myIn the midst of the electoral campaign for a presidential race that is as close as it is decisive for the future of the country, the United States was hit by two devastating climate disasters, hurricanes Helene and Milton, in late September and early October. While the financial costs of these disasters are estimated at several tens of billions of dollars, can we estimate or anticipate the political consequences?
Given the scientific consensus on the link between global warming and the increase in environmental disasters, the appearance, and a fortiori personal experience, of an environmental disaster should act as a signal and lead citizens to unite in the desire to fight against global warming. And one might expect citizens to favor political parties that take the reality of global warming seriously and propose solutions to mitigate its human and financial costs.
However, in the United States the opposite is happening. On the contrary, the experience of a catastrophe further widens the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats (“Experience, Narratives, and Climate Change Beliefs”, Milena Djourelova, Ruben Durante, Elliot Motte and Eleonora Patacchini, SSRN, 2023).
The authors first conducted an experiment with a small sample of 400 people, showing 200 Democrats and 200 Republicans a video about the damage caused by Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2022, and then asking them about the cause of this hurricane. Faced with the choice between “climate change” AND “unpredictability of nature”only 13% of Republicans chose the first option, compared to 62% of Democrats, a difference of 49 points between supporters of the two political parties.
The researchers then validated these results based on a large survey of more than 50,000 people representative of the US population. They compared the responses of people who live in the same county in the United States and were interviewed in the same year, but some before and others after the occurrence of one of the 2,585 environmental disasters classified as such by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. between 2000 and 2000. 2021, depending on the time of the survey.
Widening partisan differences
Systematically, local disaster experience widens partisan differences between Democrats and Republicans: while this experience increases Democrats’ environmental concerns by 1.4 to 2.6 percentage points on average, it reduces them among Republicans! The gap widens even further when respondents are asked about the need to combat global warming through public action.
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