University Place  Mark Brown Climate Science, Populism and The Democracy of Rejection  October 24, 2013 UP934  cc >> Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for being here. On behalf of the Holtz Center, it's my pleasure to introduce Mark Brown, who's going to give us a talk today about climate science, populism, and the democracy of rejection. As you may know, this talk is made possible because of the generosity of the host families. We're really grateful to be able to offer this series. Mark Brown is a professor in the Department of Government at California State University, Sacramento. He was previously a postdoc fellow at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at Bielefeld University. He's the author of an excellent book, Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation by MIT Press in 2009, as well as various other publications on the politics of expertise, citizen participation, bioethics, climate change, and related topics. He teaches a number of courses on modern and contemporary political theory, democratic theory, and other topics. It's really a pleasure to have him today, and I'm looking forward to his talk. Thank you, Mark. 

[APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you, Dominique, and thank you to the Holtz Center for the invitation and to Dominique and Lyn for organizing my visit. Thank you to all of you for coming. I'm going to start today with two important questions. One is, what can democracies do about climate change? This question I'm not going to say hardly anything at all about. This is something that is being debated quite a bit recently. Several climate, several prominent commentators have said that it's starting to look that democracies cannot handle climate change. Al Gore has called climate change the greatest failure of worldwide governance in history. And we're almost seeing a resurgence of the kind of calls for environmental authoritarianism that we heard a lot of back in the 1970s. Personally, I think there's a fair amount of evidence that democracies do better than non-democracies in addressing environmental issues in general and climate change in particular, but it depends a lot on the context. Today, though, I'm not really going to address this question. 

The question I want to focus on turns the first question around, and ask instead, what can climate change do for and to democracy? And here I'm following the lead of various science policy scholars, especially the climate scientist Mike Hulme, who have challenged us to ask, to think about science not simply as a form of knowledge, as a set of facts, but as a site of social and cultural change. As a place where societies are struggling, debating over social institutions and over the meaning of important ideas, like freedom, equality, justice, and democracy. And I'm interested in climate change because it seems to be a place, a terrain, where a lot of questions are being formulated about what democracy means to us today. And I think in many ways, also, the politics of climate change is really changing what democracy means and how people think of it. So that's the general question I want to address today, and I want to come at this question through the particular angle of considering how we should respond to people who reject climate science, so-called denialism. People who, for one reason or another, reject either the mainstream scientific view that climate change is happening or the view that it's mostly caused by human activities. Denialism, I want to say right from the beginning, is a terrible term. It is polemical. It purposely evokes the Holocaust deniers. It tends to be applied indiscriminately to anyone who is the least bit critical of mainstream science, and it really doesn't lead to very productive debate. 

However, having said all that, there is a phenomenon that we need to think about, which is that we do have large segments of the public, especially the American public, and this is something where the United States really differs a lot from European countries and in fact from most countries in the world. A phenomena of large sections of the American public rejecting either the idea that climate change is happening or that it's caused by humans. Now, the number of people who completely reject climate science is actually not as high as many people think. It's gone up and down quite a bit over the years. There was quite a bit of hand-wringing a few years ago after the Climategate email scandal in 2009 when there was a small dip, but the number of people accepting mainstream climate science has recently gone back up. But what's most interesting to me is not so much the specific numbers on who accepts what but on the partisan divide that we see. Here's poll results from a couple years ago showing that people who self-identify as tea party members, only 34% of them accept that global warming is happening, regardless of questions about what's causing it or what we should do about it. So, how do we explain this, and what does this mean for democracy today? There's a whole series of different possible explanations that have been offered. Probably the most common is people point to sheer economic interest, fossil fuel companies, major oil industry lobbyists, and maybe just ordinary citizens that don't want to have a major change in their way of life, who don't want to give up the American way of life. They have a simple economic interest in not accepting climate change. 

