Why are rural and blue-collar Americans so resistant to taking concrete steps to reduce the impacts of climate change when they stand to be most disproportionately affected?
As warnings about climate change impacts become more dire and cataclysmic, I can hear the proportional frustration rising to a fevered pitch from those who’ve been building a scientific case for course correction. There seems to be an ipso facto belief in more data equaling an obliteration of financial obstruction from fossil fuel interests and widespread adoption of pricing carbon and taking other steps towards resiliency by middle America. To all of those people, I highly recommend you read the J.D. Vance memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” to understand why these tactics have resulted in such little progress.
If the totem of emissions reduction activists is Star Trek’s, Dr. Spock, the characters inhabiting this true story of Appalachia and rust-belt America over the last 50 years are James Kirk to a “T.”
The Vance book is the qualitative complement to the reams of quantitative survey data that gets spit out every day in an attempt to show how differently Americans see the world.
Is blue collar and rural America willing to cut off its nose to spite its face if it means they get to stick it to the elite that has so thoroughly screwed them since the 1970s? In a word, Abso-*uck*ngloutely! They are stewing in a toxic brew of downward mobility in which they’ve been increasingly left to fend for themselves, so even if they have time to pay attention to the science between working two jobs and dealing with families and neighborhoods in freefall, a warmer winter in Ohio and West Virginia isn’t an altogether bad thing.
It’s easy to put the blame at the feet of the word du jour–tribalism–as it relates to a political party to explain America’s polar opposites ; however, these Appalachian Scotts-Irish descendants are people who voted for Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama, candidates who believe(d) in climate change and developed policies to do something about it, but then turned around and voted for you know who in 2016.
Likewise, it’s too easy to blame race or immigration without peeling back the outer layer to realize all of this is born of class-based resentment, something Donald Trump tapped into very effectively.
They’ve stopped believing in scientists and economists and climatologists and anything that smacks of elitism because Rust Belt and rural America is drowning and all the talking heads can tell them is the water is blue. In that context, it’s all just noise to them, even though it’s my suspicion more than a few of these folks know Trump is full of B.S when he claims global warming is a hoax. But if you’re powerless anyway, at least you get the satisfaction of sticking it to the people who go to Paris and Davos and Jackson Hole to rub elbows and sign treaties.
Does this mean blue-collar America hates clean energy? Of course not. Every demographic group in America shows broad support for wind and solar energy, but in this case, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
Every day the media is saturated with stories about autonomous vehicles and cars charged with electricity instead of gasoline in a glorious embrace of the future. Meanwhile, if you don’t live near a city and have to commute an hour or more to work, are you going to be eagerly embracing that future, or are you going to be worrying about maintaining the 15-year-old, rusted, gas guzzler through one more winter?
And even if they like the idea of a zero-emission vehicle, when Chevy is closing auto plants and announcing it’s going to build that EV in China, the promise of a green economy becomes just another false hope that some politician peddled to win votes.
So how do we convince the “other” America that they’re in this fight too? For starters, forget the science. This is a group that has to see it to believe it because they can’t trust anything anymore. After a few more years of hurricanes, drought and wildfires, they’ll get it. For once, the media’s need to cover catastrophe will help the good guys, and it won’t matter how much the Koch Brothers spend to try to obfuscate the issue with their junk science either.
Leaving aside policy prescriptives from free post-secondary education to building a Cape Canaveral for clean energy in Cleveland to a Conservation Corps to manage our forests and farmlands, understand by virtue of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, this demographic might never be early adopters and castigating them the way society did with smokers might end up backfiring badly. Instead of shaming people who drive to work, we’d be better off perfecting a biofuel that reduces emissions while avoiding the food vs. fuel debate.
The more we can appeal to the ethics of freedom of choice and convenience in our message construct, the more progress we are likely to have. Beating the car gong again, people don’t drive by themselves because they like to pollute. Single occupancy vehicles dominate our transportation system because it’s convenient. Mass transit isn’t going to work for smaller, spread out communities. Let’s acknowledge it and work on solutions that are even more convenient than driving solo and that cost less.
Finally, as the inflated Silicon Valley real estate market drives startups to seek new homes, we need a national policy to encourage these entrepreneurs to take their chances on small cities in exchange for the government’s willingness to take a chance on them, similar to doctors and teachers whose tuition is covered in exchange for working in smaller communities. It’s a visible marker that says to these towns they won’t be forgotten again as they have been at the end of the industrial age.
None of this is easy, and none of it is a panacea. Vance, himself, says, “there is no government that can fix these problems (broken families, addiction, economic contraction) by itself.”
Hillbillies don’t want a hotter world. They’re just taking the path of self-preservation.
Still, Vance doesn’t believe they should be able to escape being held accountable for their destructive actions, which have also contributed to the demise of their communities. He even pointedly puts down a marker by asking his fellow white trash, “Are we tough enough to look in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children?”
To wit, are we strong enough to put down our reams of data and see the world through the eyes of the disenfranchised in India as well as Indiana? Because when your survival is an everyday concern, you don’t have the luxury of worrying about your child’s tomorrow.