Exposure to Wildfires Increases Support for Climate Action
By Saul Levin and Shom Mazumder
California is still on fire. And now the state’s hottest temperatures on record are exacerbating dangerous air quality. Its desiccated land has been ablaze for weeks following more than ten thousand lightning strikes — uncommon fire structures are decimating homes, forests, and lives. Even more, the state has admitted that the fires are partly out of control because high rates of the Coronavirus in prisons have destabilized the workforce they usually rely on for the dangerous work of fighting fires.
Reflecting an insufficiently aggressive and glaringly unjust plan for climate action, California has relied on grossly underpaid and coercive prison labor to put out wildfires.
As we watch the escalating impacts of climate change with increasing desperation and limited action, we wondered: will voters actually be moved to do anything about this?
Recent evidence published by political scientists Chad Hazlett (UCLA) and Matto Mildenberger (UCSB) demonstrates that personal experience with climate-related disasters increases support for policies to combat climate change. The authors examine whether climate-induced hazardous events, specifically other recent wildfires in California, to determine their impact on political behavior and support for policy to combat the climatic changes exacerbating them. While other studies have examined shifts in public opinion, this work goes further by demonstrating that climate disasters are increasing political climate activity — a serious breakthrough for thinking about productive responses in the aftermath of increasingly common catastrophes.
For California residents who lived within 5 kilometers of a wildfire, they were 5-6 percentage points more likely to support costly, climate-related ballot measures relative to those who live far away.
But there’s a catch. While Democrats were more likely to support these measures as a results of exposure to wildfires, Republicans were largely unresponsive to these fires despite millions of acres of burnt land and more than a billion dollars in property damage. Thus while the increasing salience of climate-related catastrophes does seem to motivate Democrats to take action, highlighting the harms that people currently face right now does not seem to move Republicans.
The study concludes that the closer you live to a wildfire, the more likely you are to increase your political activity, if, that is, you are a democrat. Republicans, meanwhile, whose geographic dispersion has them disproportionately at risk of fire danger, are politically unaffected by the experience.
More can be done to prevent these wildfires, but warming already locked in by our egregious emissions ensures that these disasters will get far worse before they get better. These results provide hope that, at least within the Democratic Party, acceleration in involvement will track with increasingly frequent and severe events going forward. One poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests that all groups but conservative Republicans are more likely to believe in climate change now compared to 2008, suggesting that repeated hottest years on record may also reach more moderate Republicans.
On the one hand, rushing to talk about political strategy in the midst of a tragedy may at first seem tone-deaf, but on the other hand, with the climate crisis, broader action is the only response that might work. Of course, we can’t simply wait for climate disasters to change behavior - we’re already too late, but Hazlett and Mildenberger’s research offers a rare upward trend in something other than heat or sea level.
The implications of the paper for climate organizing and political strategy are hard to pin down. Perhaps now is the time to set up further democratic political structures and ballot initiatives so people have places to plug in and take action. Supporting political accessibility must be a core part of climate adaptation planning and strategy, as it increases safety and awareness.
There is evidence that despite limited increases in political behavior, voters across the political spectrum are aware of the problems underpinning poor disaster responses. Recent Data for Progress polling suggests that when offered the options, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans are more concerned with utility company power management than renewable energy as triggers for California wildfires. Of those polled, 64% said utility companies should be more responsible in managing power reserves while only 21% said the state should rely less on renewable energy.
Matto Mildenberger, one of the authors of the study, recently reflected on the study on Twitter: “climate-related disasters won't move the political needle unless the media and advocates tell effective stories that help the public understand how climate change is shaping their lives.” A lot of people will be reached. According to Florida professor Matt Hauer’s research, ~86% of US statistical areas’ will be affected by climate impacts and migration, suggesting that the political impact implicated in this research will be extremely widespread.
For Democrats, our polling has shown that the environment is a winning issue and will only become more so as these climate-related disasters become more frequent and prominent.