Home appliances used to be a safe topic of conversation, if a boring one. But these days, many Republican politicians see gas stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines as symbols of government meddling in people’s lives. Earlier this year, passed lawmakers in the House the “Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act” to make it harder for the Department of Energy to create new energy-saving standards, although it stalled in the Senate. Other device-related accounts proposed this year included the “Freezer Freedom Act” and “Laundry Freedom Act”.
The uproar over efficient appliances is just one of the ways that deepening polarization threatens efforts to reduce carbon emissions. On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump revived longstanding complaints about energy-efficient dishwashers and showerheads and also spoke out against clean technologies. falsely claimed that wind turbines break when exposed to salt water and that hydrogen powered cars tend to blow up like bombs.
A growing segment of the public appears to share some of Trump’s reservations. Four years ago, 84 percent of Republicans supported new solar farms; according to this spring, the number has dropped to 64 percent poll from Pew Research Center. Wind power has seen a similar drop in support, and the share of Americans who say they would consider an electric vehicle for their next purchase fell from 38 percent in 2023 to 29 percent this year.
Disrupting climate change from the culture wars can feel almost impossible. But scientists have found ways to talk about the changing weather that resonate with Fox News fans, a segment of the population that many climate advocates see as a lost cause, by taking a “just the facts” approach.
“If you’re just talking about pure observations, there’s nothing political about it,” said Keith Sietter, a lecturer at the College of the Holy Cross and executive director emeritus at the American Meteorological Society. Telling people that hurricanes are increase faster for example, sitting over record-warm sea water allows them to come to their own conclusions about how the world is changing.
Climate Central, a nonprofit organization that aims to “scrupulously non-advocate and impartial,” provides localized data and graphics to help newspapers, online news sites, meteorologists, and TV and radio programs explain the science behind our increasingly strange weather, from warm winters on longer allergy seasons. According to Peter Girard, Climate Central’s vice president of external communications, the organization has had success working with right-leaning media, such as Fox affiliates, because of its apolitical approach.
“Audiences, regardless of their political stripes, want to know what science is telling them about the weather and climatological experiences they’re having in their backyards,” Girard said.
But even as fires, floods and heat waves get noticeably worse, Democrats and Republicans are further divided on the science of human-caused global warming than almost any other issue. Some observers have noted that the resistance to accepting climate science is not about the science at all, but what efforts to solve the problem may involve. An experiment in 2014 found that Republicans who read a speech about the United States using environmentally friendly technologies to stimulate the economy, versus a speech about enacting strict environmental regulations and pollution taxes, were twice as likely as other Republicans to agree with the mainstream climate science. In other words, it may be easier to just ignore a problem if you don’t like the proposed solution.
This concept of “solution aversion” may help explain how the culture war over climate solutions began. In the early 1990s, with the public fresh warned by scientists that global warming has already begunmomentum has begun to build for global action, with countries considering mandatory requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Corporations that had a stake in continuing to burn fossil fuels—oil companies, utilities, automakers, railroads, and steelmakers—saw this as an impending disaster and organized a counter-offensive. Conservatives have begun to doubt climate science, arguing that shifting away from fossil fuels threatens the economy and the American way of life. A rift has emerged between Republicans and Democrats on a topic they mostly agree on, with Republicans in Congress vote against environmental measures.
Climate change “has become the talking point for everything that’s wrong with government,” said Aaron McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University. in an interview with CNN last year. “‘You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do on my land. Federal government — stay away from me.’” Between 1992 and 2012, the gap in support for environmental action was between Democrats and Republicans increased from 5 percent to 39 percentaccording to Pew poll.
The fault lines have deepened in recent years. When progressives pushed for a Green New Deal in 2019, Republicans falsely claimed: “They want to take away your hamburgers.” It has become a refrain, with the proper warning that the Democrats are coming for your cars and your gas stoves. “It’s all part of an agenda to control you and to control your behavior,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said last year in a speech delivered before an oil rig in West Texas. “They’re trying to limit your choices as Americans.”
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There are efforts to position climate action in a way that appeals to conservative values, linking it patriotism, innovation, or competition with China. But Kenneth Barish, a psychologist and the author of the forthcoming book Bridging Our Political Divide: How Liberals and Conservatives Can Understand Each Other and Find Common Groundsays that in practice conservatives may reject this kind of framework altogether, because they feel as if they have not been listened to. His formula for depolarization begins with a one-on-one conversation between two people who disagree. The goal is to learn why your interlocutor feels the way they do, and then work together to find solutions that address both of your concerns.
This kind of dialogue creates opportunities for creative, pragmatic solutions—perhaps ones that succeed in reducing greenhouse gas emissions while limiting government power over household decisions. Matthew Burgess, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming, said it’s possible that just making electric stoves more responsive to temperature adjustments, or making electric vehicles cheaper and charging stations more readily available, could reduce some of the resistance to those technologies. will solve
“When you make this shift from having an opinion to understanding the concern underlying the opinion, it’s really a different kind of conversation,” Barish said.
The approach is reminiscent of “deep work,” an outreach method developed by LGBTQ+ advocates that involves listening to people’s concerns without judgment and helping them work through their conflicted feelings. Personal conversations like these have been shown to change people’s minds, with lasting effects.
In one experiment in British Columbia, volunteers hoping to convince local governments to switch to 100 percent renewable energy kept running into roadblocks in the rural town of Trail, home to one of the world’s largest lead and zinc smelters. They spoke to hundreds of residents, listened to their concerns about lost jobs and worked to find common ground. In the end, 40 percent of residents shifted their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 to move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.
This is proof that breakthroughs can happen, but also indicates that there is a lot of work ahead for climate advocates. Knee jerk reactions are quick and easy; engaging in meaningful dialogue is slow and difficult. Barish said that better conversations need to recognize that complex problems like climate change need to be seen from different perspectives. “If we come to someone who opposes certain interventions and try to convince her why we’re right and she’s wrong, then we’re probably not going to get anywhere.”
