David Gergen on Climate Politics and Public Opinion

Climate One

News, News Commentary, Science, Social Sciences, Earth Sciences

4.7 • 583 Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“This is turning out exactly the way scientists predicted, with one exception: it’s happening faster than they thought,” says political analyst David Gergen, who served in four presidential administrations. “The question is what can we do rapidly that would alleviate this and be fair to all.” “There’s a lot of signs that voters, you know, they may not completely agree with the Green New Deal,” says Marianne Lavelle, a reporter with InsideClimate News, “but they’re not very happy with having politicians who are just not paying attention to climate and just not doing anything.” Ultimately it is Republican voters who are pushing their legislators to act, since many of them, especially in western states, find their views on energy and conservation at odds with the current administration’s environmental policies.“The vast majority of western voters say we need to make sure that we protect [public lands] for all Americans,” notes Lori Weigel, a GOP pollster. “It shouldn't be something where economic value or resource extraction is taking priority over the uses that we’re most familiar with." Guests: David Gergen, Professor of Public Service and Founding Director, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School Marianne Lavelle, Reporter, InsideClimate News Lori Weigel, Partner, Public Opinion Strategies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Climate One Conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats.
0:15.0	I'm Greg Dalton.
0:17.0	In the last 20 years, while the percentage of Democratic voters in favor of immediate action
0:22.0	on climate has risen, the level of Republican support has sunk or stalled.
0:26.8	But if you broaden your language and talk about, should we be transitioning to cleaner
0:32.2	energy, should we be taking some sorts of actions, then you get far more Republicans, especially Republican women,
0:39.6	especially younger Republicans, who say yes, yes, we ought to be doing something.
0:45.3	Lori Weigel is a Republican pollster. Her data has shown that GOP voters, especially in Western
0:51.4	states, are skeptical of the current administration's environmental policies.
0:56.0	In fact, they support a variety of solutions to promote conservation and clean energy.
1:01.5	This is the thing that we have tried to get across in our coverage.
1:07.8	Marianne LaVelle is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Washington, D.C.
1:12.6	For so many years, the discussion was stuck on is climate change happening or not.
1:20.3	And a debate on solutions is a position that we haven't been in before.
1:28.0	We'll hear more from her and Lori Weigel later in the program.
1:31.9	First, a conversation with political analyst and former presidential advisor, David Gergen,
1:37.3	who served in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
1:43.5	I asked him what changes he's seen in the politics around climate following the 2018 midterm election.
1:50.6	Well, I think the politics have changed dramatically.
1:53.6	If you look at both parties, they have not taken, in the presidential elections in the past,
1:59.2	they have not taken climate as seriously as they
2:01.5	might to our, I think everybody's surprise. As I recall in the debates of 2016 with Hillary and
	...

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