It began with a law about heat pumps. It ended with stones being thrown at politicians and a surge in popularity for the far right. <\/p>\n
For an example of how climate change is increasingly becoming a flashpoint in the culture wars, Germany is a good place to start. <\/p>\n
A proposed law \u2014 championed by the Green Party, part of the coalition government \u2014 aimed to ban almost all new heating systems that run on oil and gas in favor of more energy-friendly heat pumps. <\/p>\n
The backlash was swift and severe. Already stretched by soaring food and energy prices, many Germans feared the law would translate to huge upfront costs for homeowners \u2014 fears stoked and weaponized by the populist far right-party Alternative for Germany, or AfD. <\/p>\n
Dubbing it Heizhammer<\/em> \u2014 \u201cheating hammer\u201d \u2014 they framed the law as an unaffordable luxury pushed by the out-of-touch elite \u201cmoving into your house and deciding what you can and can\u2019t do,\u201d said Miranda Schreurs, professor of environment and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich. <\/p>\n Anger morphed into protests, then violence. In September, Green politicians were pelted with stones during an election event in southern Germany. The next month, the AfD surged in the state elections. Despite eventually pushing through a weakened version of the law, it was a disaster for the government. <\/p>\n As climate solutions and policies move from the abstract to the personal \u2014 our cars, our food and how we keep our homes warm \u2014 it has created fertile ground for anger and fear, and has fanned the flames of a culture war long in the making. <\/p>\n Those who push these narratives often divide the world into \u201cvirtuous\u201d ordinary people on one side, and corrupt, indifferent \u201celites\u201d on the other, said Stephan Lewandowsky, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol. <\/p>\n As British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak watered down key climate targets in September, for example, he rebranded himself a defender of motorists against the \u201cideological zeal\u201d of climate advocates. <\/p>\n \u201cI am slamming the brakes on the war on motorists,\u201d Sunak said in a video posted on X, as he delayed a ban on selling new gas and diesel cars. <\/p>\n Similar rhetoric has been used in other parts of Europe. In the run-up to Poland\u2019s recent elections, the populist right-wing Law and Justice party claimed the opposition wanted to ban meat and force people to eat worms. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, Spain\u2019s far-right Vox party vowed to defend the country against \u201cthe new climate religion.\u201d <\/p>\n But to understand why climate change and the culture wars have become so enmeshed globally, experts say the United States probably holds the key. <\/p>\n Standing in front of a West Texas oil rig in September, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican candidate for president, described the Democrats\u2019 climate and clean energy policies as an all-out assault on freedom. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is all part of an agenda to control you; and to control your behavior,\u201d DeSantis said. \u201cThey are trying to limit your choices as Americans, they\u2019re trying to circumscribe your ambitions.\u201d <\/p>\n This rhetoric is dark, but it\u2019s not new. The same speech could have been made by an American conservative decades ago, said Michigan State University sociologist and climate expert Aaron McCright. \u201cAnd why has it stuck around? It\u2019s effective, it does scare people.\u201d <\/p>\n The origins of the climate culture war in the US lie in the early 1990s, when a new push for global climate action collided with big geopolitical change, McCright said. <\/p>\n In 1992, more than 100 countries agreed to tackle planet-heating pollution in a treaty which was extended by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, compelling major developed nations to lower their climate pollution from coal, oil and gas. <\/p>\n Around the same time, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving a vacuum for a common enemy among Americans. <\/p>\n \u201cThe communist menace that people on the American right have railed against for decades is gone, and there\u2019s no more boogeyman,\u201d McCright said. The environmental agenda was, in many ways, a perfect replacement. <\/p>\n Climate \u201cbecame the stand-in for everything that\u2019s wrong with the government,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2018You can\u2019t tell me what I can and can\u2019t do on my land. Federal government \u2014 stay away from me.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n At the same time, fossil fuel companies, which knew about the climate impact of their products as early as the 1970s, according to a slew of studies, pumped huge amounts of money into undermining climate science, Lewandowsky said. \u201cThey started a propaganda campaign very early.