HomeMy WebLinkAboutNews Release - Mail Packet - 10/25/2016 - Information From Darin Atteberry Re: Christian Science Monitor Article Dated October 12, 2016 Why Climate Change Divides UsPage 1 of 9
Why climate change divides us
UNDERSTANDING EACH OTHER
Americans are becoming more polarized about climate change even as scientists
find consensus. Two Colorado counties offer a portrait of why this is happening.
By Amanda Paulson, Staff writer / October 12, 2016
Steve Wells sits in his office, a warehouse on his 32,000-acre ranch in Colorado's Weld County. Wells, whose
grandfather started the ranch in 1888, has more than 600 oil and gas wells on his property, most of which have
been fracked, and which have been a huge financial benefit to him. He doesn't believe in human-caused
climate change, and says wildlife on his property has been more abundant since the wells were drilled and the
water hasn't suffered.
Amanda Paulson/The Christian Science Monitor
FORT COLLINS AND GREELEY, COLO.
Kellie Falbo is tackling climate change one step at a time. That means lowering
carbon emissions by driving a biodiesel vehicle, keeping a vegetable garden, and
composting with worms.
Sure, those efforts by themselves won’t make much difference globally. But sitting
in the Happy Lucky Tea House, which is proudly “serving up world change”
(according to the awning outside), she sees a constellation of small steps here in the
heart of Colorado’s Larimer County that can ripple outward to address an
overwhelming challenge.
About 30 miles southeast, in neighboring Weld County, Steve Wells looks out over a
very different picture.
More than 600 oil and gas wells dot the flat grasslands that extend to the horizon of
his 35,000-acre ranch. Many of them involve hydraulic fracturing – the
controversial drilling practice that Larimer County's largest city, Fort Collins, tried
to ban a few years back.
October 20, 2016
TO: Mayor & City Council
FROM: Darin Atteberry
FYI /sek
Page 2 of 9
He gets angry when he talks about the activists who would like to ban fracking but
who have never come to talk to him or bothered to see that the water hasn’t been
damaged and that wildlife is thriving. The income from those wells has made an
enormous financial difference for Wells, whose grandfather started the ranch in
1888, allowing him to contribute to local charities, such as a local food bank and a
women’s shelter.
As for man-made climate change? He doesn’t believe it is happening.
When it comes to global warming, the border between Weld and Larimer Counties
might as well be a fault line.
They are two quintessentially Colorado counties – Weld stretching eastward from
the shadow of the Rockies onto the wide and empty skirts of the high plains, while
Larimer gathers up the cities that cluster against the foot of the Rockies north of
Denver.
But their different character speaks to a broader divide nationwide. Weld voted for
Mitt Romney in 2012; Larimer voted for President Obama. Larimer life rotates
around Fort Collins, a college town as home of the local state university; Weld
considered seceding from the state in 2013.
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They are blue and red America in miniature, and their different approaches to
climate change mirror the rift within America itself.
Polls show that the partisan divide is wider on climate change than any other issue.
In 2001, the gap between Republicans and Democrats on whether climate change is
real and human-caused was 17 percentage points. This year, the gap stands at 41
points. Just 43 percent of Republicans now believe climate change is human-
caused, compared with 53 percent back then.
What has happened? How has public opinion become more fractured even as
scientists have moved toward consensus?
Views of science play a role, as does the willingness to take an economic hit to affect
the global temperature a degree or two. But Colorado shows how the divide on
climate has become as tribal as politics itself.
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The community solar farm in Fort Collins is just one example of the way that city in Northern Colorado is taking
a lead on climate change solutions. The city has reduced per capita greenhouse gas emissions by 18 percent
since 2005, and has a plan to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Amanda Paulson/The Christian Science Monitor
In Larimer, the Kellie Falbos look on climate change with a mounting sense of
moral urgency, determined to save what they see as a planet in crisis. While in
Weld, the Steve Wellses sigh at the headlong expansion of the federal government –
from healthcare to Western land rights – and worry that climate change is just the
next Trojan horse.
It’s not that there are no Americans in the middle. Far from it, actually, and there
are efforts here and elsewhere to knit together the vast middle into a political force.
Yet for the Americans driving the climate conversation, the issue has become a
badge of belonging – a statement on which worldview they accept – as much as a
matter of policy.
“If they understand the science or believe in the science, I don’t think that’s super
necessarily important,” says Jack Zhou, a Duke University PhD who has surveyed
climate attitudes. “The facts of the matter matter a little less and some of the
identity measures matter a little bit more.”
• • •
On his ranch near Greeley, Mr. Wells sits inside his “office,” an enormous
warehouse filled with hunting trophies, flags, eagle images, rodeo posters, and
mementos: a 1927 green beer-delivery truck, a guitar signed by rock star and
Second Amendment crusader Ted Nugent, and a ’92 Harley Davidson low-rider in a
glass case.
His understanding of the climate and of climate science comes from the numerous
articles he reads every day, sifting through them “to search for the truth.”
