Consumer demand brings organics to the masses, another sign that public concern about environmental issues is increasing. Photo © George Filgate
Boats lie stranded in an empty, dry lake. A rising sea swallows south Florida. No snows top Mount Kilimanjaro. These images flash across the screen in the movie An Inconvenient Truth as former Vice President Al Gore tells audiences that ten of the hottest years on record were in the past fourteen years.
“And the hottest of all was 2005,” he intones.
Gore is evangelical about global climate change, warning in his movie and book by the same title that a warmer Earth is dooming mankind’s future. Many wonder where this strong environmental message was in 2000, when he narrowly lost the presidency to George W. Bush after a campaign in which neither candidate focused on the environment. For the past six years, the Bush administration has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the validity of global warming, even in the face of mounting scientific evidence and warnings penned by some of the country’s most eminent scientists.
But today, climate change has come to the forefront of the news and, polls say, of the minds of the voting public. While the economy, the war in Iraq and other issues may motivate voters more, experts are saying that the issue that has become synonymous with Gore’s name may be making the environment a hotter topic. Global climate change, political observers say, is fueling an environmental concern that may translate into voter action.
A June NBC–Wall Street Journal poll said the number of people who want “immediate action” to address global climate change is growing—from 23 percent in 1999 to 29 percent seven years later. The National Wildlife Federation recently released the results from a survey of hunters and fishermen that shows they are concerned about global warming. Those responding voted two to one for President Bush over Democratic Senator John Kerry in 2004, and about 50 percent classified themselves as evangelical Christians, says Adam Kolton of the federation.
Even so, “about three–quarters believe global warming has impacted or will impact hunting and fishing opportunities in America. Eighty–six percent say the administration or Congress is not doing enough to break our addiction to oil. Sixty–nine percent say the nation is on the wrong track in meeting our energy needs,” he says.
“Americans are seeing changes as a result of human behavior that are impacting our environment, impacting our climate,” Kolton says. “In almost every state, lakes and streams and rivers are contaminated by mercury” from power plant and other emissions, prompting fish consumption advisories, he says. “That’s pollution, but it is [also] a conservation issue…. You can’t eat the fish you catch.”
Political consultant Roy Fletcher works both sides of the political aisle—from Republican Senator John McCain’s last presidential bid to Democrats in his home state of Louisiana. The environment as a concept always ranks high among voters’ interests, but it doesn’t seem to motivate them unless there is a local connection that becomes a key deciding factor in a race, he says. And today, global climate change is becoming a local issue.
For example, he says, residents across the country are drawing connections between global warming and local weather: in the Gulf Coast, there are stronger hurricanes; the Northeast experienced massive flooding in late June; and in the Midwest, droughts have become more common.
“It is easy to make the case [that global warming] impacts the weather right there where you live,” Fletcher says.
Global warming is also powering a sense of environmental pessimism that is driving the public to demand that more be done about the environment, says Jon Krosnick, political science professor at Stanford University.
“Fifty–five percent of Americans said they expect the world’s natural environment to be in worse shape in ten years than it is now, and an additional 5 percent said the environment is in poor shape and will not improve.” That’s 60 percent of Americans who are “environmental pessimists,” Krosnick says.
According to that same survey, conducted by Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, 67 percent of Democrats are pessimistic, versus 48 percent of Republicans. About 94 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans want a great deal or a lot to be done to improve the environment.
Eight in ten respondents said Bush’s policies harmed the environment a little or more during the past year. “Even a majority of Republicans acknowledge some environmental damage attributable to the president,” Krosnick says.
His surveys have found that, for many issues, a hard–core group helps frame the public debate. For example, at one point in the 1990s, surveys identified 31 percent of the public focused on abortion, making it a major political issue, he says. Today, he sees those concerned about global warming growing into another such group. His survey shows 17 percent of voters believe global warming is an important action issue. “It is growing,” he says. In 1997, only 8 percent of voters considered the issue important.
Terry Melancon, president of the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, is part of that movement. “You don’t have to tell a duck hunter what happens to breeding waterfowl when the prairie potholes of the upper Midwest start to dry up or when freezing weather comes too late to encourage waterfowl to their wintering grounds,” he says. He wants to see the issue addressed through the nation’s energy policy.
The Pew Charitable Trusts also found increasing voter anxiety over the state of the environment: 59 percent listed “protecting the environment” as a top priority, up from 49 percent a year ago and just 39 percent in 2003. The NBC poll said voters think Democrats do a better job of protecting the environment than Republicans, by a 49 to 12 percent margin.
THE GREEN ELEPHANTS
With climate change and a sense of pessimism focusing more attention on the environment, those pushing greener legislation are finding a warmer reception. In addition, issues like energy policy also may affect fall elections.
For example, moderate Republicans joined Democrats to pass some pro–environment amendments this May during votes on the 2007 budgets for the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency. Legislators voted to ban subsidies for new logging roads in the Tongass National Forest; to cut language that could have opened all coastal areas to natural gas drilling (although a new version was coursing through Congress by midsummer); to bar the EPA from narrowing the scope of the Clean Water Act; and to halt an EPA proposal to reduce the frequency with which industries must report their emissions in the annual Toxics Release Inventory.
Some of those Republicans are being empowered by the president’s low job approval ratings, party leadership hobbled by scandals, gasoline prices rising ever higher, and the growing belief that global warming is making the environment worse.
The votes encouraged those in the GOP who have been trying to make their party greener, like Jim DiPeso, policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection.
