Saving Us

by Katharine Hayhoe

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  To everyone who believes the difficult issues in life are worth talking about

  PREFACE

  It took a pandemic to bring us together.

  As coronavirus swept across the world, we saw country after country go into lockdown. Schools closed and places of work shut down. For a while, it seemed we were all united against a common threat.

  As the pandemic wore on, this consensus started to disintegrate.

  Political leaders who’d been elected on waves of nationalist and populist rhetoric began to depict coronavirus precautions as more damaging to society than the disease itself. Supposedly reputable sources hyped false cures, and deliberately misrepresented the severity of the illness. In the U.S., going without a face mask became a badge of the conservative cause. While some continued to social distance, others held gatherings, some of which turned into superspreader events. The contrast between nations was stark—and the difference in infection and death rates equally so.

  Sadly, none of this surprised me. I’ve spent my career studying climate change. The same techniques used to politicize coronavirus—promoting pseudoscience and fake experts, slandering the actual experts, valuing the economy over human life, even hiding or denying data to make the issue seem less urgent and less harmful than it is—have been applied to climate change for decades. Horrified, I’ve seen political biases drive people to reject simple facts: climate is changing, humans are responsible, the impacts are serious, and the time to act is now.

  The U.S. is arguably home to the most extreme divisions between liberal and conservative, but I’ve seen these same divisions growing in recent years in my home country of Canada, in the U.K., in Australia, in Europe, and beyond. No matter where we live, the result is the same: as people identify with increasingly narrow tribes, they begin to view those with different views as alien, not worth respecting or even treating as human. The Beyond Conflict Institute’s 2020 report, America’s Divided Mind, didn’t mince any words: “Increasingly, Americans who identify themselves as either Democrats or Republicans view one another less as fellow citizens and more as enemies who represent a profound threat to their identities.”

  During the last full year of Donald Trump’s Republican administration, the U.S. experienced the world’s highest death toll from the pandemic. His time in office also coincided with apocalyptic wildfires, record-breaking hurricanes, and dire scientific warnings of climate impacts. Yet in the November 2020 election, Trump’s base stuck with him. Democrat Joe Biden eked out a narrow win in key swing states. The country remained as divided as ever.

  Religion, politics, and money have long been potentially combustible topics. Today, though, climate change tops that list. It’s the most politicized and divisive issue in the U.S. At this point, overcoming the polarization seems nearly hopeless, and solving climate change, even more so. Is there any remedy to our deep-rooted and growing divide?

  * * *

  If you’re already worried about climate change and support climate action, you’re not alone. Over 50 percent of adults in the U.S. are alarmed or concerned about climate change. People in other countries are even more concerned—from 67 percent in Australia to over 90 percent in countries like Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Around the world, “there is a strong sense [that all] have the power to combat climate change.” In the U.S., seven out of ten say they wish they could do something to fix it; but half of them don’t know where to start and only 35 percent say they ever talk about it, even occasionally.

  I’m a scientist who studies climate change. But increasingly, I spend more and more of my time explaining why it matters: to Christians at church groups and kids at science museums, businesspeople at conferences and community members at neighborhood meetings.

  Why? Because after thousands of conversations, I’m convinced that the single most important thing that anyone—not just me, but literally anyone—can do to bring people together is, ironically, the very thing we fear most. Talk about it.

  Why are people not talking about something that matters to them so much? Even if we agree it’s real and it’s serious, talking about it can be discouraging and depressing. There’s too great a risk the conversation might devolve into a screaming match or end up leaving everyone overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. We want to talk about it; we just don’t know how.

  “How do I talk about this… to my mother, brother-in-law, friend, colleague, neighbor, elected official?” I’m asked this question nearly everywhere I go.

  A fellow scientist asks me this after a lecture in a wood-paneled theater at UC-Berkeley in California. In Slovakia, I listen in as a group debates it in the upper balcony of the old, stripped-down city hall at the country’s first national climate meeting. Moms, dads, and teachers post on my Facebook page wanting to know what to say to their kids. My friend texts me asking how to reply to the disinformation his mom just shared with him.

  Usually, they’ve already given conversation a try. They’ve boned up on a few alarming scientific facts. They’ve tried to explain how fast the Arctic is melting, or how bees are disappearing, or how carbon dioxide levels are rising. But their attempts have fallen flat. Why? Because the biggest challenge we face isn’t science denial. It’s a combination of tribalism, complacency, and fear. Most don’t think climate change is going to affect them personally or that we can do anything reasonable to fix it; and why would they, if we never talk about it?

