One of the most divisive and bitterly fought over issues that Americans face today is the issue of climate change. As we look back through the last decade, we can see just how partisan this issue has become: President Obama committing the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016 only to have President Trump withdraw from the very same agreement in 2017 (making the U.S. one of only three member states of the United Nations not to be involved in the treaty, along with Syria and Nicaragua). This can also be seen in the Trump administration’s rollbacks of established environmental regulations, ranging from Obama-era strict carbon dioxide emissions standards for coal burning power plants (December 2018), to clearing U.S. federally controlled waters in the Arctic for offshore oil drilling (October 2018), and more recently, a dose of now frequent verbal attacks on water saving standards in new appliances (especially toilets) from the current president himself.
But why has this seemingly scientific issue of climate change bled into the realm of politics? It may be the same reason that many issues which seem far from political become flashpoints in political discourse: acknowledgement of the issue would demand a fundamental change in behavior. If one acknowledges that humans, through the burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, are contributing to (if not downright causing) the average global temperature to rise—exacerbating issues such as wildfires, rising sea levels and extreme weather events—one would presumably modify one’s behavior in order to lessen their impact on these events. (Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat by absorbing infrared radiation from the sun and storing it.) Here lies the problem: coal and oil have been creating jobs and creating millionaires since the Industrial Revolution, when coal was first burned to power steam operated machinery. When something has the potential to allow you to make a living or even to become wealthy, it is very hard to turn your back on it and no longer support it, because your change in behavior, caused by your acknowledgment, damages yourself in some way.
President Trump ran on a platform appealing to many blue-collar workers in the so-called Rust Belt, promising to return to coal and recreate the jobs that had been lost in that industry. This message may have been responsible for his winning in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan in the presidential election in 2016. If candidate Trump had acknowledged that the burning of fossil fuels and the subsequent release of carbon dioxide contributed to rising global temperatures, and vowed to regulate emissions and coal burning, he very well may have never even secured the Republican party nomination, costing him the presidency.
On the same line, national and even local representatives running in districts historically supporting the coal industry have a smaller chance of getting elected if they recognize that the burning of coal and the release of carbon dioxide have a direct link to rising global temperatures. This is simply because their rhetoric goes against an important (albeit harmful) pillar of the local economy. Voting for or electing that anti-coal candidate would go against that district’s own self-interest, and if there’s one thing that human nature tells us, it is to protect our self interest above all else, perhaps at the expense of others—or even our environment.
Climate change is difficult to talk about. It can cause arguments, fracture relationships and cause deep divides to form between people and political affiliations. While I respect those who disagree that the burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide causes changes to local climates and the global environment, I also invite them to think about why they believe this, and to research the many thousands of scientific articles, papers, and journals dedicated to this subject.