The Political Science behind climate change

[Peter1469]

The Political Science behind climate change

Disregard the climate science on climate change for a moment. Instead, consider the political science of climate change. We see protests in Europe and riots in France over carbon taxes. Americans would revolt if we had to pay $8 a gallon for gas.

This year, California recorded its deadliest wildfire in state history. The combined intensity and duration of the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans’ tropical storms and hurricanes reached a new recorded high. A group of researchers reported that worldwide fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions are projected to hit 37.1 billion tons in 2018, yet another annual record.

It’s time to take a clear-eyed look at the science behind these developments — the political science.


The data show that, for all the evidence that climate change is real, manmade and dangerous, and despite wide public acceptance of those propositions, people in the United States do not necessarily want to stop climate change, in the sense of being willing to pay the cost — which is the only sense that really matters.


“The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades, and addressing the problem with government action ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans,” according to a comprehensive review of public opinion literature published in 2017 by Patrick J. Egan of New York University and Megan Mullin of Duke University.


In a series of open-ended Gallup surveys this year asking Americans to name the “most important problem facing the country,” environmental issues never scored above 3 percent.


Even before the recent riots against President Emmanuel Macron’s climate-change-related fuel tax hike in France, there was a quieter backlash of sorts in the United States: Anti-fossil-fuel referendums lost in Colorado, Washington state and Arizona during last month’s elections.

***

Climate change and environmentalism more broadly have gotten caught up in the partisan polarization corroding U.S. politics, with support for “green” policy increasingly a badge of Democratic Party loyalty, and opposition to it defining what it means to be Republican.


A Pew Research Center study this year found that the public ranked climate change 18th out of 19 possible top priorities for the Congress and Trump, with 46 percent choosing it. However, this was an average that included 68 percent of Democrats and only 18 percent of Republicans.


Democratic concern does not necessarily translate into support for specific, costly policies, however. Washington, a deep blue state, rejected a state-level carbon tax in a 2016 initiative and did so again in 2018, by large margins each time.


The most politically feasible climate-change proposals, Egan told me in an email, may be those which “address the problem in a more piecemeal and thus less visible fashion,” such as raising automobile fuel economy standards, or, at the state level, requiring that a minimum share of energy come from low-emission renewable sources.


It didn’t work in Arizona, where 69 percent of voters, obviously including Democrats and independents, opposed a measure this year that would have required utilities to derive 50 percent of electricity from renewables by 2030.

Read the entire article at the link.

[Peter1469]

Another on point article: Will uprisings thwart green central planners?

You know you've got a problem when your tax schemes are even being rejected by the French. While there's always a danger in reducing the causes of political unrest to a single issue, the plan to impose yet another regressive $9 billion annual carbon tax proved to be a catalyst for the "yellow vest" protests that are roiling Paris.

The nonviolent version of the French carbon-tax revolt is spreading globally, too. Last November, Washington state voters rejected a very well-funded effort to pass the first ballot-approved carbon tax ever. The province of Ontario is suing the Canadian government to block a federal carbon tax there. According The Wall Street Journal, "the issue could topple the Alberta government and perhaps Prime Minister Justin Trudeau." The Journal adds, "German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Energiewende—a transition to renewables that has increased dirty coal emissions and caused household energy costs to soar—has become a political liability."


The resistance comes from middle- to low-income workers. They're especially sensitive to changes in the cost and availability of energy for the simple reason that it affects so many aspects of their lives—from getting to work, especially for those who live in rural areas, to the price of most consumer goods. It's clear that many ordinary people aren't willing to pay higher costs just to fulfill the grand visions of central planners.


In response to ongoing protests, French President Emmanuel Macron just announced he'll cancel the planned increases in fuel taxes that were supposedly going to put the country on target to hit its Paris climate accord objectives. Nevertheless, other proponents for massive tax increases are doubling down and calling for even more central planning with the hope of drastically remaking modern economies in a manner that they believe will be friendlier to the environment.


Billionaire Tom Steyer claims that the real issue highlighted by the French protestors is inequality, and that the answer isn't to stop trying to tax people into behaving in an approved manner but to ensure "unionized, living wage jobs."


I'm guessing Mr. Steyer isn't terribly familiar with France, where extreme regulatory burdens of the type he prefers already exist and make employees extremely costly. The predictable result is a ghastly 9-plus percent unemployment rate (21.5 percent for youth) that has barely budged in decades.

[DGUtley]

It all seems like developed to undeveloped wealth redistribution to me.