What strikes him as convincing? Articles about emissions from Mt. St. Helens
influencing climate more than humans (a claim opposed by most scientists), and
ones detailing NASA data showing the Antarctic ice cap is growing (a paradox that
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scientists acknowledge, though most say it is insignificant in terms of broad
warming trends).
The articles fit into a broader pattern of partisan distrust. He recounts what he sees
as a litany of Democratic failures and distortions on energy and the environment.
“Jimmy Carter said we’d be out of oil by the year 2000 and we were headed for an
ice age, and that didn’t pan out,” Wells says. “Then it was acid rain. Then we started
the global warming thing, and now we’ve started on climate change. You need to
follow the money to figure out the truth. If you look at Al Gore’s net worth since he
got out of office versus now, he’s made a lot of money with this so-called energy
issue.”
It’s not surprising to find such skepticism in Weld County, which is solidly
Republican. Action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions here can seem like a direct
shot at a major source of its prosperity: Weld County has more oil and gas
wells than any other Colorado county by a wide margin.
In a county with 63 people per square mile, no one is waiting for Google to move
in. Ranching and farming and drilling are pretty much all Weld County has got.
That, and an independent streak. In 2013, some of its county commissioners
proposed a plan to secede from Colorado and – along with several other rural
counties – form a new state.
Not everyone in Weld County has oil-well income. The county is also home to some
major manufacturing tied to solar and wind energy – renewable sources that are
broadly popular in red and blue America alike.
But for residents like Roni Sylvester, owner of a Weld County farmhouse, climate
change elicits only one response.
“I think it’s a complete and total hoax,” she says.
In one study he conducted, Mr. Zhou of Duke tested whether Republicans might
show more support for curbing emissions if the rationale was couched in
conservative ideals such as national security or safeguarding the economy. Instead,
opposition to climate action actually hardened. It was seen as a liberal issue,
period.
Ms. Sylvester has a website devoted to property-rights issues and is deeply angry
about the many ways she sees environmental regulations infringing on those rights:
through the Endangered Species Act, the creation of national monuments, and
climate change.
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To her, it’s the “climate activists” who have the science wrong and the “climate
realists” like herself who are holding the line on bad policies, such as cap and trade,
in which carbon emissions are limited but allowances can be traded among
businesses.
“I see things like cap and trade as only a means to further enrich those who are
trying to implement it,” she says. “The flip side is that I’m 1000 percent for
research, and I really, really encourage and want research. But I want scientific,
untainted by politics, research.”
“First you say you can’t farm there, ‘You might hurt the sage grouse, which needs
tall grass, and the piping plover needs short grass,’ and then you deny [farmers] the
opportunity to generate income and support their family, then you come along and
say, ‘Oh, you can’t frack there either,’ and it's always based on emotion instead of
solid science.”
Roni Sylvester stands in front of several of the gas wells drilled on the 200-acre farm where she and her
husband live in LaSalle, Colo. The farm has been in her husband's family for four generations. Ms. Sylvester is
a property-rights advocate who believes that climate change is a hoax, and is bothered by the many inroads
into property rights that she says are caused by environmental legislation and activists.
Amanda Paulson/The Christian Science Monitor
What seems most solid to Bill Jerke, who has lived his whole life on a 160-acre farm
just south of Greeley, is that costs will go up if the climate activists get their way.
Climate change is happening, he says, but wouldn’t it be better to adapt?
“If we were to change our industrialized habits to the tune of being able to make a
major impact, it would destroy civilization to a degree,” says Mr. Jerke, who heads a
local group that educates people about the benefits of the oil and gas industry. “I
happen to like A/C and being able to move around. I’m not going to turn all that off
because someone thinks they might be able to change global warming to the tune of
a degree or two over a century.”
His view is telling. Even among Americans who believe in climate change, the
willingness to pay to address it is all over the map.
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“I think people might have a nominal, ‘Yeah, I want a cleaner environment,’ ” says
Zhou. “But then when you push them on that or give them tradeoffs, then the
environment does not fare well.”
About 42 percent say they wouldn’t pay even a dollar a month, according to a
September poll conducted by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of
Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. But 57
percent of respondents say they’d pay some monthly fee to curb emissions (often
$20 or $50).
• • •
Those are the people that Falbo wants to reach.
She founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable living, saying she saw a need for
education about the individual actions people can take to live more sustainably.
“The people who hear about climate change and choose to ignore it – if we can
reach 10 percent of those people who think they don’t make a difference, and show
they can, that will have impact,” Falbo says. “It gets discouraging, but I’m hopeful.”
Raised to love the outdoors during her youth in Oregon, Falbo’s lifelong
environmental ethic has guided her toward climate activism.
“It was always ingrained in me that you’ve got to take care of the Earth, and she’ll
take care of you,” she says.
That is Larimer County talk.
Cross the county line from Weld County, and it’s not like you’ve entered
Massachusetts. Larimer isn’t liberal in the way that, say, Boulder County, to its
south, is. This is farm country, too.
