Climate change is arguably the biggest challenge the nation and the world face right now. There's a solid scientific consensus that anthropogenic global warming is underway. But in America – to put it gently – there's a range of beliefs about it, and what if anything to do about it. This lack of social consensus has paralyzed the political system. Nothing much is happening, or likely to happen for a while.
What in other circumstances would be a question of scientific policy (which is difficult enough) has become wrapped up in the broader, unsettled cultural struggle that divides our politics today, University of Michigan professor Andrew J. Hoffman argues in this piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review:
Climate change has become enmeshed in the so-called culture wars. Acceptance of the scientific consensus is now seen as an alignment with liberal views consistent with other “cultural” issues that divide the country (abortion, gun control, health care, and evolution). This partisan divide on climate change was not the case in the 1990s. It is a recent phenomenon, following in the wake of the 1997 Kyoto Treaty that threatened the material interests of powerful economic and political interests, particularly members of the fossil fuel industry.3 The great danger of a protracted partisan divide is that the debate will take the form of what I call a “logic schism,” a breakdown in debate in which opposing sides are talking about completely different cultural issues.
There are several features of climate change that help create this divide. The first is the difficulty in seeing carbon dioxide as a threat. The traditional view of "pollution" is noxious stuff that shouldn't be there. But CO2 falls into a different category: it is a natural part of the atmosphere and integral to the processes of life. The problem is not the presence of CO2 but the fact that there's too much of it being produced by man-made processes.
On its own that can be hard to understand and accept. But of course the implications of it are enormous:
Not only do we have to change our view of the ecosystem, but we also have to change our view of our place within it. Have we as a species grown to such numbers, and has our technology grown to such power, that we can alter and manage the ecosystem on a planetary scale? This is an enormous cultural question that alters our worldviews. As a result, some see the question and subsequent answer as intellectual and spiritual hubris, but others see it as self-evident.
If you accept this, he writes, then you also have to accept that the world is interconnected in ways not previously contemplated, and that, over time, new forms of individual responsibility and governance may be required to get a handle on the climate problem. Climate change will have both local and global effects that our institutions as currently configured will not be able to handle. Needless to say, this idea is even harder to absorb - or easier to reject, take your pick.
Hoffman has some suggestions for how to disentangle the climate debate from the culture wars and refocus it around what science tells us, and how to act upon that knowledge. I think he's perhaps more optimistic than the situation warrants, likening the climate wars to the long dispute over cigarettes:
Is there a reason to be hopeful? When looking for reasons to be hopeful about a social consensus on climate change, I look to public opinion changes around cigarette smoking and cancer. For years, the scientific community recognized that the preponderance of epidemiological and mechanistic data pointed to a link between the habit and the disease. And for years, the public rejected that conclusion. But through a process of political, economic, social, and legal debate over values and beliefs, a social consensus emerged. The general public now accepts that cigarettes cause cancer and governments have set policy to address this.
Here's the entire essay.