Irony of Reid's Move: Latinos Want Climate Action

Seems like Senator Reid can’t manage more than one issue at a time. He’s decided to push the bipartisan effort on climate and energy legislation to the back burner and instead focus on immigration reform. If you smell a rough re-election campaign, you’re on the right track. Ironically, Senator Reid is missing a big opportunity to address something that Latinos care a lot about – and that’s climate change.

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change (NLCCC) released a study on the attitudes of Latino voters on climate change in three key states –Colorado, Florida AND Nevada. The findings? Latino voters want global warming action.

What’s more – the overwhelming majorities of Latino voters in Florida (80%), Nevada (67%) and Colorado (58%) say they are more likely to vote for a U.S. Senate candidate that supports proposals for fighting global warming. And 8 out of 10 voters reject the idea that fighting global warming will hurt the economy. In Nevada, 72% of those polled said that focusing on clean energy will create jobs.

NLCCC’s Vice-Chair Lillian Rodriguez-Lobez tells us why: “Latino Americans are on the front lines of climate change. We live where we feel the biggest impacts of droughts and hurricanes. We suffer disproportionately from asthma and air pollution, which will get worse under global warming. And, in huge numbers, we work in agriculture – of all industries the one likely to be hardest hit by climate change. The fact is that Latino Americans have every reason to call for an Earth Day revolution.”

Looks like Senator Reid is now saying, you can’t have it all. You can’t live freely in America and at the same time, be safe from the impacts of global warming.

Of course, let’s not just point the finger at Senator Reid. If there were more than one Republican Senator willing to do the work of protecting all of us from the impacts of global warming, then we wouldn’t be in the middle of this mess. In the absence of leadership, we all lose.

Heart and Head

One of my standard slides in presentations to groups on how to talk about climate change is a picture of a brain and a picture of a heart. Another favorite, is a picture of the Wicked Witch of the West, with the caption, Cursed with the Curse of Knowledge – borrowed from the Heath brothers who first coined the term, Curse of Knowledge in their book, Made to Stick.

My point to groups of policy wonks trying to get the public engaged in climate change is that the data can only take you so far. For example, skip the “by 2100” and go straight to “in the lifetime of a child born today.” Give me something I can see and feel.

Thankfully the Heath brothers are back with a new book that delves even further into this integral balance between the rational and the emotional. It’s called Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard.

Kevin Huffman, the enviable winner of the Washington Post’s Next Great Pundit contest nailed it today when he wrote about how the lessons of Switch can be applied to the current health care debate.

Change comes, as Huffman aptly notes, “only when we appeal to both logic and emotion.” Getting that balance right is an art. And we haven’t found it … not with health care. And it’s going to be an even tougher challenge with climate and energy legislation (see my previous post, Climate Change and Change Management).

Opponents of action on climate change have done a masterful job at using emotion and logic to scare people. Scared about the economy? Scared about keeping your job? Well then you better be scared of this monster thing called cap and trade. Environmentalists have tried to scare people with the unfortunate facts of what global warming will do – in the future. Logic takes over and the here and now of the economy makes more sense than future predictions of doom “at the end of the century” or melting glaciers in a place they can't even find on a map.

While climate change realists have gotten better about moving away from the policy wonk trap of “cap and trade” and toward emphasizing what action on climate change can do for American leadership in the clean energy economy and job creation, we’re not balancing that logical message about leadership with the emotional message about what what kind of planet we’ll leave our kids. We’re not in alignment on both the logic and the emotion.

It’s that alignment, the Heath brothers advise us that will be essential to changing things when change is hard. And there’s nothing going to be harder than getting strong climate and energy legislation passed.