Having written a post earlier today suggesting (along with The Monkey Cage’s Rob Ford) that a relative lack of ideological polarization hasn’t been particularly good for British politics, I’d offer a contrary data point: polarization seems to have made any sort of action on climate change increasingly difficult throughout the English-speaking world, even in Britain. The Guardian’s Seumas Milne spells it out:
[W]hat should be a pressing debate about how to head off global calamity has been reframed in the media as a discussion about whether industrial-driven climate change is in fact taking place at all - as if it were a matter of opinion rather than science.
The impact of this phoney controversy during an economic crisis has been dramatic: in the US, the proportion of the population accepting burning fossil fuels drives climate change dropped from 71% to 44% between 2007 and 2011. In Britain, the numbers who believe the climate isn’t changing at all rose from 4% to 19% between 2005 and 2013 (though the floods seem to be correcting that).
See full Article: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2014_02/polarization_and_climate_chang049154.php
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