While the votes are good for the environment, other considerations helped garner the needed support, and that is key for getting more bipartisan coalitions, he says. “For example, on Tongass, it was fiscal responsibility.” Some “deficit hawks” revolted in response to pork–barrel perks for certain party leaders who support opening the Tongass, such as Representative Don Young of Alaska, the chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Young had pushed an expensive “bridge to nowhere” connecting Gravina Island, population less than fifty, to the mainland with a span longer than the Golden Gate Bridge and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge.
Salesmanship can make a difference too, DiPeso says. “If there is a way to frame environmental protection in ways that engage other issues as well, then I think there is a chance to build that bipartisan support that ensures the legislation will have a good chance of passage.”
The word “conservation,” he says, plays better than the word “preservation.” Conservation “implies the land can still be used and the community will benefit from it.” On the other hand, people interpret “preservation” to mean “only the elite can use it.”
The old saying of “think globally, act locally” also played a part in how legislators weighed in.
Regarding the vote on the Toxics Release Inventory, “a lot of local communities were saying, ‘Hey, we depend on that information.’ For example, the local fire departments want to know what the factories and plants are using” so they can better plan community safety, DiPeso says. “There were a lot of local objections and congressmen heard from their communities and acted accordingly.”
Republicans also helped House Democrats block an administration plan to sell off national forest lands to fund the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self–Determination Act. “Hunters and fishermen got involved in this and they talked to their members of Congress and said: ‘We don’t want to sell off our prime hunting and fishing lands to a bunch of condo developers.’ The last thing they want is for prime elk habitat, for example, to be turned into chalets for second–home owners,” DiPeso says.
Representatives of environmental and conservation groups are seeing the same dynamic.
Natural Resources Defense Council lobbyist Karen Wayland says those recent amendment votes showed Republican moderates “are being freer to vote their conscience rather than following the party leadership. Up until a year ago or so, they were walking lockstep with leadership… The president’s low poll numbers have freed up a lot of Republicans.”
Environmental and conservation groups once could count on only thirteen to twenty moderate Republicans for support. But “we won [the House amendments] with an interesting bloc of Republicans,” she says. “On one vote, we got sixty–something Republicans. Some of them probably always wanted to vote that way,” but didn’t want to buck a party leadership that has been seen as anti–environmental, she says.
Martha Marks, president of Republicans for Environmental Protection, and the National Wildlife Federation’s Kolton also see a split opening between rank–and–file Republicans and some of the party’s leadership.
Most party members “are way out in front of official party leaders” who are apparently listening to “a small minority, mostly people involved in some way with extraction industries,” Marks says. “The extreme voices are being heard because often they have a lot more money and they give money, so they are first at the table.”
Kolton says he sees some elected Republican officials listening more to their constituents and not following the party leadership. “It is an election year and you need to line yourself up with the environment.”
But how will all this play out in this election year? Early results have been mixed.
If there is a Darth Vader for conservation groups, he is California Republican Representative Richard Pombo, chairman of the House Committee on Resources. His strident anti–environmental stands even lured former Republican Representative Pete McCloskey out of retirement to challenge Pombo.
One of the founders of Earth Day, McCloskey moved into Pombo’s district to unseat him. The Republican Party needs to return to “a reasonable balance between economic progress and environmental protection,” McCloskey told voters. He also attacked Pombo for his staunch support of party leaders such as former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, who stepped down earlier this year amid an ethics scandal.
But Pombo cruised to a Republican primary win in June. He was so confident of his victory that he was flying back to Washington before the polls closed. Two years ago, Pombo easily beat the same Democratic challenger he will face in November.
While California might not be the bellwether for American politics, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is seeking re–election with a greener platform. He wants to build a “hydrogen highway” to encourage alternative fuels and to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global climate change. “You have to have a vision of a clean California,” he says. “And then go out and build it.”
Fletcher, the political consultant, says environmental issues are typically complicated and therefore give politicians lots of room to operate between the extremes of pro– or anti–environment. “It’s easier to fudge. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, it is easy to say, ‘Well, I did this to help the environment.’” A politician can be pro–wildlife and “vote for something the polluters have amended to hell and back and still say he voted for the environment,” he says. “It is not always a straight up–and–down vote.”
The Resource Defense Council’s Wayland agrees: “I think [Republicans] will talk greener” this election year. “One issue everyone is going to talk about is energy—a clean energy future, alternate fuels, conservation and efficiency. A lot more people are talking about ethanol. Between now and November, there will be a lot of talk.”
The Republican Party has a long history of conservation and gave birth to most environmental regulations, Marks says, and she is hoping the shift she sees is a return to those values.
Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve great American places are widely known, she says. But the conservation tradition in the Republican Party goes back further, to the very first GOP president—Abraham Lincoln, who protected Yosemite National Park. “Few people know it was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who first gave federal protection to the land now known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” she says, or that Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Republicans founded conservation and supported it for most of its history,” she says. “Somehow or another they seem to have turned their back on it…. A lot of Republicans say the Democrats stole the environment or conservation as an issue. The Democrats didn’t steal it—the Republicans gave it away.”
Fletcher says the GOP could make a stronger connection with voters through that legacy. Bush recently won praise from environmental groups for setting aside a new marine preserve in Hawaii. “They are seeing it as an issue people are starting to focus on,” he says.
Marks hopes so. She continues to campaign to make her party more environment–friendly. She says she often asks fellow Republicans: “If conservatives won’t conserve, who will? When did it become liberal to conserve our resources and conservative to squander them?”