  It’s important to understand what’s happening to our world and how it affects us. But bombarding someone with more data, facts, and science only engages their defenses, pushes them into self-justification, and leaves us more divided than when we began. On climate change and other issues with moral implications, we tend to believe that everyone should care for the same self-evident reasons we do. If they don’t, we all too often assume they lack morals. But most people do have morals and are acting according to them; they’re just different from ours. And if we are aware of these differences, we can speak to them.

  Here’s more good news. The Beyond Conflict Institute’s report also shows that people perceive that “the other side” disagrees with them far more than is actually the case. So instead of reacting to something you disagree with, what if you started a conversation about something you agree on? What if you asked questions rather than arguing? What if you shared, genuinely and personally, how climate change threatens what you care about? And what if you talked about practical, real-world solutions that are already available today?

  Beginning a conversation with something that unites us instead of something that divides us means we are starting at a place of mutual respect, agreement, and understanding—which is pretty much the opposite of where most conversations about contentious issues like climate change begin these days. And as we truly listen, we’re likely to discover more surprising points of agreement.

  In this book I want to show you how to have conversations that will help you to reconnect with family and friends in real life, building genuine relationships and communities rather than tribes and bubbles. The bald facts are scary, and necessary. But climate change connects to the things we all care about: the health of our families, the economic strength of our communities, and the stability of our world. Fixing it isn’t only good for the planet; it’s good for all of us, too
.

  The bottom line is this. To care about climate change, you only need to be one thing, and that’s a person living on planet Earth who wants a better future. Chances are, you’re already that person—and so is everyone else you know.

  SECTION 1: THE PROBLEM AND THE SOLUTION

  1 DEMOCRATS AND DISMISSIVES

  “It is a common folk theory… that facts will set you free.”

  GEORGE LAKOFF, DON’T THINK OF AN ELEPHANT!

  “Climate change is the second biggest hoax after the corona scamdemic.”

  MAN ON TWITTER TO KATHARINE

  I’m getting used to being hated. It’s not for anything I’ve done; it’s because of what I represent. Communist, libtard, lunatic; Jezebel, liar, and whore; high priestess of the climate cult and handmaiden of the Antichrist, I’ve been called it all.

  We scientists can take criticism and give it, too. Our professional exchanges and reviews of one another’s work don’t pull any punches. Yet it’s hard not to find such epithets disturbing. Even more unsettling, they seem to come out of nowhere, and offer no clear avenue of response. If a colleague disagrees with my ideas, it motivates me to collect more and better data—data that sometimes shows they’re right. That’s how science works. But what am I supposed to do when I’m called a “climate ho”—somehow prove I’m not?

  Much of it arrives virtually, but the first time I faced this attitude was in person. During my first year as an atmospheric science professor in Texas, a colleague asked me to guest-teach his early morning undergraduate geology class. It was a challenging time of day to ask anyone to absorb the details of how carbon moves through the planet’s climate system. Still, I optimistically connected my laptop to the projector and peered out into the dark, cavernous lecture hall. Most of the seats were full, so I launched into my carefully prepared presentation.

  Every teacher thinks their favorite topic is fascinating, and I was no exception. How could you not want to understand the history of our world? But my talk just didn’t seem to capture the students’ interest. A few took notes, but most seemed to be checking Facebook on their laptops or sneaking a nap. Even the last few minutes of the lecture, where I described how humans had accelerated the natural carbon cycle by millions of years through digging up and burning fossil fuels, didn’t get any reaction.

  Trying to hide my disappointment, I called for questions. A tall, athletic-looking student raised his hand and stood up so I could see him. I nodded eagerly. Then in a belligerent tone, he demanded,

  “You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?”

  Floored, I replied, “No—I’m Canadian!”

  * * *

  That was a relatively benign introduction to what’s now become a regular part of my life. Nearly every day I receive angry, even hate-filled, objections to the work I do as a climate scientist: tweets, Facebook comments, even the occasional phone call or handwritten letter. “You make your living off climate hysteria,” reads one tweet. A multipage, single-spaced manifesto in my university mailbox starts, “You Lie!!!!” A Facebook message screams, “Get aborted you human-hating c***.” But before I block anyone on social media, I look at their profile. I want to know what type of person would go out of their way to write things like this to someone they don’t even know.

  About a third of the social media accounts that hurl insults score high on the online bot ratings, indicating they probably aren’t real people. They’re just part of the automated online attack squad that’s regularly aimed at everyone from progressive politicians to COVID virologists. But most other accounts seem to be associated with living, breathing humans. If they are from the U.S., their profile nearly always features the acronyms MAGA, KAG, or QAnon, all trademarks of right-wing ideology. If they are from Canada, they usually hate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, love Alberta’s oil and gas industry, and support the Conservative or, increasingly, the ultra-right-wing People’s Party of Canada. If they’re from the U.K., they’re pro-Brexit. If they’re from Australia, they’re likely to support the conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Wherever they’re from, they want everyone to know how much they love their country and how much they hate the proponents of political correctness, the mainstream media, and the “leftards and commies” who are intent on destroying it.