There's certainly something to that. I'm sure it's part of the story. Another common explanation is that it has more to do with religious and cultural affiliation. That when people reject climate science, just like when many people reject the science of evolution, they're not really focused so much on making an epistemic statement about the world, they're focused on expressing solidarity and membership in a particular cultural group. They reject climate science just because their friends do and because they want to belong. I'm sure that's also a big part of the story. Another part of the story is psychological, anxiety. Maybe it's not so much an issue of people denying climate change but of being in denial about it. I think that the psychological dimensions of the politics of climate change have started getting more attention, but it's really an area where we need to do a lot more work. And if you think of the phrase being in denial, then in some respects we're all in denial. 

Anyone who accepts climate change but doesn't really completely change their life is perhaps in some way in denial. And it's almost a necessary response because the gap between the facts that we're confronted with and the options for action available to most of us is so large. So that's also an important part of the story. Perhaps the least important part of the story is to blame constructivist science and technology studies. We sometimes hear that, well, since the post-modernists told us that all truth claims are relative and everything's up for grabs, the Bush Administration listened and they just made up their own truth. And so the real folks to blame are the science study scholars. I don't think science study scholars have that much influence, unfortunately. [LAUGHTER] If they did, we'd probably live in a different world. So I don't think that's a very good explanation at all. Aside from what, I'm going to come to one last possible explanation later, but aside from how we explain it, I think the most important step is to move beyond simply focusing on the cultural and social dimensions of people who reject climate change. 

What about the cultural and social dimensions of those who accept it? And what about the culture and social influences on climate science itself? Those familiar with science studies will recognize this as a typical move of moving toward a symmetrical treatment of science and non-science. We can't just look at the cultural/political effects on non-science and ignore those that shape science itself. And so to get at that, I want to turn to the idea of different cultural frames, and this is an area of research that many people have done a lot more than I have. Looking at how combinations of metaphors, ideas, values, and selected facts all combine together to create a certain cultural frame around different ways of understanding the climate change issue. Cultural frames are neither true nor false. They all contain some truths and perhaps some falsehoods. But they're often in the background of political debate. So it's really useful to try and get a handle on which different cultural frames are shaping the politics of climate change. I'm going to go through four different ones, and I brought some pictures for each of them. One of the most common is an apocalyptic frame. 

This goes all the way back to 1986. This cover is from the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The climate catastrophe two years before James Hansen's famous congressional testimony in the summer of 1988. And here we see climate change as something that is really going to end the world. Here's a more recent example from Time magazine from 2001. Here's another example from 2006. Be worried, be very worried. And here's a short film clip that exemplifies the same basic cultural frame.  >> Global warming. [train whistle] Some say irreversible consequences are 30 years away. 

Thirty years? That won't affect me.  >> So, now ask yourself, would that motivate you to get involved in the politics of climate change? Would it motivate you to change your light bulbs, drive less, do all the things that we're supposed to do? It seems that for decades now environmentalists have thought that it would, but there's increasing evidence that it just really doesn't work. That these kind of apocalyptic images tend to backfire. We now have catastrophe, fatigue. We have people shutting down rather than getting involved when they see images like this. Here's another frame that we sometimes see. What I'm calling, following, again, Mike Hulme, the nostalgic frame. And here the point is not so much to be scared of climate change but to try to save the Earth, to protect a vulnerable planet. This discourse often has kind of a quasi religious dimension to it where greenhouse gasses are presented as sinful. The goal is to keep nature pure. 

