{"id":1480,"date":"2015-01-30T19:45:55","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T19:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/?p=1480"},"modified":"2015-01-30T19:46:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T19:46:37","slug":"listen-to-the-people-that-means-republicans-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/2015\/01\/30\/listen-to-the-people-that-means-republicans-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Listen to the People…That Means Republicans Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Time had an article today titled, Most Americans Support Government Action on Climate Change, Poll Find<\/a>s. \u00a0A recent study conducted by both the New York Times and Stanford University shed light on the changing mindset of the American people and perhaps more importantly American Voters. The republican party is notorious for its position of climate change, in fact I wrote a\u00a0blog post<\/a> last semester on what the republican domination of the last election meant for government action on climate change… it was\u00a0not optimistic. So\u00a0this research\u00a0came as a happy surprise. Its opening line states, that “An overwhelming majority of the American public, including nearly half of Republicans, support government action to curb\u00a0global warming<\/a>… [and] two-thirds of Americans say they are more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change.” The study also found that the majority of people (and about half of republican voters) would be turned off by a candidate who questioned the science of climate change or called it a hoax.<\/p>\n

However, this study begs the question, why are republicans\u00a0candidates<\/em> not in line with the views of their consituents? Clearly half of republicans in office do not think government should take action on climate change. Of the\u00a02012 republican presidential\u00a0candiateds only one<\/em> publicly acknowledged the science of climate changed and believed it to be “real,” and thought it would be beneficially to have some government policy for emissions reductions. The chair of the senate’s Environmental Committee is a republican by the of James Inhofe that literally wrote of book <\/a>on climate change denial. Furthermore, the senate approved the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline, pushed by republican leadership despite its dire climate consequences<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the answer lies in campaign finance. It is no big secret that big oil companies contribute hefty amounts of campaign funds to politicians with some expectations on how their candidates handle climate change. The article states that, “advocacy groups funded by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch have vowed to ensure that Republican candidates who advocate for climate change action will lose in primary elections.” Perhaps the divide between republicans and democrats is not actually as large as we often perceive, maybe the problem lies in a much broader issue of how we allow large corporations to influence American politics.<\/p>\n

\"1112toon_luckovich\"<\/a>\"Head-in-the-ground-climate-change\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Time had an article today titled, Most Americans Support Government Action on Climate Change, Poll Finds. \u00a0A recent study conducted by both the New York Times and Stanford University shed light on the changing mindset of the American people and perhaps more importantly American Voters. The republican party is notorious for its … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Listen to the People…That Means Republicans Too”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2119,"featured_media":1485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100741,100739,77135],"tags":[108626,108624,76355,108622,108623,60085,108625,43354,108406,108621],"class_list":["post-1480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-society","category-climate-governance-politics","category-mosaic","tag-american-politics","tag-campaign-finance","tag-democrats","tag-keystone-xl","tag-koch-brothers","tag-new-york-times","tag-presidential-candidates","tag-republicans","tag-senate","tag-stanford-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/cop20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}