How little do elected officials care about climate change? Look no further than a recent US Senate hearing about the biggest threats facing the country, where lawmakers asked a single question about global warming during the entire three-hour event.
Sadly, this hearing occurred just days after the world’s leading scientific body on climate change warned that the world has a mere dozen years to avoid catastrophic impacts.
Despite the urgency of the climate crisis, getting elected officials in the United States to commit to genuine solutions has been slow going, to say the least.
Nathaniel Stinnett has some idea of why and what to do about it.
Stinnett worked for years as a consultant and advisor on political campaigns and for advocacy nonprofits. A few years ago he noticed that polls showed that climate change and environmental issues were usually last among priorities for likely voters.
But that’s not because Americans don’t care about those issues, he says. Polls of American adults show that tens of millions do care deeply about those issues. They’re just not good voters compared to people who vote on issues like immigration, which is the top priority among voters in this year’s midterm election.
So in 2015 Stinnett launched the Environmental Voter Project with the goals of identifying environmental advocates who don’t vote and then turning them out for any and all elections.
The group calculated that close to 16 million environmentalists didn’t vote in the 2014 midterms, and around 10 million didn’t vote in 2016’s presidential election.
It’s hoped that the more people vote, the more action will finally be taken by the politicians who get elected. “More facts or fancy arguments are not going to convince politicians to lead on climate change,” he says. “All they care about is getting enough votes, so that’s all we care about.”
In just a few years of effort, the…