Climate action: How values – and disasters – influence progress

In recent years, environmentalists in the United States saw legislative efforts geared toward curbing climate change’s worst impacts as a Sisyphean task. They would lobby lawmakers to push for substantive action, legislation would be introduced, debate would follow, and then the partisan divide would send the boulder rolling back down the hill, where the effort would start anew.

That changed on Tuesday, with President Joe Biden’s signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. The sweeping bill represents the nation’s largest climate adaptation investment to date, including provisions for emissions reduction and clean energy investment.

Andrew Hoffman, the Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, is the author of numerous books, including 2015’s “How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate.” Dr. Hoffman spoke recently with the Monitor about how U.S. political and cultural values have shaped – and continue to shape – conversations about climate action. The exchange has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Culturally, what has held us back from reacting proactively to climate change? 

You can’t see CO2. You can’t feel global mean temperature going up. The science is complicated. It took a while for people to recognize the connection between CO2 and shifting weather patterns. The idea of taking proactive action on a problem that is far less visceral, less visible, has been a common problem on environmental issues for a long time. 

I remember Bill O’Reilly, when he was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under [President] George H.W. Bush. He said, “Where are we spending our money on environmental issues, and where should we spend it?” We’re spending it on very visible problems, like abandoned hazardous waste sites, when we should be spending on invisible problems, like radon and ground-level ozone. Climate change fits into that very hard to see kind of problem. The solutions are so enormous, with greater economic impact, that we wouldn’t see the benefits right now. It’d be for future generations. That idea of caring about future generations becomes a major cultural block. 

Foresight isn’t humankind’s forte, per se, but we’re not hopeless in terms of gauging the future. In this case, why do you think it’s so difficult in terms of adapting to a changing climate?

That’s true in so many issues. We deal with them when we have a visceral crisis. We didn’t get into World War II until we were bombed at Pearl Harbor. It takes a while for the public and politicians to move on something. They need a visceral prod to get them to do it. 

There [are also] plenty of ways for people to ignore climate change, even when they come to accept it, by saying, “It’s going to happen to somebody else, someplace else in the future. Not my problem.” It really became an issue in this country when it started to happen to us, now – the wildfires in the West, the drought in the Southwest, food scarcity. I think COVID has fed into it and made people realize how vulnerable our systems are. So, we are facing those crises, and now, people are waking up [to realize] that we need to do something about it.

The Inflation Reduction Act is one example of that progress. What about our contemporary cultural moment do you think allowed for us to take that step?

It wasn’t easy, and certainly we still have the partisan divide. If there were 49 Democrats [in the Senate], this wouldn’t have happened. There were 50, with [Vice President] Kamala Harris breaking the tie. Also, the Democrats finally got a little smart about this and took away some of the third-rail issues that got tied in with it. [Legislators also] didn’t allow the perfect to become the enemy of good. Politics is the art of the possible. Accepting good rather than perfect is a good step.

So, was it more card-playing luck than a reflection of our cultural moment?

No. I think people are ready for action on climate change. If you look at public opinion polls, the number of people who believe climate change is happening is going up steadily. Conservative Republicans less so, but among moderate Republicans, the numbers are going up. If you ask people why they’re changing their position, it’s because of the weird weather. I think that among the general public, there is a growing awareness and concern over climate change.

Given that, can we say we’ve begun to bridge climate action’s cultural divide?

Yes. But one of the problems with climate change is when you tell people you have a problem but give them no way to do anything about it – it’s demobilizing. People are now seeing ways to do something about it, and that’s getting them behind it. Whether it will be enough, that’s a different question.

I’d like to expand on that question. Would you deem the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage as an example of bridging the cultural divide, or is it more so the result of climate change’s symptoms – droughts, wildfires, flooding, etc. – hitting closer to home for many? 

We’ll see, because even the investments that are in the legislation are not going to have a visible impact on global emissions. For American emissions, it will take some time. People have short attention spans. They want instant results. Let’s see how it plays out.

How do we keep the public focused?

The wildfires, the droughts, the floods – these are visceral events that keep it on people’s minds in the same way that mass shootings still stun us. People think we’re getting numb to it, but we aren’t. It’s still front-page news. It keeps guns on the agenda. 

The effects of climate change will continue to take place, especially if they have costs associated with them. That’s the kicker – if you want to make something salient, put a dollar sign on it and that will keep people’s attention.

Why is value framing – cooperation, perseverance – important to climate action?

If you look at the partisan divide over climate change, for those on the right, they see efforts to address climate change as a restriction on economic growth and an opportunity for government to control the economy, to control our lives, and restrict our freedom. If you look at it from the left, it’s the need for government to come in to control businesses running amok.

It comes down to other values that climate change either affirms or challenges. That affects how people choose to accept or reject the idea of climate change. 

[But] the evidence is becoming harder to ignore. That’s why the public opinion polls are going up. Then it comes down to solutions. Again, that’s when values start to play in. Should we invest in nuclear power? There’s a partisan split, again. Should we be removing subsidies for fossil fuel companies? These are all now new value-based solutions, where before they were driving recognition of the problem.

Are we heading in a direction in which our values are more closely aligned?

That’s hard to gauge. If you want to go to a 3,000-foot level, think about some of the values that must shift to come to a full recognition of climate change. 

In many ways, climate change is not an environmental problem. Climate change is a systems breakdown. It’s the climate system. Importantly, we are now a part of [that system] in a way we’ve never been before. Human beings now can alter the global climate. That is an enormous shift in how we view the environment, how we view ourselves, and how we view the two being connected. It’s similar to the shift that we experienced around the scientific revolution. 

Before the Enlightenment, before the scientific revolution, nature dominated us, and we didn’t understand it. We tried to make sense out of it using religion, saying it’s run by mystical forces. Then the Enlightenment comes along, scientific revolution comes along, and we treat it like a machine that we can tamper with. 

Now, we’re starting to recognize that that didn’t quite work either. We’ve come to a kind of recognition that the success – and survival – of the human species and the natural environment are commingled. Now, we must think about our behavior in that sense.