In October, experts on climate change hailing from backgrounds in law and policy to business and media gathered at Vanderbilt Law School for the Bypassing Climate Polarization Conference, a two-day summit to address ways to engage the center-right on climate change.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy, and the Vanderbilt Law School Sally Shallenberger Brown EELU Fund financed the conference, which consisted of lectures and panels featuring diverse perspectives on how to address climate change.
The Importance of an Open Mind
Dean Chris Guthrie kicked off the two-day event with a discussion on the nature and challenges of polarization in today’s political climate. “[Polarization] is both anti-intellectual and uncivil,” he said. “It is corrosive to the work we need to do as a people to ensure that we live in a robust, civil society committed to tackling the greatest challenges of the day.
“At Vanderbilt, we have a longstanding commitment to addressing the challenges posed by our changing climate,” he continued. “This commitment is reflected in the work of our Energy, Environment and Land Use Program, our Climate Change Research Network, a new private climate governance lab we are launching here at the law school, and a new Vanderbilt University initiative.”
In his introductory remarks, Professor Michael Vandenbergh, the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law, EELU Co-Director, and a Carnegie Fellow, emphasized the importance of an open mind when dealing with the inconvenient truths behind climate problems and our political system.
He cited a Six Americas study which shows that the percentage of the population concerned by climate change has increased from mid-40s in 2008 to the mid-50s in the present day. Despite this jump, the constitutional design of the U.S. government means change is far from guaranteed. A “great division” in American society, he argued, contributed to a total collapse in major pollution statutes in the 1990s.
Both liberals and conservatives have issues with some commonly mentioned solutions to climate change, but Vandenbergh believes unique solutions, like a larger focus on household behaviors and the private sector, might bypass polarization.
The Psychology of Polarization
The keynote address was delivered by Jay Van Bavel, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University.
Van Bavel found that his research on polarization could be applied to many other areas after observing the dynamics of the two-party system during the 2008 election. He explained that, between 1949 and 2011, the divide between votes in the U.S. House of Representatives grew greatly. Bavel accredited this to a shift in mindset from a desire to get things done to a desire to support their own parties.
A paper he co-wrote with sociologists found hints of political sectarianism in the current U.S. landscape. Political sectarianism is an extreme form of divide where separate parties see the other side as, not just wrong, but evil.
“People hate the other party more than they like their own party,” Van Bavel explained. “This means that you are willing to look the other way if your party leader is corrupt, because you cannot let the other party get power because they’re evil.”
He mentioned several studies that demonstrated the wide-reaching consequences of this sectarianism. It has shortened Thanksgiving dinners. Parents approve less of their children’s partners for representing a different political group than a different race. Democrats and Republicans have been found to grossly overestimate the percentage of the other party that approve of basic moral wrongs such as tax fraud and animal abuse.
The more research and data that accumulates on climate change, the more polarized the U.S. public grows. Republican support for climate change as a top policy priority grows at a slower rate than Democrat support.
His research found that, while more liberals believe in climate change and support changes to policies, conservatives were just as willing to act as liberals. “In this case, taking action meant working hard to plant trees, but conservatives were just as likely to work as hard as liberals to plant trees,” said Van Bavel.
“It might be helpful to start by finding things where there is consensus and get people to take action on them,” Van Bavel said. “If you find yourself planting trees, you start to think of yourself more as somebody who cares about the environment. You’re more likely to engage in other actions and beliefs that align with that over time. This is called self-perception theory.”
He has found that “doom and gloom” messages, commonly posted to social media to raise awareness of climate change, have backfired. While they increased social media sharing by 12%, these messages reduced tree planting by 10%.
“You have to think about messages that are effective for your audience and also your goals,” Van Bavel said.
Van Bavel also discussed the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, wherein teams proposed interventions to reduce polarization that would be tested on a sample of 30,000 representative Americans. Of the 252 teams that applied, Bavel’s team was selected among the top 25 and deemed the third-most effective.
“We created a message about how Democrats and Republicans both care about democracy, and we found quotes among leaders from both parties that supported those norms,” Van Bavel explained. “[It] was the third most effective strategy … It also lasted multiple weeks.”
Van Bavel wanted the audience to take away five lessons from psychology:
- We are not as polarized as we think (don’t fall for false polarization)
- Remove partisan identities from discussions
- Find actions that are not polarized and move forward on those
- Use messages that are effective for your audience + goals (not “doom-erism”)
- Highlight common identities
Social and Behavioral Considerations
The first panel was moderated by Matt Burgess, assistant professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, and featured post-doctoral fellow Jane Miller of Vanderbilt, professor Leaf Van Boven of the University of Colorado, professor Sara Constantino of Stanford, and professor Lachlan Watkins of Vanderbilt.
