Why don't many of the Republicans in the House and Senate believe in climate change?

Question

In their foundations, they support the laissez faire (economics) but they don't accept the green economy. Are there any logical reasons of why most Republicans (not all) refuse to acknowledge climate change? Are their ideas supported by any ideology, movements, lobbies?

Answer 1

I'm not American, and would only sometimes vote Republican if I were, so your question is not directly addressed to me. Nonetheless the debate about climate change crosses national borders so I believe I can still contribute a useful answer on one of your points.

You write, "...they support the laissez faire (economics) but they don't accept the green economy."

It's not "but", it's "therefore". The green economy arises mostly as a result of government action, the opposite of laissez faire. The main drivers of the green economy are:

• government subsidies to companies providing services that are believed to be environmentally desirable, e.g. solar power, wind power, insulation in houses, recycling, research into green technology;

• jobs created in the above industries and jobs created to ensure compliance with green regulation;

• the curtailment by taxation or legislation of activities that are seen as environmentally undesirable (e.g. coal mining), which pushes investment into activities seen as desirable.

A believer in laissez faire by definition thinks that utility is maximised if the market is allowed free play.

So they are very likely to think that the "green job creation" as a result of government subsidy is outweighed by the jobs and wealth destroyed by the taxation necessary to pay for the subsidy. Jobs created simply in order to fulfil environmental laws will be seen as still worse, as harmful to everybody but the job-holder. (All economists, not just believers in laissez-faire, agree that to all but the job-holder jobs are a cost not a benefit. Often a necessary cost, but still a cost.) As for jobs, so for wealth and utility generally.

Another reason for many of those Republicans who believe in the free market (which not all Republicans do) to think that the green economy is incompatible with laissez-faire is that many of their opponents say so too.

For instance, the well-known activist Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate is described in the following terms on its US Amazon page:

"The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems."

The anti-capitalist tone of much climate justice activism leads pro-capitalist people to suspect that the danger from climate change is being exaggerated, consciously or unconsciously, as an excuse to justify political measures they oppose.

Answer 2

There's a particularly important phenomenon at work here: things are harder to believe in if they're costly. For example, someone may say "I'm 100% sure my sportsball team will win that game," but that same person will probably be unlikely to make a $1000 bet at 100:1 odds against them that their team will win. When believing something has costs people become less sure and more sceptical.

I would argue that believing in (and believing we must take action to solve) catastrophic anthropomorphic climate change is much more costly to someone with a conservative world-view than with to someone with a more progressive or liberal world-view. Note I said conservative not Republican, the Republican party is an organization with one goal, win elections, conservatism is political philosophy which makes up one constituency likely to vote Republican and thus influences the positions of Republican lawmakers.

Conservatives see value in the existing social order. Hybrid cars and eco-friendly light-bulbs will not change atmospheric CO2 levels significantly. What will is rapidly switching almost all power from fossil fuels to renewable sources and nuclear power. This transition could fundamentally change or risk the destruction of the current societal order. Billions to trillions of dollars in equipment and human expertise related to fossil fuels would become drastically less useful and hundreds of thousands to millions of people would have to change jobs (just petroleum extraction and coal mining is 200,000 jobs). Communities would change as people moved. Furthermore, renewable energy is more expensive (especially in the short run during the transition) and people's standard of living would be effected. All of this screams change, and conservatives are much less likely than those of other philosophies to embrace such change.

Conservatives are distrustful of governmental power, and it would take a lot of governmental power to change atmospheric CO2 levels. Conservatives see a huge risk of corruption and special interests gaining power as the clumsy hand of government attempts to remake the energy market. Progressives are much more comfortable with using governmental power and see it as much more efficient and effective.

Conservatives are distrustful of the international community. Conservatives have little faith that the entire world would be willing to simultaneously make the cutbacks necessary to actually have a significant effect on atmospheric C02 levels. They worry that a "cheating" nation could gain significant advantage militarily and economically from consuming fossil fuels and jeopardize the global order and peace. Many progressives have much more faith in the power of organizations like the UN and diplomacy to resolve these issues.

