Trump Voters Not The Climate Enemies You Think They Are

Here is one thing I found, and one thing I didn't.

The science of climate change is incredibly robust, but science alone cannot tell us what makes a solution fair, or who should get a say in its design. The Paris Agreement, for example, has a strong moral component that was hard-won by developing nations, small island states and international activists.

It depicts a world in which the blame for climate change and the responsibility for addressing it lie predominantly with rich countries such as the US, and it prescribes financial flows to victim countries to help them adapt. For many precarious Americans who feel neither rich nor villainous, this is a difficult narrative to swallow.

I saw a similar pattern in my own research. Racial justice, indigenous knowledge, urban inequality and youth are themes that typically frame public engagement with climate action by the federal government and grassroots movements . These aren't necessarily topics that will always resonate in rural, conservative communities such as Carteret county.

Opinion surveys and election data in the US show that climate change is an issue on which voters are polarized.

This helps explain why advocates for climate action tend to speak to the already engaged, by referencing other progressive causes. But advocates are not necessarily more influenced by facts than skeptics. It's simply easier to sign up to a cause you can see yourself in.

What I didn't find in North Carolina was what I came looking for: climate denialism.

Climate change rarely came up naturally in the conversations I had in Carteret County, but when it did, the responses were inconsistent, ranging from concern to curiosity and from ambivalence and apathy to fatalism and skepticism. What mention there was hardly fit the stereotype of bitter, conspiracy-fuelled rejection of reality.

In this tight-knit fishing community, people had become wary of outside interventions. Some were ill-disposed to environmental movements after feeling lectured by regulatory scientists or environmental campaigners on how to manage a coastline they knew well.

Others were fatalist about resisting sea-level rise – generations spent on the Atlantic's ferocious frontline taught them that you don't fight storms, you ride them out. Many people saw things were changing but were too strapped for time and money to do much, or else found it intolerable to wake up each day contemplating the death of their community.

Denialism had no explanatory power here. On the contrary, by failing to distinguish between disagreement and lack of agreement, it misrepresented complex social dynamics as a matter of simply believing facts or rejecting them.

So why does any of this matter? Because, when we identify one group as the sole cause of a problem we give ourselves permission to stop asking what we could be doing differently. After all, climate action's advocates – from UN officers to individual voters – play a role in shaping what legitimate climate action looks like and who will want to be part of it.

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To react to the US withdrawal from Paris by repeating that“science is real”, in the vein of world leaders and American lawn signs , is to miss the point. Public dissent is often less a question of whether we should fix climate change than of whose vision of a good world we are working towards.

This is not to shift blame for Trump's withdrawal. Nor should it excuse people in politics, business and the media who have repeatedly obscured the climate debate in bad faith.

Carteret's older residents have seen the decline of local industries and ecosystems. Photo: Karl Dudman via The Conversation

But reducing public dissent to a matter of misinformation and gullibility shows a lack of humility and dismisses concerns that may not crystallize into opposition if treated respectfully. Asking more questions of ourselves is something we can all do to make climate politics less toxic.

As Trump signed his first executive orders, I pressed send on my thesis's final corrections. How the international community reacts this time remains to be seen, but the last four years have taught me that it may influence whether or not there is a next time.

Karl Dudman is a PhD candidate in anthropology, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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