Miller oversees the Carnegie-funded program of research within the Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt along with Vandenbergh. She discussed their program to develop a series of social-psychological-based messaging techniques designed to bypass political polarization to get more people on board with climate change mitigation.
A predecessor on the study conducted a literature review and identified four problems to target: lack of knowledge, group identities, solution aversion, and the 1%.
The program is testing social media messaging techniques to bypass political polarization, and individual actions and personal responsibility. They have found that the phrase used to describe “climate change” doesn’t influence individual actions or perceptions of responsibility, and emphasizing personal responsibility does not provoke individual actions.
Van Boven discussed the similarities between Democrats and Republicans in interpreting climate policy. He explained that the underlying psychologies of the groups are more similar than different.
“It’s exactly those similarities that many of us are talking about today [at the conference] that produce these polarized divides in the context of evaluating climate policy,” Van Boven said.
More Democrats believe in climate change than Independents and Republicans and believe in it more strongly, according to Van Boven’s research. However, on average, all three groups believe in climate change.
Van Boven and fellow researchers found that individuals of both parties are more likely to support policies if they are under the impression that their own party proposed the policy.
His research also demonstrated a point Van Bavel made in his address: people exaggerate partisan opposition.
Constantino argued that people’s tendencies to support one’s own group is promising for climate change policy, because aligned material incentives may lead to increased bipartisan support for policy and behavior change.
She cited research that demonstrated that Republicans were more willing to support climate change policies if they were exposed to more costly weather events (like wildfires) and more likely to adopt rooftop solar if electricity prices rose.
The big challenges to bypassing polarization for Constantino are polarization among elites with influence and public trust in institutions.
Vanderbilt Professor Lachlan Watkins wrapped up the conversation by discussing how goods themselves might have polarizing effects as well. His current work deals with measuring electric vehicle uptake and differences between political parties. Watkins cited a working paper by researchers at UC Berkeley that found the 10 most Democratic-leaning counties in the United States are responsible for 50% of the electric vehicles on the road.
Male conservatives tend to show the most opposition to electric vehicles, according to Watkins. However, higher reported ranges and lower prices resulted in less polarization. Watkins is optimistic that uptake will increase as the technology improves.
The Conservative Environmentalist
John Siegenthaler and Benji Backer discuss Backer’s book, The Conservative Environmentalist.
Growing up in Wisconsin, Backer felt a great connection to nature. The polarization over climate change in the 2016 debates motivated Backer to start a conservative environmental organization. His American Conservation Coalition (ACC) now has 55,000 members.
“There was no resource out there for people out there to understand what a conservative environmental approach was,” Backer said.
Backer detailed how conservatives used to support many environmental policies, including the creation of the EPA, as well as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Republican presidents like Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush championed environmentalism. He believes the current political divide over the topic was incited by Al Gore.
“He ran on the platform of climate change and winning votes on the environment,” Backer said. “It became a hot-button campaign issue … I think, unintentionally, it created the polarization that we have today.”
Backer reasoned that conservatives began to associate climate activism with Al Gore, which pushed them away from the topic politically. But conservatives do not care any less about the environment in Backer’s mind. “Conservatives love the environment just as much as anybody else,” Backer said.
The issue, as he sees it, comes down to political allegiance.
“It’s way easier to say that climate change isn’t real, and try to polarize America in that way, than actually come up with a substantive discussion,” Backer said. “It’s easier to just oppose the left, and that’s what it seems like [Trump] wants to do.”
“[The right is] scared of the left’s solutions, and the right has not proposed their own,” Backer continued. “What we’re trying to show conservatives is that you can be pro-climate, but also pro-economy and pro-America and pro-rural communities.”
Siegenthaler asked Backer if he believes there is a way to bypass climate polarization.
“I think that climate and the environment is the first issue that America could get back to rational dialogue on,” Backer said. “If you remove climate change from the equation, and how polarizing that topic is, every American in this country wants clean air and clean water.”
Siegenthaler then asked about the divide Backer has seen between rural and urban America on climate change.
“The rural communities don’t look to urban communities and realize how important they are for their livelihoods or vice versa,” Backer said. “When you have such a divide, it ends up being part of our politics.”
He also cited the gap in development between urban and rural companies as a contributing factor.
While Republicans and Democrats are divided on energy, Backer noted that they may not be as divided as they seem. “The highest states in terms of percentage of power coming from clean energy are Republican, conservative states,” Backer said. “[Republican states] love the jobs and the cheap energy.”
The incentive for green energy is not just a cleaner environment, but economic growth, which has led many green energy companies have moved their facilities to states like Texas and Wyoming.
This growth has encouraged a movement away from climate denial on the right.