For these reasons it's much more costly for a conservative to believe in and want to stop climate change than a progressive. Despite the wealth of macro statistical data, there is no airtight reproducible double blind experiment proving the effect of mankind on the climate. So there is room for doubt both in climate change's existence and especially in degree to which man is responsible for climate change and accuracy of predictions of what will happen to the climate (which are much more difficult and many conservatives perceive as having been wrong before). Given this room for doubt, many conservatives deny climate change outright or remain agnostic saying something like "it's probably real, but I'm reluctant to take massive policy action without stronger evidence."

Note, I'm not saying these beliefs are correct or articles are fair and unbiased; I'm just trying to explain a position.

Answer 3

It is impossible to answer this question for every Republican; each may have their own reasons for the determination they've come to. So, the following answer is a representation of the reasoning, in the circles I travel, that the prospect of man-made climate change is questionable. There are four main points, highlighted below with amplifying information. They will be followed by a summary.

History of Data Manipulation
There are two significant incidents where it has been revealed after the fact that those developing the man made climate change narrative have made demonstrated lapses in integrity. First was the Hockey Stick graph, first released in 1999 (Mann, Bradley, and Hughes). It was subsequently weighed down with challenges to the statistical methods it used and a critique questioning the choice to minimize the statistical influence of the Medieval Warming Period, the latter highlighted by the differences in the IPCC reports between 1990 and 2001. The integrity of the work was further tainted by the hacking of climate research email servers which provided a perspective of conspiracy (more later). More recently, the choice of NOAA to 'adjust' recorded temperature information, lowering earlier records and raising current records, furthers the perspective of manipulation.

Data Not Available for Review
In addition to the question of data integrity, there is an ongoing complaint that many of the reports and news articles present the results of an review, without providing the source information and methodology for evaluation. With a Bachelors in Mathematics and a Masters in Systems Engineering, not having access to the raw data increases the skeptical approach.

Active Conspiracies
While some level of confidentiality and opaqueness is expected in scientific exploration, the lengths that the proponents for climate change goes to doesn't help the perception that something untoward is going on behind the scenes. This is worsened be previously referenced release of emails from within a climate change organization that reflected those concerns.

Abandonment of the Scientific Process
The line that creates the most cringing response is "the science is settled," with the impression being that it has been proven that man made actions have an influence on climate change. That isn't how science works. It far easier to prove the negative, that a thing doesn't exist, than to ever prove a thing does exist. Consider the level of proof required for even the simplest of scientific claims. In this case, the intention that the exhausts of man made technologies has an influence on climate change (again, more later), requires an in depth understanding of a multitude of factors, which non-exhaustively includes: solar cycles, irregularities of the planets orbit, irregularities of the planets rotation, the cyclical nature of prevailing winds, interaction of the moon on the tides and the resulting effects, irregularities of the planet's core hydraulic rotation, shifting of the continental shelves, variation of volcanic heating influences on the oceans, and many, many more. Further, the claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, which is held true in order to curtail it's production, is questionable. An increased availability of carbon dioxide would encourage an expanse in plant growth.

Summary
Climate Change does exist; there are cyclical pattern that can be demonstrated in what weather does. That said, I can't give much credence to the claims that man kind is at direct fault for it.

Answer 4

For the record, I am neither a "believer" nor a "skeptic" on the question of man-made climate change. I am unresolved on it.

It is of course possible that contributions from fossil fuel companies have successfully influenced Republican decision-making in Congress away from what it would otherwise be. But the existence of the contributions by itself doesn't prove anything. Perhaps it is the other way around, that these companies merely support those who already favor their positions.