  HOW DID CLIMATE CHANGE BECOME SO POLARIZED?

  A thermometer doesn’t give you a different answer depending on how you vote. Even in the U.S., climate change used to be a respectably bipartisan issue well within most of our lifetimes. In 1998, a Gallup poll found that 47 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun. In 2003, Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, then a Connecticut Democrat, introduced the Climate Stewardship Acts. As recently as 2008, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and current House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, cozied up on a love seat in front of the U.S. Capitol to film a commercial about climate change. “We do agree, our country must take action to address climate change,” Gingrich said, while Pelosi added, “We need cleaner forms of energy, and we need them fast.” But for the past decade, climate change has topped the list of America’s most polarized issues, along with immigration, gun policy, and race relations. By 2020, coronavirus had joined the list.

  It’s not just the U.S. In Canada, there’s nearly a one-to-one correspondence between people’s response to the question “Is the Earth warming?” and the party that won that particular area in the 2019 federal election. The more conservative Canadian voters are, the more likely they are to reject what a hundred and fifty years of temperature data is telling us. In the U.K., Conservative members of parliament are five times more likely to vote against climate legislation than their Labour counterparts. In Australia, the influence of the coal industry and the Murdoch-controlled press on national politics is undeniable. Australia was the first and only country to implement, then withdraw, a carbon tax after just two years. More recently, some of its politicians asserted that climate change had nothing to do with the devastating wildfires in late 2019 and early 2020. Their claims were bolstered by disinformation—including that the fires were started by climate activists—that was deliberately introduced and circulated on social media in a manner similar to “past disinformation campaigns, such as the coordinated behavior of Russian trolls during the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” one study found.

  Although science denial dominates the headlines, people’s rejection of the science on climate change is rarely about the science itself. In a study of fifty-six countries, researchers found people’s opinions on climate change to be most strongly correlated not with education or knowledge, but rather with “values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation.” Like coronavirus, vaccines, and more, climate denial is often just one part of a toxic stew of identity issues that share a key factor: fear of change. Societal change is happening faster today than at any time in our lifetimes, and many are afraid they’re already being left behind. That fear drives tribalism, emphasizing what divides us rather than what unites us; and the more threatened we feel, the tighter we draw the circles to distinguish between them and us.

  That’s why so much of the polarization is emotional. Over the past forty years, researchers Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt found that “people [in the U.S.] who identify with either of the two main political parties increasingly hate and fear the other party and the people in it.” This polarization can also be literally mind-altering. In one experiment, when asked what they thought of an issue, then told that their political party thought something different about it, many immediately changed their opinions and were unaware of the fact that they were doing so.

  A lot of what we see online doesn’t help. “As media frames opposing viewpoints as shouting matches and comments on Facebook and Twitter convey vitriol and accusation,” says psychologist Tania Israel, “we shy away from people and organizations whose positions may conflict with our own. We take r
efuge in echo chambers of like-minded people expressing views we support, cheering each other on as we rake our common enemies over the coals.”

  Giving up intellectual adherence to a scientific issue like climate change that seems remote and virtually unfixable seems like a small price to pay to be part of a tribe that accepts us and makes us feel safe. It may even be a benefit, because who really wants to believe that climate change could spell the end of our civilization? And the more we experience the benefits of belonging, the more willing we are to tailor our beliefs to those of our tribe.

  WHY TWO CLIMATE TRIBES ARE NOT ENOUGH

  We often assume that the tribes that form around climate change can be sorted into two categories: them and us. In reality, though, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I also have a problem with the labels that are most often applied to those categories: believers and deniers.

  I object to “believers” because climate change is not, at its core, a matter of faith. I don’t “believe” in science: I make up my mind based on facts and data, much of which can be seen and shared. Not only that, but climate change is often deliberately—and very successfully—framed as an alternate, Earth-worshipping religion. This is sometimes subtle, as the church sign that reads, “On Judgement Day, you’ll meet Father God not Mother Earth.” Other times this point is made much more explicitly, like when Senator Ted Cruz told Glenn Beck in 2015 that “climate change is not science, it’s religion,” and Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2014 that “the problem is Al Gore’s turned this thing into religion.”

  And while it may be convenient for some climate advocates to dismiss their opponents as “deniers,” it’s an unhelpful label if you want to win people over. I’ve also seen it applied all too often to shut down discussion, rather than encourage it, through stereotyping and dismissing anyone who expresses any doubts about the reality of climate change.