By most reasonable accounts, the public discourse around healthcare reform, from Sarah Palin’s made-up death panels and others’ hyperbole to conservatives actually bringing assault rifles to Presidential events, was pretty pathetic.
But as bad as the healthcare debate became, brewing climate-change policy reform will draw an even-more-foot-stompy reaction from conservatives.
Here are five reasons why:
Healthcare is one of the most boring areas of public policy imaginable, while environmentalism has consistently drawn a high level of attention for the past four decades. Whereas healthcare reform actually created the current ideological divide among the huddled masses about how, exactly, public policy should treat healthcare, with climate change, that divide has long been established despite decades of policy inaction.
There have been clumsy attempts at climate-policy reform elsewhere in the world. There are plenty of conservatives who think any government intervention into private industry at all, no matter how reasonable the policy, is inherently bad and riddled with ulterior motives. These people don’t need any additional encouragement, but they’ll get it from the same astroturfing lobbyists who organized anti-healthcare rallies and protests. See also: Climategate.
Progressives can effectively argue for healthcare reform by using moral appeals. Because pretty much everyone can agree that helping sick people, whether or not they’re insured, is the moral thing to do, there wasn’t a whole lot of noise from conservatives about poor people not deserving to live. But hard science, not moral fundamentals, will drive climate-change policy, and there’s a lot of overlap between those who have unwavering support for both upping morality and deriding science. Related:
It’s easy for conservatives to call climate-change science mind control. Talking to a climate-change denier about the science behind environmental trends is a bit like dividing by zero: There’s simply no way to make it work. Indeed, it was cold outside someplace today, and citizens of an industrialized country like the States will be among the last to experience climate-change ramifications first-hand. But plenty of Americans, with their grumbles about their HMOs, do have first-hand experience with the the plight of receiving healthcare. And on that note:
Climate change is a problem “designed to be ignored,” The Washington Post recently noted. “It is a global problem, with no obvious villains and no one-step solutions, whose worst effects seem as if they’ll befall somebody else at some other time.” H.R. 3247 (overview, full text) actually seeks to identify the psychology behind consumer reactions to climate change. Though there are certainly worse ways to spend $50 million, detractors have a habit of reacting to politics instead of policy.
Fortunately, “most Republicans,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), post-Copenhagen, “don’t feel comfortable with the idea that our party stands for unlimited carbon pollution perpetually.” So the brewing problems involve conservatives – those wishing to conserve policy rather than change it – and not the Republican party or its supporters.
There are even odds, though, on whether Graham and his supporters will hold onto that position when confronted with angry voters hellbent on conserving nonexistent climate-change policy that no one bothered to create in the first place.
(image via)
Tags: Climate Change, Climategate, Environmentalism, Policy
