Aseem,
While I agree that the things like embedded environmentalism are good ideas and
indeed that environmental advocates need to do a much better job at connecting
climate actions (mitigation and adaptation) to the things many citizens care
about, the rather uncritical treatment of "blue collar" workers in these
debates (and in The Hill piece) has me pretty concerned. In point of fact, US
working class people continue to mostly vote for the candidates with stronger
enviro positions. The white ones do so in lower proportions than the non-white
ones, I'll grant. But this may be more than in incidental detail...
Is it up to environmentalists alone to change the discourses in places like
West Virginia, when nearly every candidate in both political parties is mostly
lying outright to the voters about climate, energy and other such concerns?
Where major employers and most of the business community does that same? Help
me understand how environmentalists ideas about dying coal communities change
that narrative.
And do we have any expectations at all of public servants and elected
officials, in this regard? This piece is published in The Hill. It pretty
clearly suggests to its DC/Capitol Hill readers that the failure of
environmentalism/ists is responsible for the current state of climate and
energy politics in the US. Really? This, it seems to me, is the most worrying
(and likely empirically incorrect) argument to make to "the hill" -- where a
lot of naked corruption is, in my view, quite a bit more responsible for the
state of US climate politics than is environmentalists failure to somehow solve
the problem of coal communities' decline.
In my view, "The Hill" and how it works and whose interests are well
represented are the locus of responsibility for the state of US climate and
energy politics. I doubt TheHill wants to publish that argument, but I don't
see how a bunch of environmentalists responding to your call for ideas about
how to connect to blue collar workers changes anything on "the Hill." How
represented and supported do these blue collar workers feel, when they look at
The Hill now? I do fear that this sort of piece suggests that the policy
makers who read the hill should blame environmentalists for their own failures.
--SV
On 4/25/18, 3:44 PM, "gep-ed@googlegroups.com on behalf of
as...@u.washington.edu" <gep-ed@googlegroups.com on behalf of
as...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
Colleagues:
We published this today in response to Michael Bloomberg's $4.5 million
donation to the UN Climate Change Secretariat.
"Environmentalists need to reconnect with blue-collar America"
http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/384856-environmentalists-need-to-reconnect-with-blue-collar-america
Aseem Prakash
********************************************************************
Aseem Prakash
Professor, Department of Political Science
Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences
Founding Director, UW Center for Environmental Politics
39 Gowen Hall, Box 353530
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3530
http://faculty.washington.edu/aseem/
http://depts.washington.edu/envirpol/
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