We need to build a climate coalition, not fight a culture war

In his first weeks in office, President Trump exited the Paris Climate Accord and froze funding, purged staff and gutted regulatory programs related to climate change and clean energy. This anti-climate stance is framed as part of an effort to roll back the “liberal elite” agenda in Washington and restore “common sense.”

The fact that Trump saw this issue as an easy way to score political points shows how desperately the politics of climate change need a reboot.

We can no longer afford a partisan culture war that falsely pits “anti-science climate deniers” against “out-of-touch elites.” To tackle a problem this big, we need everyone on board in a coalition of moderates, conservatives and liberals; rural, suburban and urban dwellers; and working-class and college-educated Americans.

The seeds for this coalition exist. A 2024 survey found that 46 percent of independents and 40 percent of Republicans under age 45 believe humans are causing climate change. A majority of voters from both parties support policies like restrictions on power plant emissions and tax credits for businesses developing carbon capture technology. But you wouldn’t know this by looking at politics and popular culture, where climate change is pigeonholed as the concern of urban, educated elites.

Climate change has become tied up with cultural identity — and cultural identity is a powerful force. Conservatives and liberals even have different memories of how warm or cold recent winters have been. A study by Michael’s team at Vanderbilt found that conservatives were significantly less interested in buying an electric vehicle when it was presented as a common choice by liberal consumers. Among conservative drivers of light trucks, the average purchase price of an electric vehicle would need to drop by nearly $14,000 (or about 26 percent) to overcome this identity-driven hesitation.

To build a climate coalition, we have to work with identity, not against it. We must speak to people’s culture and values and show how concern for the climate aligns with their communities and identities.

First, we need to combat “pluralistic ignorance,” the inaccurate picture of what others in one’s social groups believe. Research shows that Republicans, Democrats and independents all dramatically underestimate support for climate change, both locally and nationally. Correcting this misperception can increase support for climate action by showing people that others in their tribe are already on board.

For example, a recent study found that Republican support for climate-friendly policies jumped 20 percentage points when participants were told that Republican members of Congress proposed the policies. We need to highlight conservative, rural and working-class voices that support climate action.

We can also shift people’s attention from their political affiliations to “superordinate identities” that unite us across differences. For example, we can emphasize that we are all Americans whose economic competitiveness and national security depend on a clean energy future. Or speaking to parents across party lines who want their children to live in a clean, safe and healthy world.

Focusing on these superordinate identities allows us to tap into values that appeal to conservatives and moderates, like economic innovation, personal responsibility and loyalty to place. For example, research shows that framing climate action as patriotic can increase support among voters on both sides of the aisle. Describing it as stewardship of God’s creation has been shown to appeal to Christians. For farmers, the key message is that extreme weather means you can’t farm as your grandfather did. And those who work outdoors may be mobilized by the idea that sweltering heat will make it harder to earn a living.

But it’s not only the messaging. We need policy solutions that appeal to conservative and moderate voters and that don’t harm working-class people. Policies like carbon taxes and restrictions on fossil fuels evoke fears that costs will go up and jobs will disappear — trade-offs many are unwilling to make.

The psychology of “solution aversion” means that we decide how worried we are about a problem based on how we feel about the expected solution. When government regulation and spending are touted as the answers to climate change, conservatives care less about the issue (the same happens with liberals when nuclear power is presented as the solution). But research that one of us published found that touting efforts by private companies to reduce emissions and develop clean energy leads conservatives to become more supportive.

Democrats finally got the memo and structured the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to avoid pitfalls like carbon taxes. Instead, it centered on creating jobs and sparking innovation in pursuit of cheaper and cleaner energy. The law was about blue-collar jobs, and it should have been front and center in 2024 to appeal to the many voters for whom the economy was the top priority.

But climate change is such a divisive issue that Democrats barely talked about the Inflation Reduction Act last year, despite it being one of the biggest pieces of climate legislation in American history. It should have been an easy sell to people on all sides of the aisle, but Democrats didn’t know how to cross that cultural chasm.

Anti-climate forces made this into a culture war. We have to respond with messages and solutions that speak to people’s cultural identities and values. As political scientist Roger A. Pielke paraphrased the words of journalist Walter Lippmann from roughly a century ago, “The goal of politics is not to get everyone to think alike, but to get people who think differently to act alike.”

One of us is a moderate and one is a liberal. But we both believe that we can — and indeed, we must — build a climate coalition that has room for all Americans.

Michael Vandenbergh is a professor of law at Vanderbilt University and director of Vanderbilt’s Climate Change Research Network. He received an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship research grant in 2022. Joan Williams is the founding director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco and the author of “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.” The views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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