Going beyond the "follow the money" theory, there are several major factors as I see it as to why a Republican in Congress, or a Republican voter, who does not have a PhD in a relevant scientific field, might not accept the "consensus" on climate change we've heard so much about.

• How can it be known that the earth is warming? This is not a small thing to claim to "know". Temperature varies wildly in any place as time passes. Weather has been recorded at a useful level of precision for something like 150 years now. So how can it possibly be proven that a small upward trend in global averages is taking place on a scale of tens of thousands of years? More specifically, what does it mean for this idea to be "proven" or "disproven"? What are the criteria? In all I have read on the subject, I have never seen any serious discussion of the criteria for proof or disproof - except by climate skeptics.
• How can it be known that any warming is caused by human activity? This is also not a small thing to claim to know. Especially given that natural events have been known to suddenly and drastically alter earth's climate at least for a time. In order to be considered scientific, an idea must be falsifiable. And again, only climate skeptics seem to openly discuss this very important question. From believers, the answer seems to be, "trust the scientists", or worse, "you must believe the earth is flat too".
• Is the research behind the findings free of bias? The Obama administration made climate change a top issue, even tasking unrelated agencies with climate change related initiatives, and Obama himself proclaimed "the debate is settled" as a way to shame anyone who disagrees with the conclusion. Professional scientists must secure funding to continue their work, and since government is the source of much of the climate science funding, this necessarily puts political pressure on scientists to produce results favoring climate change. And in such a cultural setting, could a PhD candidate who is very open about his/her climate skepticism possibly be awarded a doctorate in this field? If not, perhaps such a person would be labelled incompetent, but to me that could just as easily be groupthink. Frankly, even the OP carries the apparent attitude that disagreement implies lower intelligence. At the very least, this bias fully explains how 90+% of scientists in the field might agree on the climate change question, without at all strengthening the argument itself.
• Is the research behind the findings free of error and fraud? We've all heard by now about the Climategate story. Partly in aftermath of it, there is now a lot of chatter out there about the altering of raw temperature data in a way that happens to suit the apparently-desired outcome, and even in one case deleting the raw data keeping only the altered data, which if true does not sound very scientific to me.

But perhaps most suspicious of all:

• The "solution" to human-caused climate change seems to be giving the government, or even the UN, total control. To me this is a troubling non sequitur. Another answer references the book This Changes Everything. This kind of messaging, which is all too common, makes it all seem like a scam, a Big Lie intended to change free-market Western republics into totalitarian Communist societies. This policy response seems especially dissonant considering that China, long a Communist country, appears to be contributing more than the United States to environmental problems lately. If total state control over the energy economy is the answer, why isn't China a green paradise by now?

Answer 5

As reported in The New York Times in 2017, the more education Republicans have, the less they tend to believe in climate change.

As of 2017, this may be because of the "hiatus" in warming that was not predicted by climate models. Here's a snippet of what the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2014 / current) included on that subject:

Box TS.3 | Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years

The observed [global mean surface temperature (or GMST)] has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years (Box TS.3, Figure 1a, c). Depending on the observational data set, the GMST trend over 1998–2012 is estimated to be around one third to one half of the trend over 1951–2012. For example, in [the observational data set called] HadCRUT4 the trend is 0.04°C per decade over 1998–2012, compared to 0.11°C per decade over 1951–2012. The reduction in observed GMST trend is most marked in [northern hemisphere] winter. Even with this ‘hiatus’ in GMST trend, the decade of the 2000s has been the warmest in the instrumental record of GMST. Nevertheless, the occurrence of the hiatus in GMST trend during the past 15 years raises the two related questions of what has caused it and whether climate models are able to reproduce it. {2.4.3, 9.4.1; Box 9.2; Table 2.7}

Fifteen-year-long hiatus periods are common in both the observed and CMIP5 historical GMST time series. However, an analysis of the full suite of CMIP5 historical simulations (augmented for the period 2006–2012 by RCP4.5 simulations) reveals that 111 out of 114 realizations show a GMST trend over 1998–2012 that is higher than the entire HadCRUT4 trend ensemble (Box TS.3, Figure 1a; CMIP5 ensemble mean trend is 0.21°C per decade). This difference between simulated and observed trends could be caused by some combination of (a) internal climate variability, (b) missing or incorrect [radiative forcing], and (c) model response error.

