A review of "Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?"

post by David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) (capybaralet) · 2025-04-25T05:12:50.986Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  The review
    Summary:
    Claims with insufficient support:
    Other Critiques:
    Questions:
None
No comments

I was recently encouraged to read Jeffrey Heninger's report "Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?"  It was interesting, but I thought it had some critical flaws.  I would've recommended rejecting it if I were reviewing it for an academic conference.  

I've written a mock review below.  As typical when reviewing for a conference, I didn't aim to mince my words or make my critiques exhaustive, and I anticipate that I will have missed or misunderstood some things.
 

The review

Summary:

The paper presents (and frequently returns to) an apparent paradox, illustrated in Figures 1/7, 8, 13: Why was there a partisan decoupling, specifically around environmentalism and specifically in the USA, beginning in ~1990 and most prominently in the mid-90s?  Potential explanations are presented and discarded, and blame is ultimately assigned to the environmental movement’s alliance with Democrats and Fossil fuel companies’ promotion of anti-climate change policies and beliefs.  The paper’s main conclusion is that the environmental movement made a strategic error in neglecting to defend against polarization.

 

There is an additional question of why did this trend continue (Figure 4)?  I’m not sure if the paper aims to address this, but it can perhaps be answered by a broader trend towards polarization.

The paper also includes what appears to be a reasonably good overview of the history of the environmental movement in the USA around the time of interest.  A related work section would help reassure the reader that this history is reasonably balanced, accurate, and complete.

Ultimately, I found the claims in the abstract/intro/conclusion to be overstated and not well supported by the rest of the work.  The paper does a good job of documenting that this polarization occurred, and I found the idea that Gore and Clinton were at least partially to blame somewhat compelling.
 

Claims with insufficient support:

• Central claim: “Partisanship was not inevitable. It occurred as the result of choices and alliances made by individual decision makers. If they had made different choices, environmentalism could have ended up being a bipartisan issue, like it was in the 1980s and is in some countries in Europe and democratic East Asia.”
• The main arguments I found compelling were:
  • It’s much less partisan outside USA
    • But the USA is unique and it’s hard to generalize from other countries.
  • Increasing partisanship around climate change in USA starting around 1990
    • The paper tries to establish a strong causal connection between choices of the environmental movement and this outcome, but IMO it fails, because:
      • It doesn’t actually provide significant evidence that the choices of the environmental movement contributed to this outcome, unless you consider Gore/Clinton to be part of the movement.  In fact, I don’t recall it saying much about choices the movement made during this time, outside of the abstract/intro/conclusion.
      • It doesn’t seriously consider and argue for counterfactuals: what key actions should the movement have done differently, and what do the authors claim would’ve happened?
• Central claim: “There were several years in the early 1990s when it appears that”...
  • “environmentalists could have built relationships with congressional Republicans and conservative think tanks (who were still receptive at the time),”
    • I found very minimal support for this.
  • “but instead focused exclusively on one side of the aisle.”
    • I found no support for this.
• Non-central claim: “The process by which environmentalism became allied with the Democratic Party involved mission creep in some environmental organizations.”
  • But “Section 6.6: Mission Creep” acknowledges “While social justice is something that all major environmental organizations embrace now, it is unclear how associated they were as environmentalism began becoming partisan.”

 

Other Critiques:

• I think the structure of the argument was not outlined clearly enough.  I would characterize it as an argument via process of elimination: the authors consider all the alternative explanations they think seem reasonable, discard them, and thus conclude that their preferred explanation is correct.  I don’t find this type of argument particularly compelling (historical/cultural trends are complicated and often difficult to explain in reductionist terms).  But also it’s possible I’ve misunderstood the structure of the argument.
• It seems to suggest that the environmental movement could've magicked up a Republican Al Gore.
• The argument about alliances with Democrats is pretty weak, mostly just referencing Al Gore’s opposition to Reagan’s cuts to research on climate change, and Clinton/Gore’s policies of BTU tax and the Kyoto protocol.  I don’t recall any arguments that “the environmental movement” made alliances with left-wing politicians during this time period.  It is also not explained why Gore’s opposition didn’t trigger polarization at the time.
• An alternative theory I’d like to see addressed:
  • Partisanship was inevitable because of an irreconcilable clash of interests between environmentalists and fossil fuel companies, both of whom were powerful enough to achieve major political representation.
  • This came to a head in the 1990s because this is when environmental policies that would seriously impact fossil fuel companies’ bottom lines were introduced.
  • (Optional): The default counterfactual is that neither party supports serious action on climate change, that Al Gore did made it much more likely that the US would take serious action.  Al Gore came extremely close to winning the 2000 election and things might have gone very differently if he had.
• No related work section.  What do other people think about polarization?  What about the history of US politics + climate change?

Questions:

• Why did Clinton/Gore advocate for BTU tax and Kyoto protocol?  These are presented as obvious mistakes, but I’m unconvinced: I imagine they must’ve seemed sensible to the proponents at the time.  Perhaps they were calculated gambles (e.g. with high expected value) that failed to pay off?  Or perhaps energy conservation and/or wealth redistribution to poor countries were themselves seen as desirable outcomes (but ones which arguably should’ve been decoupled from climate change)?
• I wasn’t clear on the relation between the start of polarization and ongoing polarization.  I took the paper to mostly be looking for an initial “smoking gun” that kicked it off, and then assuming it was doomed to polarization by the end of the 1990s.  Is this right?
• What about broader anti-science / anti-intellectual / anti-academic trends in US Republican politics (cf intelligent design)?  These seem plausibly implicated, but not discussed, that I saw.
  
   

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