A new study in Environmental Politics, led by Deboarh Lyn Guber, used an archive of the Congressional Record from 1996 to 2015 to analyze how elected officials have talked about climate change. The partisan difference was stark, with a single exception: Republicans were willing to talk about the impacts of climate change when those impacts were occurring in their districts. Otherwise, Democrats stuck to scientific and jobs-based messaging, while Republicans emphasized both the stark denial of attacking the science, but also “a softer, cue-based narrative,” that focuses instead “on anecdotes and storytelling.”
The study uses a Big Data approach, mining valuable insight from the four billion words in the Congressional record by applying a quantitative text analysis to 2,727 speeches that referenced “climate change”, “global warming” or “greenhouse gas” at least two times (to weed out the passing mentions.)
The resulting graphs of the frequency of speeches show that the 2009 Cap and Trade fight remains a highwater point, particularly for Republicans who focused intently on attacking the bill, though overall Democrats talk about climate more (particularly Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s weekly speeches on the subject, which account for a full 32% of all Democratic speeches on climate in the senate since he started giving them in 2012)
Based on keywords identified, the data shows that at the start of the record in the late ‘90s, speeches by members of the two parties were similar, with the proportions of topics they discussed largely overlapping. Both Republicans and Democrats at the time talked about extreme weather and the economic opportunity of climate action at about the same proportion. But over the length of the study period, certain trends emerged. As Democrats focused on extreme weather, jobs and public health, in the Bush years Republicans ramped up climate denial, defined here by an expressed antagonism to climate science, activists and policy, as epitomized by the snowball-throwing Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe.
But during the Cap and Trade fight in 2009, a new rhetorical strategy begins to show up in the data, which the study terms “anecdotal denial.” This is a “softer” sort of denial, for those “not inclined to challenge the science of climate change per se. Rather, they framed the issue as a narrative, deploying analogies and storytelling to make a point.”
The example they give is of Texas Republican John Carter recounting a day in 1964, when as a young man playing golf the day started hot (“89 or 90 degrees”), and then there was a dust storm, then a regular storm, then it was cold (20 degrees, he said.) “Now did [George W. Bush] do that?,” Carter asked sarcastically, “because that certainly was the most spectacular climate change I have ever seen in my entire life.”
That approach, not of directly challenging the science but instead telling some kind of story as a distraction, provides a way for Republican leaders to signal their opposition to climate policy to voters (and campaign donors) without having to confront the scientific impetus for action. It’s an expressly anti-scientific, “ain’t I folksy, just like you folks?” rhetorical trick, playing the “simple country lawyer” trope as best exemplified by Phil Hartman’s classic “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.”
There are a few exceptions to the stark partisan divide, though, as “Democrats have on occasion been joined by a small group of pro-climate change Republicans in delivering science-driven speeches, giving the topic labeled Climate Change Impacts a more bipartisan appearance than most.” The best examples were apparently two Maryland representatives, Republicans Wayne Gilchrest and Roscoe Bartlett, who “represent a state acutely vulnerable to beach erosion and rising sea levels.”
So as more Americans experience climate impacts first hand, and understand that the fires or floods are a result of fossil-fueled climate change, the harder it will be for deniers to distract constituents with silly stories about a wild day of golfing in 1964.
Unfortunately, in the meantime the more glaciers melt, the more caveman lawyers will get unfrozen… and elected.