In this discourse we often hear about protecting polar bears. Here's another short video clip.  § §  Okay, and then a third frame that's getting more press recently is a Promethean frame focused mostly around the idea of geoengineering, dubbed by one journalist, "a bad idea whose time has come." And these are, as you might know, a whole series of proposals for reducing the amount of solar radiation that enters the Earth's atmosphere or increasing the amount that's reflected back into space as a way of cooling the planet. It quite likely would work in a narrow sense. Spraying aerosols into the stratosphere could be relatively cheap and easy, but the possibility of unpredictable consequences is enormous and very dangerous. There's a high likelihood of shifting rainfall patterns all around the world, and perhaps especially in poor countries. So it's a very problematic area. But there's quite a bit of research going on, and just in  the last five years the whole idea has been normalized to a certain extent, and there's quite a few both scientific research programs going on as well as social scientific efforts to try to develop governance schemes and frameworks to address geoengineering. The fourth frame I want to talk about is a skeptical frame associated with climate denialists. And here's a fun little clip from them. 

This takes just a second to load. >> You've seen those headlines about global warming. The glaciers are melting. We're doomed. That's what several studies supposedly found, but other scientific studies found exactly the opposite. Greenland's glaciers are growing, not melting. The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner. Did you see any big headlines about that? Why are they trying to scare us? Global warming alarmists claim the glaciers are melting because of carbon dioxide from the fuels we use. Let's force people to cut back, they say. But we depend on those fuels to grow our food, move our children, light up our lives, and as for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out and plants breathe in. 

Carbon dioxide, they call it pollution. We call it life. >> See, everything's going to be fine. Stop worrying. Okay, now, if we take all these different cultural frames, they all have different conceptions of nature. Nature is vulnerable or pure or inert or resilient, but what's most interesting to me is they all have basically the same conception of expertise, the same conception of the role of science in politics, which is a linear conception. The idea that science should and can directly and immediately affect public policy, that we should simply take the conclusions of scientific investigations and implement them in public policy. And I think what's interesting to me about the debate, say, between denialists and their critics is that they actually agree about the role of science in politics. They disagree about whether science tells us about reality. But if it does, then they agree that it should tell us what to do. 

They just disagree about the first part, about whether it tells us about the climate. So this is a real problem because this linear model of science advice, science policy scholars have been showing for years, works fairly well in certain very limited contexts. In contexts where you have consensus on facts, you have consensus on political values. In those contexts, it often works quite well to simply implement the science. But very few of the problems that we care about today actually meet those criteria. Climate change, biotechnology, the evolution debate, all of the big issues that we're facing today with science and society involve serious disagreement and uncertainty either in science or in politics and often in both. In addition, a big problem with this linear model of science is that it creates an incentive for critics of the policy to attack the science. If I tell you that the number one reason to implement my preferred policy is because of the science, well then of course you're going to do everything you can to undermine the science. So, in this sense, people who over rely on science are just shooting themselves in the foot and inviting their critics to attack them. And then, finally, a problem with this approach is that it's simply not necessary. 

There has been majority support in the United States for over 30 years for efforts to address climate change. It's weak, it's not considered a top issue, but there's been majority belief that climate change is real. It goes up and down, but it's basically been quite stable for 30 years. And recent surveys show that strong majority support climate policies even as people remain doubtful about climate science. Right? So even people who are skeptical about the science often still support climate policies. So, in a sense, the whole debate about skeptics and denialists and climate science, it's all really just a big distraction, and what we should be talking about instead much more is the social and political questions. Are we responsible for past CO2 emissions? Should we fund clean development in poor countries? Do we owe a carbon debt to other nations? To what extent are we responsible to future generations? Those kind of questions. We see polls all the time about the public beliefs about climate science. Have you ever seen a poll about what the American public thinks about our responsibility to future generations? You have? Okay, I haven't seen very many. Or about whether we are responsible for our past CO2 emissions? There might be a few polls here and there, but they don't have near the prominence in the public discussions as polls on public belief and science. 

Now, one reason we keep focusing on the science, I think, is because social scientists are simply not getting through. Not enough. Social scientists have been explaining for a long time that scaring people does not motivate them. That more scientific information is not going to solve the problem. Actually, some studies show that as people acquire more information, they actually become less concerned about climate change and less involved because it's almost like acquiring the information itself is their activity and then they feel off the hook. So there's a lot of excellent research in science communication and other fields about how to do this better, but we just keep saying the same old patterns. And just a little bit tongue-in-cheek, I'm going to call this social science denialism. That many scientists and science communicators are just denying the social science that, if they would pay a little more attention to it, would help them do a much better job. And we need to do a better job. Here's over 20 years of surveys on correct answers to factual knowledge of science in the United States. 

