What Environmentalists Don’t Understand About Climate Apathy
By: Jonah Woolley
Tags: Politics, Climate Change, Environmentalism, Environment

In recent years, climate change has been getting a lot more attention from politicians, the media and the public as a whole. Polls have found increasing numbers of voters agreeing that climate change is urgent, there have been hundreds of “climate strikes” across the globe demanding action to combat environmental pollution, and many proposals have been introduced in Congress to address it, including the Green New Deal.

In that, however, there are also bad signs for the environment. Companies are still contributing to climate change through things like new shell cracker plants, many people still don’t consider climate change to be a priority, and one of the US’s major political parties doesn’t even accept that climate change is real.

The response of environmentalists to these people has been suboptimal. They’ve accused companies of deliberately covering up climate change so they could pocket more money at the expense of the planet, and they’ve called people who don’t work to stop climate change ignorant or in denial.

For people who are incredibly alarmed about climate change, this feels justified. The evidence is so clear to them, and in their minds, anyone who isn’t working just as hard as them to stop climate change must be malicious or completely oblivious.

However, this thinking is highly flawed. Environmentalists thinking this way about companies and climate skeptics is the same thing as companies and skeptics thinking that environmentalists want to destroy the economy and stifle innovation, as many of the policies they advocate for would have those side effects.

From both sides, this is the result of misunderstanding. Environmentalists don’t want to crash the economy, they simply want to improve the environment and address the problem of climate change. In the same token, non-environmentalists don’t want to cook the planet and aren’t ignorant, they just have bigger priorities than the environment.

To illustrate this, in the book Break Through, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger discussed the creation of the environmental movement in the 1960’s. According to environmentalists, the environmental movement was born because there were many environmental disasters and discoveries that opened people’s eyes to the reality of how we were harming the planet. As a result, they began pushing for action to protect the environment, and from that came laws like the Clean Air Act.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger, however, argue that the conventional narrative around the foundation of environmentalism is wrong. People didn’t suddenly begin caring about the environment in the 1960’s because they had a collective epiphany, they began caring about the environment because their social and economic statuses improved.

They had a term to describe this, postmaterialism, which is when people have satisfied their material needs and can then move on to other issues that don’t concern their survival specifically.

Before the 1960’s, most people just had to worry about themselves. They had to worry about securing their own rights, getting a good job to put a roof over their head and food on the table, and in that, they didn’t have time to care about how the rivers were being poisoned or how the air was unhealthy. They just had to survive.

However, that began to improve. Eventually, the majority of Americans got to the point where their quality of life was ensured, and they could worry about post-material needs, such as how the environment was being harmed. And thus came environmentalism, and action by the US government to clean up the environment.

Just like air and water pollution in the 20th century, history is repeating itself with climate change. People aren’t ignoring the problem because they don’t care or want to harm the planet, they’re ignoring it because they have bigger issues to worry about.

Climate change is a vague threat, at least to Americans. Sure, we’re hearing about melting sea ice, hotter global temperatures, more intense storms, and thousands of animal species going extinct, but all of those problems feel abstract and separate from us. We can’t actually see climate change happening to us, it isn’t an immediate threat, and therefore, it can be ignored for now.

While climate change will certainly be bad for us in 30 or 40 years, it isn’t causing direct harm right now. But you know what is? The flawed criminal justice system, soaring healthcare costs, racial and gender discrimination, income inequality, unaffordable college prices that lead to student debt, and our overwhelmed immigration system, just to name a few.

We recognize that climate change is a problem, but is just isn’t the ultimate problem. Right now, those other issues are more concerning to us, more immediately relevant to our lives. Average people won’t care if we instate carbon pricing or switch to clean energy if they go broke paying for their child’s surgery or can’t find a job solely because of the color of their skin.

Therefore, the only way we can spur action on climate change is if we make it the biggest concern, which already seems to be happening.

Environmentalism is quickly rising to prominence on the international stage, and while previously climate change was near the bottom of voter priority lists, it has quickly risen and is near the top, especially for Democrats.

Continued work by environmentalists is helping to raise awareness and make it so people recognize the problem and are able to see that even if we aren’t immediately being affected, it’s still something we need to address.

There have been some modest actions by certain countries and some US states, and rates of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been significantly decreased from where they could be.

However, we also have to consider the possibility that climate change may have to get worse before enough people choose to act on it in a substantial way. There are still millions of people who, because they can’t see climate change happening to them, deny it is happening at all, and millions more who don’t see it as a large enough problem to do something about it.

Because we have a flawed government and a divisive political climate, it’s far more likely we’ll have to wait until we can see visible signs of climate change that we’ll be able to do something about it, because then it will become the biggest issue for Americans.

Unfortunately, that means signing up for catastrophic consequences from climate change first. Researchers have projected that, even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, there will still be many negative effects due to our emissions. This is because greenhouse gasses don’t go away immediately, and the gasses already out there have begun feedback loops that will perpetuate the release of more greenhouse gasses and more climate change for decades to come.

With every bit of visible climate effects we see, there’s a lot of climate change we’re signing up for in the future with our emissions. This means that even when we get to the point where things are bad enough to act and we put a cap on carbon emissions, things will continue to get worse for a long time afterward.