Indivisible is right: Emphasize health care, not climate change

The climate change issue divides Democrats.  How pure is pure enough? 

Indivisible is doing exactly the right thing in emphasizing health care, not climate change.   I write this as a person who thinks that climate change is an important matter facing the country.   It is undeniable that species sometimes ruin their own habitats.   Yeast does it in fermentation, humans did it at Easter Island.  We killed off the passenger pigeons and the dodo bird and nearly killed all the bison.  

It is what humans do.  We use up the easy, convenient resource.  We put wells next to septic tanks then feel surprised and angry that the well gets polluted.  We build houses next to the ocean or in flood plains and then act surprised when they get flooded.

A commenter on an earlier blog expressed a concern that Indivisible was failing to focus on the really important issue facing mankind.  She understands that humans are changing our environment and changing our climate and that this is a great hazard.   (I agree.  In a future blog I will write about the North Atlantic, the thermo-saline cycle, and triggering an Ice Age.  But today I will discuss political craft and strategy and message.)

Here is how I responded to her question, lightly edited:

County map:  Clinton vs. Trump

"I realize that the climate issue is a huge issue for a great many people, but I don't think it is a crossover, widen-the-base issue. In fact, I think it is the opposite: one of those issues that motivates the base and actually estranges the non base. Here is why.

1. The problems brought up by climate change are potentially catastrophic but are hard to calculate and very mixed in their application. It could well mean more rain the the California Central Valley--or the opposite. It could mean less snow in the Upper Midwest, or more snow. The people at greatest risk of extreme weather events, e.g. tornados or rising sea levels are people who are aggressively in denial in Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas for tornadoes and in low-lying Atlantic coastal areas.  It is hard to know if anyone really gets hurt, and most of the problems will show up in fifty or a hundred years.  Bottom line: remote and uncertain problems for our grandchildren are less salient and measurable than current problems.

2. Lots of people see the move to natural gas from coal as, on balance, a good thing for the environment both here in the US and worldwide, especially China. Fracking is "bad" according to some environmentalists, yet it almost certainly reduces coal use, which is probably worse in its effects, and it certainly improves the US foreign policy, giving us more freedom not to be hostage to Middle East theocracies.  Energy independence from the Middle East is a good thing.  Fracking has problems, and even people in Oklahoma with its new earthquakes admit it, but the situation is complicated and there are pros and cons.   Walden said pipelines moving natural gas are a net good, not bad, and he cited the value of natural gas and the pipeline FOR the environment.

Republicans don't relate to environmentalists

3. Preciousness. By that word I mean there is a kind of consciousness by my environmentalist friends where they insist on environmental niceties because their own lives allow it. For example, perhaps they don't farm, so they are comfortable with regulations regarding farmer use of fertilizers, pesticides, GMO crops, etc. They may live in urban areas and like urban facilities like mass transit, public sewerages, municipal water systems.  However there are in fact a great many people who really prefer their own well and septic tank. There are people who do not care about organic and in fact prefer their fruit to have fewer pest blemishes than one sometimes sees on organic fruit.  In Oregon they or their family members log trees.  They see cutting tress for lumber as a good thing, making possible good jobs and putting a natural resource to work.   They point to the hypocrisy of people who live in wooden houses and type anti-logging letters to the editor on a wooden desk.

That difference in consciousness shows up in how very badly Hillary and Democrats generally do in rural areas. Those rural voters who resent people from the city telling them how they should live cost us the Senate, the House, and the White House, so this is not a little thing; it is a big thing. For a lot of voters climate change seems like a "really nice thing" but not an important thing and not as important as a job now.

Losing your health care access is real, now, and a pressing matter. Sea levels in Miami in 2150 is a remote problem, and if the tornados in Texas are worse, well, that is their problem, not ours.

That is why I emphasize health care."

Conservative media calls "Hypocrisy!"

Democrats need to decide what big message they are comfortable with.   Democrats have become the "environmentalist" party and Republicans have become comfortable becoming the oppose-the-environmentalists party.   Republicans do not say they hate a clean environment.  Instead, they argue that the regulations that might achieve it are over-broad, mistaken, too severe, etc.   I watched Republican crowds stand and cheer presidential candidates who condemn the EPA.

Democrats need to watch out.  Sometimes environmental protection is understood by people to be anti job and utterly unrealistic.  One cannot have wooden houses without cutting down trees.  Even a Prius uses fossil fuels.   There is nobody who is pure and without compromise and hypocrisy.  Al Gore built a very, very big house, as Republicans point out gleefully.  If Democrats want the votes of rural Americans they need to be comfortable addressing their concerns about the wise use of natural resources.  Urban, college-town environmentalists dominate the Democratic Party debate on this issue and they are the generous donors who help Democrats in contested primaries win.  But a Democrat who seems just right for Cambridge or Berkeley or Madison or Ann Arbor runs the severe risk of losing Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and therefore the White House.   

Some environmentalists will call compromise and accommodation "selling out," and they dominate Democratic primaries.  (Senator Ron Wyden is routinely condemned by some Democrats for that very thing.  He is good but not good enough.  Throw out the lousy traitor!) But there is another way for a Democrat to think of this.  It is not an issue of selling out or staying pure.  It is an issue of representation.

There are competing values at stake here.   On one side it is the obligation to ourselves and future generations to be good stewards of the earth: the environmental value.   On the other side is the obligation to serve the needs of the people in a democracy, the value of representation and just power, derived from the consent of the governed.   

Some environmentalists are skeptical of the second value, saying it is simply a matter of wanting to secure or retain office.  ("He will say anything to get elected!")  But the other value is principled as well: self government is fragile and important, and the people closest to those resources have an interest in how they are used.  It is easier for people in the cities, away from the resources, to say to lock them up, but the cities use the resources from a distance, sanitized from the realities of how they are made.  I liken it to the meat eater who morally disapproves of slaughterhouses.  They have opinions but sometimes lack real skin in the game.

Politicians owe the people they hope to represent their respect, period, full stop.