The IPCC report finishes that section with this summary:

In summary, the observed recent warming hiatus, defined as the reduction in [global mean surface temperature, or GMST,] trend during 1998–2012 as compared to the trend during 1951–2012, is attributable in roughly equal measure to a cooling contribution from internal variability and a reduced trend in external forcing (expert judgement, medium confidence). The forcing trend reduction is due primarily to a negative forcing trend from both volcanic eruptions and the downward phase of the solar cycle. However, there is low confidence in quantifying the role of forcing trend in causing the hiatus, because of uncertainty in the magnitude of the volcanic forcing trend and low confidence in the aerosol forcing trend. {Box 9.2}

Almost all CMIP5 historical simulations do not reproduce the observed recent warming hiatus. There is medium confidence that the GMST trend difference between models and observations during 1998–2012 is to a substantial degree caused by internal variability, with possible contributions from forcing error and some CMIP5 models overestimating the response to increasing [greenhouse gas] forcing. The CMIP5 model trend in [effective radiative forcing, or ERF,] shows no apparent bias against the AR5 best estimate over 1998–2012. However, confidence in this assessment of CMIP5 [effective radiative forcing] trend is low, primarily because of the uncertainties in model aerosol forcing and processes, which through spatial heterogeneity might well cause an undetected global mean [effective radiative forcing] trend error even in the absence of a trend in the global mean aerosol loading. {Box 9.2}

The causes of both the observed GMST trend hiatus and of the model–observation GMST trend difference during 1998–2012 imply that, barring a major volcanic eruption, most 15-year GMST trends in the near-term future will be larger than during 1998–2012 (high confidence; see Section 11.3.6 for a full assessment of near-term projections of GMST). The reasons for this implication are fourfold: first, anthropogenic GHG concentrations are expected to rise further in all RCP scenarios; second, anthropogenic aerosol concentration is expected to decline in all RCP scenarios, and so is the resulting cooling effect; third, the trend in solar forcing is expected to be larger over most near-term 15-year periods than over 1998–2012 (medium confidence), because 1998–2012 contained the full downward phase of the solar cycle; and fourth, it is more likely than not that internal climate variability in the near term will enhance and not counteract the surface warming expected to arise from the increasing anthropogenic forcing. {Box 9.2}

Answer 6

A lot of misinformation here so far. First, in people referring to the costliness of the program Are merely referring to the costs and not net costs. Here’s one for you, every environmental regulation from regan On has had an economic impact analysis done on it. They weigh net costs vs benifts. I’ve looked at hundreds of these during my time as an environmental scientist and I’ve never sees one that is a net loss. When you hear a political talk about how a regulation will cost x amount of dollars, this can almost always be traced back to this report I’m referring to. But they always leave out the benifts! Don’t believe me? Here is the one for Obama’s clean power plan https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-10/documents/ria_proposed-cpp-repeal_2017-10.pdf And one for arsenic in drinking water that was big during bush II years https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPdf.cgi?Dockey=20001YQT.txt Things such as subsidies and carbon taxes can be used to add more of something that a market tends to undershoot, like things that produce externalities. The idea that regulations of the environment is all cost and no benift is way to simple. For further reading on these estimates check out the statistical value of a human life (real thing used in valuations) if you really want To get into the weeds. So to answer your question, the only financial reason they would deny it is either campaign contributions or not understanding environmental economics. Also genuinely disbelief in the science can stem from where they grew up. We are all the victims or benificeries of our parents beliefs and in states that elect conservative people have heard climate science is bullshit.