“I would say that era [of climate denial] is done,” Backer said. “When [the ACC] started our work, there were two Republicans in Congress who acknowledged climate change being real, now there are over 150. There have been four bipartisan climate policies passed in the last two years.”
Measuring the Feasibility of Climate Change Interventions
The second panel, moderated by Jonathan Gilligan, an associate professor of Earth and Environmental Science at Vanderbilt University, featured Amanda Carrico of the University of Colorado-Boulder, MaryAnne Howland of the Global Diversity Leadership Exchange, Angel Hsu of UNC-Chapel Hill, and Renae Marshall of USCB-Bren. The group discussed the feasibility of implementing proposed climate change interventions.
Marshall presented results from a national survey experiment that analyzed the success of 800 state-level bills passed over a five-year period to see how different policies combined with decarbonization played with the public. The results showed that two-thirds and one-third of bills passed were passed in Democrat- and Republican-controlled legislatures, respectively; one-third were bipartisan proposals.
Democratic legislatures passed more bills that restricted choice and had a greater social focus, while both Democratic and Republican legislatures were responsible for bills that expanded choice, offered financial incentives, or were economically focused.
Carrico emphasized making work relevant for policy. She believes that changing behavior is more important than changing minds. Policies that make household energy use more efficient, for instance, are effective and do not threaten anybody’s values.
Howland noted that governments around the world have begun to enact stricter, mandatory regulations. She sees a need to emphasize the benefits of innovation and smooth transitions over rhetoric and doom-erism.
She noted that opening up new markets encourages more investment, benefits economies across the world, generates more sources of green energy, and improves the climate. New technologies like AI will power advancements “just like the steam engine did centuries ago.” Companies are already using AI to improve sustainability in areas like resource optimization and sustainability reporting.
Hsu expanded upon the role of AI in climate interventions. Nearly 1,200 companies on the Forbes 2000 and 149 countries have adopted plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions, yet very few of those plans are fully effective. He presentation indicated that only 5% of the companies’ plans meet all integrity criteria.
Hsu pointed to the climate-policy-trained chatbots and LLMs, such as ChatNetZero, that can help governments navigate research around topics of interest more readily.
Overcoming Barriers to the Energy Transition
The final panel, moderated by David Daniels Allen Chair of Law, Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor, and EELU Co-director J.B. Ruhl, featured Professor Hiba Baroud of the Vanderbilt School of Engineering, Peabody College doctoral candidate Mariah Caballero, Professor Michael Gerrard of Columbia Law School, and Professor David Hess of Vanderbilt. The experts discussed the transition to renewable energy and the multidimensional opposition the transition faces.
Baroud discussed the financial aspects of green infrastructure development. She cited a World Bank Group press release that reported $4.2 trillion could be saved by investing in more climate-resilient infrastructure, a concept she called “climate finance.”
A great barrier to increased support for climate finance is uncertainty. Baroud tries to remove this barrier by highlighting case studies that demonstrate how climate-resilient infrastructure generates cost savings while stimulating the economy through job creation.
Gerrard discussed state and local impediments to renewable energy generation. Local opposition, one of the greatest barriers to the energy transition, inspired Gerrard and colleagues at Columbia to form the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative, which provides pro bono legal representation to community groups that want local green infrastructure.
Gerrard and his colleagues found that local opposition has risen in recent years; 15% of U.S. counties have effectively halted wind and/or solar developments, and projects that do get off the ground face frequent delays and cancellations. They noted one workaround in New York’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which put an agency in charge of approving renewable energy projects instead of local council, successfully facilitating the development of more green energy projects.
Hess’s research deals with configurations of technology and policy that could trigger a higher level of bipartisan support. He cited local energy, distributed solar as property rights, reframing legislative proposals, local power organizations and gradual defection, water conservation and local economic development initiatives as solutions.
Caballero presented on individual action and learning from young conservatives; she noted that targeting individual behavior can be a very efficient and cost-effective means of reducing emissions. She will be conducting a study with colleagues on how young adults across the country think about climate action.
Climate Science in a Polarized Era
Andrew Dressler is a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M and the director for the center of climate studies. He discussed two thresholds— one where things “get really bad” and one where things “get really good”—and how he believes both are possible.
Dressler displayed a graph of temperature changes over the past 20,000 years. The graph showed that the current fossil fuel era will raise the average temperature of the globe by 3 degrees Celsius. Dressler pointed out how 5 degrees had previously been the difference between an ice age and an interglacial period. The ice age lasted 10,000 years, but the current temperature change will take place over just 200.