And you can see it just keeps getting better and better. Not. [LAUGHTER] The levels have stayed pretty flat for a very long time. So, obviously, something's not working. So we need a new approach. I'm just going to give a quick hint at a new approach, a pragmatic frame. Here's one more Time magazine cover that shows people actually taking constructive action, studies also suggest that when information is paired with possibilities for action, then people are much more likely to respond favorably. I'm not a big fan of the military metaphor here, but the idea of collective endeavor, the idea of people working together in a positive way to address the issue is much more likely to stimulate both knowledge and political action. Okay, I want to turn now to my second main topic, which is questions about democracy. And I want to talk just briefly about different images of democracy. 

Here's Pericles. Democracy, of course, is not a single thing. There's no single democratic ideal. Democracy has changed a lot over the centuries. It takes very different forms in different countries and different cultures. What democracy means is something that has always been and always will be contested. And nowadays it seems to be especially contested, precisely because it is so universally admired. Two hundred years ago, most leading thinkers in Europe and the United States were opposed to democracy. Democracy was associated with mob rule, with popular factions and unruly masses. And now everyone loves democracy, but no one really agrees on what it means. 

We also have all kinds of developments that are challenging or undermining existing democratic structures, globalization and the erosion of state sovereignty that goes along with it. The shift to network forms of government where all kinds of civil society actors and businesses and non-state institutions are becoming more involved in making decisions. A large decline in trust in government institutions. Declining trust also in experts, although interesting not in science itself as an institution, but certainly in individual experts. And then a real decline of traditional political parties and a decline in voting rates. Kind of mainstream democratic institutions have been seen as being in decline for a long time. Some people thinks this means that we have apathetic citizens. I think more interesting research, I think, and more convincing says that no, actually what we have is critical citizens. People are disenchanted with government precisely because they have high demands. Citizens have become demanding consumers that expect a lot, maybe too much, and that's why they're so disaffected. 

So it's not really quite correct to say that people are apathetic, and we're seeing the emergence of a lot of new forms of engagement and participation. New protest movements, new engagement in stakeholder processes or citizen juries and that sort of thing. Non-institutionalized participation, whether it's online activism or social movements. So we have a very kind of diverse and fragmented participatory landscape, and one set of concepts that I found useful for trying to get a handle on it is to different images of democracy that have been proposed by the French political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, and he distinguishes between two different aspects of democratic politics. One is the popular exercise of power. And this is the more familiar aspect, the idea that democracy is about collectivities, expressing their will and making decisions and governing themselves through their representatives. The democracy of proposition, Rosanvallon calls it. The second is less familiar, and it's about people constraining the same government officials that they authorize through elections. He calls it the democracy of rejection. And the people here are not seen so much as voters but as watchdogs. 

And there's a very long tradition of thinking of popular self-government in this way and actually predates modern democracy. You can go back to the Medieval ages and the Medieval maxim that that which is a concern of all must be approved by all. Which, at the time, was not understood as a matter of popular consent but as a matter of ascent. That if there was no public opposition, consent was assumed. And it was framed in the context of concern about what to do when a government degenerates into a tyranny and under what conditions it's acceptable for popular majorities to resist the tyrant. So the whole way the politics was framed was in terms of the possibility of popular rejection. You have similar ideas in social contract theory in the 17th and 18th century, emphasizing the right to resistance. John Locke famously wrote that if the people suffer "a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, 'tis not to be wondered that they should rouse themselves." And we get a similar phrase in the Declaration of Independence with a reference to the long train of abuses. And more recently you can think of the occupy movement. The occupy movement was essentially an oppositional movement. 

