If President Trump claws his way to victory again in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, his path will likely go through abortion and climate change, two issues on which the Democrats are most inflamed, confident in their righteousness and willing to embrace radical policies that appeal to their own voters much more than anyone else.
Joe Biden, the relative moderate, is subject to these forces. He released a climate plan that, even if more modest than the “Green New Deal” (a low bar), is clearly derived from it.
Climate is a watchword among the Democratic presidential candidates — and enormous downside risk.
Once everyone on your own side agrees about an issue, and once you are convinced that you are addressing a planet-threatening crisis that will become irreversible in about a decade’s time, prudence and incrementalism begin to look dispensable.
There’s no doubt that climate is a top-tier issue for Democrats. In a CNN poll, 96% of Democrats say it’s very important that candidates support “taking aggressive action to slow the effects of climate change.”
It’s doubtful that mom, baseball and apple pie would poll any higher.
It’s also true that the public is adopting climate orthodoxy. According to a survey by climate change programs at Yale and George Mason, 70% believe that climate change is happening, and 57% believe that humans are causing it.
It’s easy to over-interpret these numbers, though. While a big majority of Democrats see climate change as a problem, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found only 15% of Republicans and — more important — 47% of independents do.
Of course, saying climate change is a problem doesn’t cost anyone anything. An AP/University of Chicago poll asked people how much they were willing to pay to fight climate change, and 57% said at least $1 a month, or not even the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
The political experience of other advanced democracies is a flashing red light. In Australia last month, the opposition lost what was supposed to be “the climate change” election, against all expectations.
Polling showed that about 60% of Australians called climate change “a serious and pressing problem” and thought the government should address it “even if this involves significant costs.”
It turned out that it was one thing to tell that to pollsters and another to vote to make it happen. The opposition promised a 45% reduction in carbon emissions with no serious pain, while the conservative governing coalition focused on the cost — and won.
In France, gas hikes as part of a government plan to reduce carbon emissions by 75% sparked the yellow-vest movement in car-dependent suburbs and towns and had to be ignominiously reversed.
The politics of climate change are bound to remain problematic.
The voters most opposed to the costs of climate action tend to be the kind of “deplorables” most easily dismissed by center-left parties at their own peril: voters in rural Queensland in Australia, economically distressed residents of unfashionable areas of France, working-class voters in the American Rust Belt.
The real felt urgency of climate change won’t anytime soon match the rhetoric of the advocates. There’s currently an effort to make every US drought or flood, tornado or hurricane, a symptom of an alleged climate emergency.
This approach may pay some dividends, but it hardly reflects a careful accounting of the data.
According to Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute, the Palmer Drought Severity Index doesn’t show a trend since 1895, and the pattern of US flooding over the past century doesn’t track with global warming; there has been no trend in US tornados since 1945, and little trend in tropical storms and hurricanes since the early 1970s.
Bearing real costs for the sake of the climate will always be a sucker’s game for any one country so long as there isn’t a global regime mandating emission reductions (and, thankfully, there isn’t anything remotely like the political will for such a regime).
It was supposed to be a disaster when Trump pulled out of the Paris accords, but G-20 countries haven’t been on pace to meet their goals regardless.
Finally, whatever the costs, no one is going to feel any climate benefits anytime soon; even the radical Green New Deal wouldn’t make much difference.
All this should counsel caution rather than apocalyptic rhetoric and policies, although Trump has every reason to hope it doesn’t.
Read more at NY Post
I don’t think those issues appeal to their own party but to a small but very vocal subset of their party. And by embracing these issues the Democrat party are signing its own death warrant.
In all their attempts to thwart Trump and appease the Eco-Freaks and Globalits the Democrats are setting themselves up for a fall that could cost the DNC big time
What appalls me is that I have yet to hear a single Republican candidate tell us why the CO2 theory of climate change is wrong, or to defend the superior solar-cum-GCR theory of climate change. Is every single one of our politicians so stupid and scientifically illiterate that he (and sometimes she) is unable to explain this to the public? It frustrates me no end that Repubs unanimously avoid any public debate of the science on this question. They could throw the Dems back on their heels if they had enough brain cells to take them head on. All Dems can do is fall back on talking points and easily debunked phoney stats like the “97% consensus,” which is not even a scientific argument anyway but an “appeal to authority” fallacy. We need to get the lawyers out of politics and put in people with backgrounds in math, engineering, and the hard sciences. Or chess and bridge players. Really, anyone who knows how to think rationally and carefully, not just people skilled at “pleading a case.”
But Mike, all the scientists unanimously agree on AGW, and how can any politician claim to know more than every single scientist?
Oh, there is the issue of any scientists that have any data that doesn’t match with the mainstream Global Climate alarmism are labeled “Deniers”, and lose funding and jobs. But nevermind that.
Well, it’s because Global Warming/Climate Change is not about science at all. If any Republican’t tries to argue the case on the merits of science, the dems will just respond loudly with “Liar, liar!” and the stupid public will nod their collective heads and fall for the never-ending hoax.
I begin to believe that this could be a good time to endure a supervolcanic eruption or a significant cosmic impact. Such an event, while horrific to consider, would be real-world lesson in earthly processes, cancel out the human-caused, carbon-dioxide-drive climate scam, and give world leader a real problem to work with. In the end the impacts of a regional natural disaster would be less damaging that a global environmental tyranny.
We have a (Senator, or Minister of Parliament) in Australia call Malcol m Roberts. He gave speeches in Parliament calling out the AGW scam with all the right science, and went on a Left-wing biased TV panel show on his own and tried to explain the science. I’m afraid it did not work. The attention span of his audience didn’t let him get any traction. It didn’t really work. But he tried.
I agree with mikesmith. Call BS!
My pet peeve is that we’re not allowed to correlate weather to climate. Weather is EVERYTHING. Ask farmers, especially today. We were threatened with heat and drought by Gore, et al.
Now they claim today’s climate,
cold wet weather, is caused by humanity’s CO2. Why do people continue to listen to them?
The Democrats will lose by a wider margin and they already know it .
When a political party imposes it’s will on voters and does not respect the voters priorities they deserve to lose .
The global warming fraud isn’t even in the top 5 concerns of voters yet
the arrogant Democrats want to impose a “Green New Deal ” and openly threaten any worker or company associated with the fossil fuel industry.
This is a party that has just lost it .