The temperature and the climate will not return to pre-fossil fuel numbers even after fossil fuels run out, according to Dressler. While the temperature changes may seem small and gradual to some, he argued that once a certain threshold is crossed, the consequences will be significant. Many feats of engineering are built on assumptions about the climate. Bridges, for instances, can expand slightly to accommodate changes in temperature. He cautioned that as the globe warms, these assumptions will be defied, and infrastructure will fail.
“We are right on the precipice of exiting the climate that a lot of the world was built for,” Dressler said. “A lot of our infrastructure was built in the 20th century, and it was built for a climate that is ceasing to exist.”
Dressler does see a potentially bright path forward. Once emissions cease, Dressler believes the world will stop warming. The technology to stop emissions at a reasonable cost also already exists.
Moreover, technology that can stop emissions exists at a reasonable cost. The price of solar energy, for example, has dropped significantly in recent years, from as much as $350 per megawatt hour in 2009 to approximately $35 today, making it the cheapest source of energy at the moment.
“The people building the [green] energy in Texas are not Birkenstock-wearing green beans, they are people who want to make money, and you make money by building solar and batteries,” Dressler said.
While renewable energy sources are intermittent, Dressler believes a reliable grid can still be built with them. Solar and wind power could be combined to increase minimum energy output, and natural gas could be used as an energy source when both solar and wind cannot meet the energy demands. This particularly energy solution would actually be cheaper than natural gas alone, according to Dressler.
“We are both on the brink of a disaster and on the brink of a solution,” Dressler concluded.
Finding Common Ground
Day two featured a panel moderated by former U.S. representative Jim Cooper that emphasized the importance of education, community engagement, and social justice in advancing effective climate action.
“The energy transition in this country did not have to be polarizing,” said Matt Beasley, Chief Commercial Officer and Board Director of Silicon Ranch. “It did not have to have anything but a positive impact.”
Dodd Galbreath, the Director and Associate Professor at Lipscomb University’s Institute for Sustainable Practice, echoed the need for focusing on renewable energy’s benefits outside of a political context, adding the need for “depolarizing the mind” when discussing and teaching environmental sustainability and climate change. He stressed the need to reframe climate education to avoid political biases, promoting a more open and inclusive dialogue.
Beasley and Galbreath’s words highlighted the missed opportunities for collaboration when climate action becomes a political battleground, encouraging aspiring climate activists and stakeholders alike to prioritize common goals and the benefit of the world as opposed to personal partisan agendas.
The panelists stressed how integral education and hands-on engagement are in making climate action accessible and relevant to all communities. Galbreath mentioned how his program “bypasses the classroom and gets out into communities who are doing sustainability successfully.” His dedication to experiential learning emphasizes the importance of first-hand exposure to sustainable practices in dismantling misconceptions and building unbiased understandings of sustainability.
Beasley shared that Silicon Ranch often avoids using polarizing terms like “climate,” instead focusing on showing “what solar can do” in terms of positive impact. By showcasing the tangible benefits of solar energy, climate initiatives can become more approachable and relatable for a broader audience.
Laurel Creech, Tennessee State Director at The Nature Conservancy, noted that The Nature Conservancy has had to balance their work in land protection with a pro-renewable stance that can occupy land and biodiverse oceans and coastal areas. She explained that The Nature Conservancy created a scientific, informative tool called Site Renewables Right, which “identifies areas with… different biodiverse areas that we do need to protect, leaving those that are not as significantly biodiverse [as] opportunities [for] renewable energy.” This scientific and evidence-based approach emphasizes how useful practical applications of scientific methods can be to successful and mindful climate action. “We want to make sure we’re very, very thoughtful about where we put renewables,” she said.
Country Music’s Role in Bridging the Great Divide
The conference concluded with a discussion between Melinda Newman, Billboard’s Executive Editor, and Grammy-nominated songwriter Jessie Jo Dillon on music’s ability to transcend personal and political beliefs and connect a diverse range of people.
Dillon emphasized how particularly live performances provide a platform for shared interests and experiences amongst listeners of various backgrounds: “One of the biggest things is going to see a live show, because I feel like that’s a perfect place to see how much music unites us.”
She discussed creating songs that evoke shared emotions between listeners. “I think the best songs, even if it’s not my particular story… there’s a piece of someone in it—and you can’t really quantify that or describe it,” she said. The inclusion of universal elements in her music allows audiences to see and feel themselves in the music, fostering a sense of collective identity for listeners and the high level of humanity that flourishes through country music. “We may not be able to agree on anything else, but … we can come together over music that moves us and brings us closer together.”
Beyond political or personal beliefs, authenticity, for Dillon, enables artists to forge deeper connections with listeners and between listeners while encouraging fans to engage with social issues that are important to them. The honest nature of country music reflects the genre’s ability to not only bridge the gap between different opinions but also motivate listeners to use their voices and create change.