\u201d <\/p>\n These events shattered a brief moment of bipartisan consensus on climate. Republican politicians \u2014 who had previously been mostly aligned with Democrats on these issues \u2014 started to vote en masse against climate action. <\/p>\n The public followed In 1992, there was a gap of just 5 percentage points between Republicans and Democrats on support for environmental protection, according to a 2012 study from Pew Research Center. By 2012, that gap had ballooned to 39 percentage points. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you went into a coma in \u201988 and you woke up in \u201895,\u201d McCright said, \u201cyou\u2019d probably wake up going \u2018what the heck happened?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n In December 2022, a Democratically controlled Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate bill in US history. It was largely a tax incentive package to encourage people to buy discounted electric cars, electric stoves, solar panels and energy-efficient heating and cooling systems \u2014 all carrot and no stick. <\/p>\n Not one Republican voted for it. <\/p>\n Conservative media has played an outsized role in fueling culture war narratives, according to experts. <\/p>\n When progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced the Green New Deal in 2019, a nonbinding resolution aimed at tackling the climate crisis, it became a lightning rod for right-wing media. <\/p>\n \u201cThe most radical, dangerous policy proposal offered in modern history,\u201d \u201ceconomic enslavement,\u201d an \u201ceco-fascist\u201d proposal \u2014 these were just some of the responses in right-wing publications and on TV networks. <\/p>\n Watching Fox News\u2019 coverage of the Green New Deal, you would think \u201cyou were going to not be able to have hamburgers, your travel was going to be radically restricted, your freedom of movement was getting taken away,\u201d said Allison Fisher, director of the climate and energy program at progressive media watchdog group Media Matters. <\/p>\n Fox has \u201cbeen laying the groundwork necessary for positioning climate policies as a culture war issue for a long time,\u201d she said. The network\u2019s message has been simple and effective, she added \u2014 the \u201cidea that the radical left has manufactured the climate crisis to seize control of every aspect of American life.\u201d <\/p>\n This narrative taps into a defining fear of people on the political right, said Lewandowsky, the psychology professor. \u201cIf you\u2019re a conservative or libertarian, then climate change is hell,\u201d he said, because dealing with it means taxes, regulation and bigger government, and for some, \u201cthat is extremely challenging at a deep, emotional and intellectual level.\u201d <\/p>\n Even in countries like the UK, which tend to be less polarized and hostile toward big government, the conservative media has also been whipping up division over climate, said Ed Matthew of climate think tank E3G. <\/p>\n The aim is to make climate action controversial, Matthew said, \u201cand that\u2019s a very dangerous game to play.\u201d <\/p>\n While there is plenty of polling in the US and Europe that shows most people believe climate change is a threat and that they are broadly supportive of climate action, there is still an \u201cincredible gulf\u201d between recognizing the problem and doing something substantive about it, said Jennie King, a climate disinformation expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank. <\/p>\n This chasm has become wider as the cost of living soars, with many countries teetering on the brink of recession and there are genuine fears about who will pay for climate action. <\/p>\n Governments trying to pass climate laws find themselves in a bind: Push bold agendas at the risk of backlash \u2014 fueled by those who gain from stoking fear and opposition \u2014 or go slowly and put the world even more off track to limit catastrophic global warming and secure a livable climate. <\/p>\n Germany \u2014 where, for a moment, a heat pump threatened to tear apart the government \u2014 is something of a cautionary tale, said Matthew of E3G. The country tried \u201cbringing in regulation really so fast that people just weren\u2019t ready,\u201d he said, giving far-right parties the chance to exploit it and garner support. <\/p>\n The key to rapidly transforming economies to slash planet-warming pollution will be \u201cbringing society along and winning social acceptance,\u201d Schreurs said. But, she added, \u201cit\u2019s not going to be easy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n It began with a law about heat pumps. It ended with stones being thrown at politicians and a surge in popularity for the far right. For an example of how climate change is increasingly becoming a flashpoint in the culture wars, Germany is a good place to start. A proposed law \u2014 championed by the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":12026,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12025","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} \u2018An agenda to control you\u2019<\/h2>\n
Lightning rod for right wing media<\/h2>\n
Winning social acceptance<\/h2>\n