Republicans Rally Around Climate Change, Not Trump, in Election Year
By: David Montalvo
Tags: Climate Change, Environment, Donald Trump, Culture, Politics

Republicans Rally Around Climate Change, Not Trump, in Election Year

The Venn diagram circles of conservatism and climate just overlapped a little further this month, ahead of early voting.

Political cartoon on Donald Trump tweeting, on numerous occasions, that the U.S. needs ‘good old global warming,’ by Brian Adcock | Political Cartoon

Sometime in early March, before the pandemic locked down most of America, Arnold Schwarzenegger was making his way to Ohio to meet with John Kasich. Both had a few things in common: they each once governed some of the most productive states in the nation, and they were both Republicans. But the meeting, which took place just ten days after Donald Trump referred to the coronavirus as a “new hoax” made up by Democrats, would not be to talk about how to make America great again for another four years, but rather, perhaps unexpectedly, about how to make America better on the issue of the climate crisis. A bearded Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California who found himself sharing a stage with the former governor of Ohio, energetically told a room full of attendees at Otterbein University that the environment “isn’t something to fight over. This is something to fight for — for a clean environment and a green-energy future.” Kasich, hands clasped and with a more moderated tone than his California counterpart, signaled his support by pressing to the audience that “it’s all about us doing what we can to make a difference on this issue.”

Six months after that meeting, a southern Republican and formerly elected official would write an open letter to conservatives. “Dear Fellow Conservatives,” began the letter, published Tuesday by Bob Inglis, a former congressman from South Carolina, “You are the most important people in the world when it comes to solving climate change.”

Indeed, in a year already shaped by the extraordinarily unexpected, the Venn diagram circles of conservative politics and climate action just overlapped a little further this month, when early voting is set to begin in some states.

Inglis may have partly been buttering up his audience, but he’s not entirely off the mark. Bipartisan effort is necessary to combat climate change, believes John Kerry, a Democrat who served as secretary of state in the Obama administration and once aspired for the presidency himself. In fact, Kerry was the mastermind behind the climate meeting between Schwarzenegger and Kasich, which was presented as a townhall event under Kerry’s new organization called World War Zero. The organization, Kerry has said, is aimed at bringing together “unlikely allies” across the aisle who believe that climate change is real.

That would rule out Trump, who last year pulled out of the Paris Agreement on global climate action that Kerry helped to negotiate on behalf of Americans under the Obama administration. It’s a move not lost on Kerry. “It is clear to everyone of commonsense that the only way to solve this problem, ultimately, is globally,” he said in a paneled interview last month on climate. “And yet the United States of America is doing the exact opposite — insulting leaders, praising demagogues who are on the opposite side of the issue, and worse, pulling out of the W.H.O. and pulling out of the Paris agreement,” he added, warning that “we’re at a very, very dangerous, critical moment for our nation.”

While Kerry was unequivocally condemning Trump, his fellow panelist, Rafael Reif, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was unequivocally condemning the divisive state of politics. “Some issues are not political, and I think climate change is one of them,” he said, while recognizing that “unfortunately” the climate crisis has already been politicized.

And research shows that it has only gotten worse under Trump.

A nationwide poll last year found partisan polarization on the environment has grown under the current president. “Support for efforts to protect environmental quality, once viewed as a ‘uniting issue’ when such efforts became prominent in the 1970s, is now characterized by strong divisions along party lines,” according to Gallup, which found that the once “modest variation” in partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans has “become enormous under the Trump administration” — which is led by a man who, long before he entered office, had an equally long history of calling climate change “bullshit” and a “hoax,” and of maliciously ridiculing scientists, in tweet after tweet.

In his open letter, Ingris seemed to be combating some of this deep politicization of climate change among conservatives in a couple of ways. First, he reframed the issue as one that actually aligns with conservative values, writing that “we should be the first to come forward with free enterprise solutions to climate change. To do otherwise is to admit that we don’t really believe in the ingenuity of free people.” He, then, presented possible conservative solutions to the problem. “Conservatives aren’t so big” on regulations, he wrote, but they can be on incentives, and they definitely are on accountability.

“We need to get climate action right before big government gets it wrong,” Ingris urged his readers, before trying one last time to depoliticize the issue: “The good news is the Left tends to support market-oriented solutions.”

Although a conservative from the South, Ingris is not new to climate action. In 2012, he launched RepublicEn, an organization that describes itself as “a community of advancing free-enterprise solutions to climate change.” In July, a spokesperson for the organization, Jacob Abel, wrote a letter to the editors at the Charlotte Observer, applauding both Republican senators of North Carolina, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr, as well as other senators in the same party, for sending “a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urging him to consider investment to bolster the clean energy economy and innovation.”

About a month later, Ingris would publish his open letter to conservatives on Kerry’s new climate organization website.

Today, World War Zero counts a range of Republicans as partners, including Meg Whitman, who once ran Hewlett Packard Enterprise and is now the chief executive at Quibi, John McKernan, a former governor of Maine, Hank Paulson, the former treasury secretary, and Cindy McCain, widow of the one-time Republican presidential nominee John McCain. (Whitman, McCain and Kasich all appeared at the Democratic National Convention last month, decidedly not in support of their party’s nominee and sitting president.)

But it took some time for Kerry, who has long been working on climate issues, to reach this new stage — that is, to figure out the right way to get people to understand the gravity and immediacy of his work. “I will assume some blame,” he admitted in the interview, “for not having thought carefully enough in the very beginning about that message.” In those earlier days, he said, “there was a lot of talk about ice, and ice melting,” and “polar bears moving.” But what it lacked was “relating it somehow to people’s lives.”

Which is why, perhaps, the most telling thing about the RepublicEn’s letter to the Observer’s editors is not the action taken by Republicans, but rather, by that of the author. Abel, the spokesperson, as it happens, is an undergraduate student and, notably, “a young Republican from Concord who cares deeply about climate change, as well as U.S. energy independence.”

Indeed, research shows that millennials of all walks of life are worried about the environment. A separate Gallup study last year found that among this age group, which is worth $1 trillion in consumer spending, seventy-three percent say they would spend more on sustainable products. In fact, the study further noted, “millennials’ concerns about global warming is at a high point.”

This potentially means a renewed opportunity for Kerry, Ignis, and others working on climate mitigation and adaptation efforts to get the messaging right this time. “Bottomline is,” said Kerry, “we have to open up that new conversation, and it centers around jobs and the economy.”

Schwarzenegger succinctly put it another way. “We all drink the same water.”