EPA!
As recently as 2008, John McCain and Barack Obama campaigned for president
in part on who had the better cap and trade plan.
Today, stuff like that seems hard to even imagine.
So, what happened?
Since we’re talking about decades of social and political and economic history,
there’s not one simple explanation.
Instead, we did some digging, talked to some experts,
and compiled a few theories.
What if the problem with climate change is not about climate change
but what addressing climate change might mean?
In 2014, researchers at Duke University ran an experiment:
They had a group of Democrats and a group of Republicans
read one of two speeches about climate change.
The first suggested using government intervention to tackle warming.
The second pushed for relying on innovation.
Then, the researchers asked participants whether they agreed with mainstream climate science.
So here’s the group that read about government regulations:
And here’s the group that read about the clean energy economy:
Belief in climate change nearly doubled when people were told there was a market-based solution
So it’s less about whether climate change is real.
It’s more about the fact that when they associate climate change with something,
they associate it with big government, spending.
And those are anti-conservative values.
Another group of researchers rounded up roughly200 studies and polls about climate change denial.
They found political parties and ideologies to be some of the strongest predictors of climate change beliefs.
So it’s not necessarily that they don’t know the science.
It’s that they think addressing the science means big government.
They really do understand something that a lot of Liberals don’t understand,
which is if the science really is true, then the things that would be required
to lower emissions in line with science
really represent the end of their worldview.
In case 08-205, Citizens United versus the FEC.
In 2010, the Supreme Court struck down some key parts of the country’s campaign finance laws.
This meant corporations and unions could now run their own ads about political candidates.
With the Citizens United decision, which allowed for unlimited amounts of money in politics,
for those people that have influence, that capacity skyrocketed.
Look at this graph of political spending from the energy sector.
There's this big jump after the Citizens United decision.
When suddenly, there’s just unlimited unregulated dark money shaping our politics,
particularly on the Republican side, you saw a much more rightward shift in environmental policy.
That is not a coincidence.
Add to it, Republicans just hadn’t seen climate change as a winning issue.
Republicans lost in 2008 and 2012.
Those two candidates, even though maybe the majority of their party
didn’t believe in climate change, they did.
I believe that climate change is real. It’s not just a greenhouse gas issue, it’sa national security issue.
Because those types of moderate Republicans lost, a lot of the Republican base was like,
"we don’t want somebody who’s a moderate, they’re not going to win, they’re just wishy washy."
At the same time, Republicans saw less of a path to victory with the environmental community.
Green groups have mostly supported Democrats,
and climate change was kind of the thing of
known Democrat Al Gore.
The point is: Republicans have found other ways to win elections.
And breaking rank on pretty much any issue is harder than ever.
Unless politicians see climate change as win-or-lose,
like taxes or immigration, they’re probably not going to go out on a limb for it.
It’s going to take a demonstration that people win and lose elections on this issue to matter.
Like, politicians are very responsive when they think their ability to win an election is at stake.
There is a sense that young people could shake things up.
We care about it already, and we know why it's important already.
As young conservatives, it is already one of our top issues
and so we have to leverage those voices.
Several studies suggest that the younger you are, the more likely you are to accept climate science.
Even across party lines.
And as they make up more and more of the electorate, maybe politicians will start to listen.
In the 1970s, they passed some of the most sweeping environmental legislation
we have ever seen as a nation, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts,
under Nixon!
Not because he woke up that day and decided to do it,
but because there were 20 million people in the streets.
Now can these three theories explain the last few decades of climate politics?
No! They can't! I told you that wasn’t the point!
The bottom line is: things moved from here to there.
Sentiments have changed,
and that means maybe they can change again.