Climate of Contempt: How to Rescue the U.S. Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship

Abstract

Approaching the goal of net zero carbon emissions in the U.S. economy in the United States will require national legislation limiting those emissions. Building majority support for that goal in Congress is a tall order, made more difficult by the popular misunderstanding of what that task entails. The dominant narratives conceive of the task as a top-down problem, one focused on overcoming domination of regulatory politics by economic elites. But that narrative misses or understates the bottom-up forces amplified by the modern information environment. Members of Congress now worry most about pleasing their most partisan constituents, whose political outlooks are shaped by 24/7/365 exposure to the most powerful propaganda machine in human history: namely, the Internet. Invoking a large body of academic research from political science, law, economics, psychology and other social sciences, this book explains how the combination of ideological and social media supercharges voters' cognitive biases. The machine distorts popular understanding of the energy transition as both a political and economic problem. The solution requires active awareness of and resistance to the effects of modern media on belief formation. It requires more reliance on traditional long form journalism and face-to-face communication across ideological and partisan boundaries.