Some people thought that was a terrible thing, that they should create alliances with public officials. Many people thought, no, that was precisely the strength of the movement was that it didn't allow itself to be corrupted by mainstream politics. But one way or another it was clear that it was a movement against politics as usual and with a lot of skepticism and a lot of rejection of mainstream public officials. Now, the question I want to pose is, can we understand climate rejection in these terms? It seems to me that one thing we're seeing with people who reject climate change is that they are taking up this tradition of the democracy of rejection, but, rather than applying themselves to government, they are rejecting science. They're recognizing that nowadays science has at least as much power as many governments, and they are then expressing skepticism toward that power. And I think we see this in a few areas. One is the way that people rejecting climate science have sometimes identified potential conflicts of interest within climate science. Governor Rick Perry of Texas recently told an audience, "I do believe the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are substantial numbers of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects." Now, he, of course, said nothing about the much larger conflicts of interest of the oil and gas industry, but, nonetheless, I think he had a point. And the inquiries that were made after the Climategate email scandal in 2009-2010, they agreed. 

The InterAcademy Council that investigated the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it found that the IPCC didn't even have a conflict of interest policy. And that the chair served as a board member of a for-profit energy company, and they recommended the establishment of a conflict of interest policy, and they recommended more transparency in the IPCC procedures. So I don't think they were responding to Governor Perry, but they were taking up this idea, and I think overall it's been a positive development. Second, climate denialists or rejectionists have sometimes highlighted the economic stakes of climate policies. In April 2009, on the floor of the US House of Representatives, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said, "Carbon dioxide is not harmful. It is part of Earth's life cycle, and yet we're being told that we have to reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring on Earth." So, she's, of course, totally wrong about climate science. I hope that I'm not raising suspicion that I agree with her on that. But she has a point that serious policies to address climate change are going to involve potentially very serious changes in our economy. And Naomi Klein, of all people, agrees. In a recent piece in The Nation, she wrote that libertarian conservatives like Bachmann are wrong to reject mainstream climate science, but "when it comes to the real world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, they may be in considerable less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying green products and creating clever markets in pollution." So, again, the rejectionists have put an important issue on the table. 

Finally, what this all comes down to is an insistence that we understand climate change as a political issue and not as simply a scientific issue. And I think that's a message that can't be said often enough, especially to someone like Al Gore. A couple years ago, Al Gore initiated his climate reality project by saying "fossil fuel interests have money, influence control, but together we have something they don't: reality." So he seems to think that reality itself supports his political program. He went on to say, "Climate change is not a political problem; it's a human problem." So if rejectionists, no matter how wrong they are about the science, if they can remind us that this is a political issue, then I think they've done us a service. Inadvertently to be sure, but a service nonetheless. Now, I want to talk, let's see, briefly about the tea party. Some recent analyses of the tea party really fit into the argument I'm making here. On the one hand, tea party activists have been model democratic citizens. They've been extremely good at organizing meetings, handing out leaflets, setting up chairs, knocking on doors, all the kind of nitty-gritty work of democratic citizenship that's really a pain in the butt. Many have been very good at this. 

Now, some people say they are completely controlled from the top down by their corporate elite funders. That's kind of up for debate. Certainly their funders have played a major role in driving the movement, but there's also quite a lot of people involved at the grassroots level. And in many ways they're exemplifying democratic virtues. They're also extremely knowledgeable about political process. They know how to get a bill through congress. They know who to call to talk to a lobbyist. They know how to organize politics and get things done. They are not very good on substance. They think Obamacare has death panels. 

