Actually, Republicans Do Believe in Climate Change
Sherrill Rinehart
I found this in yesterday’s NYT and couldn’t pass up sharing it with all of you who are interested in bipartisan action on climate change.
I welcome responses to my private email. Please do not email the google group. Thank you.
Sherrill Rinehart
SUNDAY REVIEW
GRAY MATTER
Actually, Republicans Do
Believe in Climate Change
By Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman
Dr. Van Boven and Dr. Sherman are social psychologists.
July 28, 2018
It is widely believed that most Republicans are skeptical about human-caused
climate change. But is this belief crrect?
In 2014 and 2016, we conducted two national surveys of more than 2,000 respondents
on the issue of climate change. We found that most Republicans agreed that climate
change is happening, threatens humans and is caused by human activity — and that
reducing carbon emissions would mitigate the problem.
To be sure, Democrats agreed more strongly than Republicans did that climate
change is a concerning reality. And among climate skeptics there were more
Republicans than Democrats. Nevertheless, most Republicans were in basic
agreement with most Democrats and independents on this issue.
This raises a question: If Democrats and Republicans agree about climate change,
why do they disagree about climate policy?
As we and our colleague Phillip Ehret argue this month in the journal Perspectives
on Psychological Science, our research suggests the problem is not so much that
Republicans are skeptical about climate change, but that Republicans are skeptical of
Democrats — and that Democrats are skeptical of Republicans. This tribalism leads
to political fights over differences between the parties that either do not exist or are
vastly exaggerated.
Republican opposition to climate policy has occurred, in part, because climate policy
has been a Democratic issue. As part of our research, we interviewed several retired
members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, who stressed this point.
Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, spoke of his
opposition in his first several years in Congress: “All I knew was that Al Gore was for
it, and therefore I was against it.”
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This implies that if the tables were turned — if Republican politicians proposed a
climate policy — Republican voters might support it. In our research, that is exactly
what we have found.
In one study, we asked Democrats, Republicans and independents to consider one of
two carbon-pricing policies: a national cap-and-trade program and a national
revenue-neutral carbon tax. But we varied the information we gave about political
support for the policies, sometimes saying that a policy was backed by Democratic
members of Congress, and sometimes saying that it was backed by Republican
members.
In a similar study, we asked Democrats, Republicans and independents in
Washington State to consider a carbon tax that was on the ballot in their state in
2016. There, we mentioned either liberal Democrats (like the Green Party of Seattle)
or conservative Republicans (like the former secretary of state George Shultz) who
in fact supported the initiative.
We found, in both studies, that our participants toed the party line. Republicans
supported climate policies that they understood to be backed by Republicans and
were neutral toward policies backed by Democrats. Democrats supported policies
that they understood to be backed by Democrats more than they supported policies
backed by Republicans.
Why is it so important to people whether climate policies are proposed by their own
party or the opposing one? An interesting suggestion from our research is that
Democrats and Republicans are swayed by partisanship because they think their
fellow Democrats or fellow Republicans are even more swayed by partisanship —
and they don’t want to break ranks.
We discovered this when we asked people to estimate how their fellow citizens would
respond to the policies. People overestimated how much Democrats and Republicans
opposed policies backed by the other side. Furthermore, these exaggerated
estimates turned out to strongly predict their own support for a policy.
This finding did not come as a total surprise. Among social psychology’s
fundamental lessons is that people are profoundly affected by what other people
think. In their desire to be upstanding members of their political tribe, people are
pulled toward embracing the stances of their peers and loath to publicly disagree
with them.
As a result, the actual degree of political polarization on climate change belief and
support for climate policy is considerably less than people think it is. Environmental
activists often seek to increase support for climate policy by convincing skeptics
about the reality and urgency of climate change. But our studies suggest that climate
policy gridlock is largely about exaggerating disagreement for the sake of
disagreement.
Fortunately, there is some cause for optimism. Our studies revealed a consistent, if
somewhat surprising, pattern: Political disagreement was substantially smaller
when it came to Republican-backed policies.
In particular, there was very little distance between Republicans and Democrats
when evaluating a Republican-proposed carbon tax. This suggests that a carbon tax
such as the one proposed by prominent Republicans including James Baker III and
Mr. Shultz may hold more promise for bipartisan agreement than we have seen with
Democratic policies in the past.
Leaf Van Boven is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
David Sherman is a professor of psychology and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa
Barbara.
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A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2018, on Page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: Polarizing Climate Policy