“Freedom” is often a Republican talking point, but Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to reclaim the Democratic concept as part of her presidential campaign. In a speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, he declared that “fundamental freedoms” are at stake in the November election, including “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that is fueling the climate crisis.” Zand. ”
A new study suggests that Harris may be in trouble if she tries to convince voters who are divided between her and former US President Donald Trump. New York University researchers found that framing climate action as patriotic and necessary to preserve the American “way of life” can increase support for climate action among people across the political spectrum in the United States.
“It’s encouraging to see politicians adopting this kind of language,” said Kathryn Mason, one of the study’s authors and a psychology researcher at New York University. Based on the study’s results, he said, the rhetoric “may bridge policy gaps on climate change.”
About 70 percent of Americans now support government action on climate change, including a majority of younger Republicans, according to a CBS News poll earlier this year. Experts have long suggested that appealing to Americans’ sense of patriotism could turn them on.
The framework has been in place under President Joe Biden, who has pushed policies to produce electric cars and chargers domestically “so America’s great road trip can be electrified.” Harris reiterated that approach to climate and energy in Tuesday’s presidential debate with Trump, emphasizing efforts to make “American-made” electric cars and turning a question about fracking into a plea for less reliance on “foreign oil.”
Mason’s new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the largest study to date of the effects of patriotic language on climate change, involving nearly 60,000 participants in 63 countries. Americans read a message declaring that the pro-environmentalist was patriotic to “preserve the nation’s natural resources” and “keep the United States the way it should be.”
The text is illustrated with photos of the American flag blowing in the wind, beautiful national parks and weather-related impacts, such as Houston flooded after Hurricane Harvey and the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in an orange haze from wildfire smoke. Reading it increased people’s level of belief in climate change, their willingness to share information about climate change on social media, and their support for environmental protection policies, such as increasing carbon taxes and expanding public transportation. became.
The researchers wanted to test a psychological theory that people often defend the status quo, even if it is imperfect, because they want stability, not uncertainty and conflict. “This mindset is a huge obstacle to tackling big problems like climate change because it causes people to downplay the problem and resist the changes necessary to protect the environment,” Mason said.
For decades, environmentalists have urged people to make sacrifices for the greater good—to bike instead of drive, eat more vegetables instead of meat, and turn down the thermostat in the winter. But Frances Bloomfield, a communications professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said asking people to give things up can lead to a backlash. He said that the framework in the study turns on its head. This is not asking people to make sacrifices or make radical changes, but actually doing things for the environment to prevent a radical change in environmental catastrophe.
Bloomfield, who has studied how to find common ground with conservatives on climate change, was not surprised by the study showing that appeals to patriotism work in the United States. In other countries, however, the results were less clear—patriotic language had positive effects in Brazil, France, and Israel, but the opposite in other countries, including Germany, Belgium, and Russia.
Bloomfield urged caution in deploying this strategy in the real world, as it might be seen as an attempt to manipulate conservatives through aggression. “I think patriotism or any kind of framed message can definitely backfire if it’s not seen as a valid link in values,” he said.
Talking about a global environmental problem in an overly patriotic and competitive way can be another pitfall. Earlier this year, a study in the journal Environmental Communication found that a “green nationalist” frame — which pits countries against each other in terms of environmental progress — reduced public support for policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Natalia Bogado, the author of that study and a psychology researcher in Germany, said the new study in PNAS “makes no reference to the key features of nationalism, but only briefly to a patriotic duty” that may be partially Explain the different results.
However, if implemented intelligently, appeals to regional loyalty can lead to support for environmental causes. Consider the “Don’t Work With Texas” campaign that began in the late 1980s to reduce litter along the state’s highways. It was aimed at young men who casually took beer cans out of their truck windows and believed that littering was a “given right”. Rather than challenging their identity, the campaign channeled their Texan pride with stunning results: litter on the roads was reduced by 72% in just four years. Today, the phrase has become synonymous with Texas snobbery—so much so that many have forgotten that it was originally an anti-littering message.
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