They think that climate change is not happening, and so on. So what Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, what they point out in this book is that they're really the inverse of liberals. Liberals tend to be very good on substance, they know all their facts, but they have no idea how to get a bill through congress, and maybe don't even know their congressperson. So that's interesting. Now, one aspect of the tea party movement that fits in with this whole analysis is populism. And I want to say a little bit of that about populism. Populism is an ambiguous term. It has a sort of difficult relationship with democracy. I think with the tea party you see a feature that I would argue is core to all populist movements, which is a claim to be the authentic spokesperson for the people. There is a real homogenous people, and populists reject the efforts of intellectuals, of elected representatives, of any kind of public officials to speak for those people, and they claim to be the sole authentic spokesperson. 

Sarah Palin famously talked about real Americans. In this way, the biggest problem they create is undermining political representation and undermining the politics itself because they insist that the people is already there and that they're going to be the sole authentic spokespeople for it. And they also tend to have very narrow views about who belongs to that people. For the tea party, that definition tends to exclude immigrants, foreigners, and the so-called undeserving poor. What's interesting from my perspective, though, is that the populism that we see among tea party members and climate denialists actually appears in the entire discourse of climate change itself, insofar as it's often focused on global issues that neglect or conceal regional differences. People in poor countries are already vulnerable to climate today regardless of whether it's changing and regardless of whether any changes are caused by humans. And by focusing so much on carbon dioxide and by global circulation models and on average temperature and average CO2 levels, the very differentiated risks that people face tends to get obscured. So, this then leads to the point that there's a certain kind of parallel between populism and democracy, between the effort to use science to drive politics and the effort to eliminate science from politics, that in both cases it undermines the liberation and representation, and in both cases you have people claiming to be the sole spokesperson of the people. Okay, I want to end with a few thoughts on this last question, which is a huge question that I won't be able to say much about but it's important. Who are the people and how can they be represented and what is the role of scientific experts in representing the people? And I came up with one way to talk about this, taking three examples from Germany. 

Here is the people pre-constituted. The idea of the nation that preexists any current political debates or any current political processes. The nation is a kind of eternal, ephemeral, external force that we have to try to realize in our current politics. Another image is the people reconstituted. This is a picture of a demonstration from 1989 in east Germany where the demonstrators marched in the streets and said we are the people. Wir sind das Volk. Claiming for themselves the right to speak for the people. Thereby kind of breaking up this homogenous view of the people and asserting the principle that democracy involves multiple and conflicting claims to speak for the people. And then here is a third version, the people deconstituted. This is an art installation inside the German Parliament in the lobby inside. 

And it translates as the population. And this is kind of German irony, I guess, at work. We're now just a population, right? We're moving away from those old nationalist visions of the people. We're moving to something much more humble, much more mundane. And, in a way, I think it acknowledges that the people is something that has to always be recreated and remade. We start with a population but a conception of a people is something that only comes about through political processes. And then I'll just end with a graph that's a little too complicated. This is, basically, my book in one page. The idea here is that across the top we have different institutions and, of course, there are many more that belong on here. And different institutions represent the people in different ways. 

Along the side, I have several different elements of democratic representation. Participation, deliberation, the mirroring of social perspectives like demographic categories, the mirroring of expert perspectives, the authorization to make decisions and holding people publicly accountable. And the point is that we can't expect everything from any single institution. And I have science advisor bodies there on the left. They fulfill some of these requirements. So science advisors can speak for the people in a certain way, but they can't do it all by themselves. And we need a range of different institutions that interact with each other in order to produce anything that we might call a democratic representation of the people. Here I put in some question marks. Science advisory bodies, many are becoming more socially representative. The IPCC has a mandate to include scientists from all around the world, for example. 

So geography is an important component of its claims to represent the world's people. And, as I was just saying, some science advisory bodies are now being held publicly accountable. So, we're seeing some shifts in the democratic norms that are being applied to science advisory bodies and other institutions. Okay, well, I'll end with a word of advice. If you're in a friendship or relationship and you have a fight, often you're faced with the choice do you want to be right or do you want to preserve your friendship. And I think we could pose the same question to environmentalists and those of us who want to do something about climate change. Would you rather be right or would you rather get something done? And I hope that we all opt for the latter. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]