But at the heart of Larimer County is Fort Collins, home of Colorado State
University, and the city feels like a college town, from the funky cafes along Linden
Street to the backpack-toting Millennials who use the county as their trailhead into
the Rockies.
Oil and gas development is here, it just isn’t nearly as important.
So what emerges is a green tinge tempered by heartland pragmatism, with more
carrots than sticks behind greenhouse-gas reductions.
Fort Collins has developed policies that have curbed per-capita emissions 18
percent since 2005. By 2050, the city aims to be carbon neutral. Voters even
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supported a five-year ban on fracking, but the state Supreme Court recently ruled it
unconstitutional.
For many climate-change believers, concern about global warming has been
growing in recent years as they’ve soaked up scientific reports about a melting
Arctic.
Jackie Kozak Thiel, for one, has made climate change a personal priority for years.
But fresh urgency came recently when she became a mother.
For her, and many others, that makes climate change action a moral calling.
“The intergenerational equity piece of sustainability has new meaning when you’re
looking at someone you love so much, who will be your age when you meet these
[carbon] goals,” says Ms. Kozak Thiel, who is Fort Collins’s chief sustainability
officer. “That’s the city we want to deliver to her. And casting the compassionate net
beyond your own blood, that’s the future you want to deliver to all young people.”
• • •
Back in Weld County, that idea resonates with Greeley Mayor Tom Norton, a
Republican.
For more than a decade, he served in Colorado’s legislature, even spending time as
president of the state senate, and he remembers thinking that legislators talking
about climate change in the early 1990s were “completely nuts.”
But now, he says, “my opinion has changed.”
“We need to think as long term as we can imagine, and be very thoughtful about
what we leave for our children,” he adds.
He’s hardly become a liberal climate crusader. A lot of his fellow Republicans’
concerns about big government crushing small business still ring true to him.
Climate change, he says, is “something we need to deal with, and yes, we need to
pay attention to it, but I’m such a property-rights and economic person that I think
we have to pay a lot more attention to the cost to the general public of what we’re
saying we need to do, and regulating people out of business is not the way to solve
the problem.”
But he thinks it's time for politicians and others to start thinking about
sustainability measures that make sense.
That puts him in America’s murky middle on climate change – believing in the
problem but not energized about the most aggressive prescriptions.
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“People toward the extremes are yelling louder,” says Jon Krosnick, a Stanford
University political scientist who studies climate attitudes. “And also the Congress
has become much more polarized in this way.”
That dynamic is fed not just by politics, but also by the public’s limited bandwidth.
“The science and technology around climate change is pretty difficult to
understand,” says Professor Krosnick. “And it’s hard enough in the political arena
to get people to think about the things that are happening that affect them today.”
But there is opportunity for common ground.
Bill Jerke, standing on the Weld County farm that has been in his family since 1945. Mr. Jerke, who directs a
local group that educates people about the benefits of oil and gas, isn't concerned about climate change as an
issue.
Amanda Paulson/The Christian Science Monitor
In Weld County, Carl Erickson is running for commissioner as a Democrat. He
holds drastically different opinions about energy, fracking, and climate change than
many of his neighbors do.
So he focuses on things they can agree on – the importance of oil and gas
companies becoming more responsible with their well siting and technology, for
instance, which he’s beginning to see some companies do, or focusing on issues of
air quality and water, things most people in a rural area can agree are important.
“There are the polarized groups that are going further away, but there’s a vast
majority in the center that are starting to actually listen and think and that’s the
group we really have to [engage],” Mr. Erickson says.
Meanwhile in Larimer County, George Wallace sees the issue from a global as well
as local perspective.
A retired natural-resources professor, Mr. Wallace is now an organic-farm owner
surrounded by conservative neighbors. Mostly, he doesn’t engage on political issues
with them, outside of some lighthearted teasing.
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But he laments the degree to which America has become isolated into what he calls
“tribal information sources,” leaving less civility, discourse, and willingness to
engage respectfully. Still, he’s determined not to give up.
“We live well, and it’s real easy to say, ‘Don’t worry about it’ – not to attempt
personal lifestyle changes very much,” he says. “But I know [we’ll] be faced with
enormous challenges. Water’s going to be one of them, and food. I can’t help but
look at it beyond just my own family. Worldwide we’ll have some huge challenges.”
So, like Falbo, Wallace looks for small ways he and his wife can help: serving
actively in civic groups, driving a Toyota Prius when they go to town, not using
commercial fertilizer or pesticides, which require energy to produce.
And he looks for ways to build bridges.
The partner with whom he trains park rangers on mules and horses in the
backcountry is far to the right. So Wallace manages to find small areas of overlap
where they can talk about issues like climate change.
“One way we can talk about it is the forests,” he says. “I take the things that are
right in front of us, forest health and snowpack and runoff, and we can talk about
that.”
He adds: “You’ve got to use the connections you have with people.”
• Staff writer Zack Colman contributed to this report
http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/1012/Why-climate-change-divides-us