An economic downturn isn't the most conducive environment to enact climate policy that could increase energy prices.
Download Breakthrough's Memo on the focus groups. (PDF)
What makes the current economic downturn different from previous ones? According to two focus groups Breakthrough just held in Edison, New Jersey, people perceive this one as the result of individual - rather than government or institutional - failures. Whereas previous slumps in the economy were more centrally focused on job loss, the current situation is characterized by declining purchasing power due to the weak dollar, rising energy prices, and tight consumer credit.
In contrast to job loss, declining purchasing power is something that is experienced on a daily basis by many Americans. Layoffs, downsizing, and outsourcing are easily attributed to external forces, but rising debt and declining purchasing power have a tendency to incite feelings of failure at the individual level. Focus group participants said that individuals in debt have "spent beyond their means," and that people who can't afford to buy everything they want need to "reevaluate their priorities."
The lesson here for policymakers is that a successful solution must focus on personal responsibility. Since financial success or failure was largely attributed to individual behavior, we should be talking about how to create a new, asset-based social contract that turns America from a nation of debtors to a nation of savers. Participants responded positively to the idea of "Baby Bonds" and seeding a savings account for every child; for the men in particular, it brought up memories of others setting up savings accounts for them when they were young, or of having done so for their own children. This could serve as a powerful metaphor moving forward, balancing the belief in personal responsibility with the experience of someone assisting them in getting on the right track.
What does a new social contract have to do with global warming? As the recent gas tax holiday proposals show, where there is price anxiety, there is also political pandering. Studies show that when people feel secure, they are also more generous and altruistic. An economic downturn isn't the most conducive environment to enacting climate policy that could increase energy prices. A sense of national economic security will be a necessary precursor to strong action on global warming and a shift away from the old, fossil-fuel based energy economy.
Your analysis implies that policy makers shouldn't try to influence people's thinking, but instead just adapt policies to people's existing irrational beliefs. If that's all government does, though, then the situation is hopeless. The earth cannot survive capitalism as it currently exists, and to cater to people's anachronistic belief that their function in life is to maintain capitalistc levels of personal wealth and consumption is to condemn us all to life in a firey hell.
The idea of subsidizing reproduction is particularly ludicrous coming from someone who claims to care about global warming. Children and the notion of "family" are currently the ideological linchpins of capitalism: the sentimentality surrounding family life serves to distract people from the fact that they are little more than disposable sources of surplus value, increasingly expendable inputs in the process of capitalist production and nothing more. To save the planet, we need to dispel, not cultivate such illusions.
More specifically, we need to show people that the current economic system serves one primary function: to create profit for the ruling class at the expense of both the workers and the planet. Then, people will realize that by overthrowing the profit system they can both create an ecologically sustainable mode of production and free themselves from the lives of meaningless drudgery they currently live. Whatever capitalist entities fund your little organization wouldn't really like that, though, would they? And hence we get asinine suggestions like the ones above. The proletariat doesn't need to sign a "social contract" (i.e. truce or surrender) with the ruling class. It needs to depose the ruling class and acquire political power in order to save both the planet and itself.
Posted by: Herb Meyers at June 13, 2008 5:18 PM