Cross-posted at bluecommonwealth.com
Yes, the House just passed the first major climate change legislation in US history - by a scant 7 votes. But the bill now faces rough sledding in the Senate. After decades of mounting evidence and concern over this issue, it remains a hard sell politically.
In theory, if people understood the findings of thousands of scientists worldwide, that climate change is being driven by human activities, with disastrous consequences, it should not be hard to motivate our politicians to act on it. So much for theory. In practice, getting effective climate change legislation passed remains a very heavy lift.
And why is that? I believe it comes down to a conflict between two almost irreconcilable worldviews - the scientist's vs. the politician's.
I'm not a scientist, but I've worked with enough of them to know that they have a unique perspective, one that you could summarize as "Getting the facts right matters more than anything in the world." I'm not a politician either, but I've observed enough of them to glean their perspective as well, which could be summed up as "What matters most is influencing people to follow (and like) me and my viewpoints."
So the conflict becomes clear immediately. The scientist lives in a world of facts, where you will get roundly chewed out for misplacing a decimal point or failing to calibrate an instrument. The politician, meanwhile, lives in a world of appearances, where having people on your side outweighs the secondary issue of whether you've got the facts right.
The purest example of each type of person will frequently misunderstand and even disrespect the other. The classic scientist in his lab has little patience for the prattling of politicians, just as the classic politician will not want to hear about the scientific impacts of the popular water infrastructure project he just brought to his district.
So getting politicians to understand the scientifically-grounded realities of climate change is, at heart, a translation problem. More concrete and visible environmental problems are of course an easier sell. When your river's catching on fire and smokestacks are belching out black billows of smoke, it's easier to get the public and politicians to support action against pollution. But when the problem is mostly not yet visible, and you have to trust the scientists, it's a whole lot harder.
One more wrinkle is that while facts are real things, actually verifying them - which scientists spend their days doing - is hard work. This makes scientists more cautious about proclaiming absolute truths, since they know it all rests on the evidence, which is constantly being uncovered and updated.
Politicians, by contrast, live in the murky world of influence, where facts may fall completely by the wayside, but the person who seems the most sure and confident may be the most persuasive. So politicians will often much more unabashedly proclaim what they consider absolute truths, even if those beliefs are based on, well, not much beyond faith.
The sad truth is that, in the so-called "marketplace of ideas", the poorly grounded argument confidently proclaimed will often beat the well-grounded statement appropriately caveated. In other words, BS often wins, because it's easier to swallow.
The oil and coal companies that have funded the astroturf ecosystem of climate change denial websites and think tanks take full advantage of this situation and "win" the argument with the least facts on their side. And enviros and scientists in this situation often come across as impatient, intolerant and frankly unpleasant, so fed up are they with the refusal of so many politicians to deal responsibly with the bona fide crisis we are facing.
The solution is, first, for scientists and environmentalists to become more politically savvy - to recognize that it's not enough to be factually grounded, but we also need to learn to communicate persuasively. And second, as concerned voters, we need to make our elected representatives aware of the latest scientific evidence and demand that they get up to speed on it.
Today, there are encouraging signs of a new rapprochement between the worlds of environmental science and politics. President Obama has taken the extraordinary step of naming a Nobel laureate to be Secretary of Energy (and other top scientists to sub cabinet positions). Here in my home territory of Northern Virginia, we had the inspiring House of Delegates candidacy of an environmentalist straight from the grassroots, Miles Grant. While he didn't win this time, he did raise awareness and gain powerful experience to bring back to the grassroots, for victory in the future.
So now we've finally gotten to the point where a cap and trade bill can pass the House. But can it make it all the way? That will depend on all us making sure that a true marriage between science and politics happens and succeeds. Facts by themselves won't carry the day.