Climate change activists are seeking to use high gas prices to their benefit. 'Global warming' gets a rebranding

Shhhh! Don’t talk about global warming!

There’s been a change in climate for Washington’s greenhouse gang, and they’ve come to this conclusion: To win, they have to talk about other topics, like gas prices and kids choking on pollutants.


More than two years since Democrats’ cap-and-trade plan died in Congress, the strategic shift represents a reluctant acknowledgment from environmentalists that they’ve lost ground by tackling global warming head-on. Their best bet now lies in a bit of a bait and switch: Help elect global warming fighters by basing campaigns on kitchen-table issues.

“You don’t have to be James Carville to figure out that talking about people’s health and the health of their children … is going to make a difference to the average voter,” Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said.

In particular, the greens are targeting Midwestern swing voters in advance of the presidential and congressional elections in November.

Earlier this month, the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council made a seven-figure ad buy in swing states featuring young children with asthma inhalers making their way through the Capitol.

“We’re going to talk a lot about the health implications of dirty air,” said Heather Taylor, director of NRDC’s political arm. “I think that the Midwest is one of those places where [there are] a million great clean energy stories, especially. And they’re not being told right now, because we’ve tended to be in other markets. That’s an area where we feel like it’s time to go tell those stories.”

The new focus comes as the American Lung Association is about to release on Wednesday the latest round of its semi-annual polling on public health and environmental regulations in which a bipartisan set of polling firms found that a majority of respondents believe that it is “more important to ensure that we have strong safeguards that protect our air quality and public health” than to “streamline unnecessary environmental regulations.”

There’s a lot at stake: Republicans have portrayed President Barack Obama and his minions at various federal agencies as job killers in a time of high unemployment and fragile economic growth. The left has figured out it needs a better message — one that’s more resonant on the local level — to combat the job-killer talk.

So melting glaciers are giving way to smog-induced asthma. And fuel-efficiency is now a matter of pump prices, not pollutants.

The Sierra Club and NRDC advertisement is focused on the effects of regulations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions on incidences of asthma attacks, and cheering the Obama administration for planned greenhouse gas regulations for power plants.

Industry attorney Scott Segal called the new Sierra Club-NRDC ads “a new low in the groups’ highly inappropriate and offensive exploitation of the important subject of childhood asthma,” and “at best, a cynical election-year ploy that detracts from serious discussion of environmental protection.”

Similarly, the lung association, which spent $10 million on its Healthy Air Campaign last year, has been aggressive in its push against Republican efforts to repeal or block environmental regulations. One series of ads features a baby in a red carriage coughing outside power plants and Washington, D.C., landmarks.

“We are sort of stepping up our public advocacy on who’s standing up for clean air and who’s standing up for big polluters,” said ALA Assistant Vice President Peter Iwanowicz.

“Critics for a long time have argued that environmentalists and our issues don’t connect with people,” said Sierra Club National Political Director Tony Cani. “The idea is this: When it comes to any issue, whether it’s Keystone, EPA regulations or any other issue … how does that impact individuals? How does it impact families? I think that it’s fair to say that that’s not always been a strength of environmentalists.”

Global warming, in particular, has presented a messaging challenge.

“I think climate change is more difficult to explain,” Cani said. “When we’re talking about the immediate effects of some of these policies and some of these issues that will lead to climate change, they’re very serious too. We think that when we’re talking about [health] issues … we’re still talking about climate change,” he added. They “might not be using that word or that phrase.”

It’s no surprise that climate change has become less important to voters, said Thom Riehle, a longtime Democratic pollster who is now a senior vice president for YouGov.com.

Whereas support for climate change mitigation was at 50 percent to 60 percent in 2007, Riehle said, “it’s dramatically lower now.”

But, Riehle said, there’s one small group of voters that swing on energy issues — and it’s a subset of the overall swing vote. Here’s its profile: independents and conservative Democrats who live in the heartland, were born during the baby boom or as part of Generation X, went to college but didn’t finish a four-year degree and are more sensitive to environmental issues than the average voter.

But they are also “skeptical about how far strong environmentalists would take things,” Riehle said.

That helps explain why green groups have a tough ride during a highly charged election year.

Republicans are likely to “try to corner Obama into taking extreme environmental positions that they can play off of,” Riehle said. “Once the administration issues a proposal to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants, I would expect that Republicans and their super PAC would pounce on that proposal with all their might.”

The Lung Association polling, conducted among likely voters across the country with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, suggests Americans would like to see tighter limitations on pollutants, including mercury, smog, carbon dioxide and vehicle emissions. Support for stricter standards ranged from 60 percent of respondents on emissions from cars to 78 percent on mercury from power plants.

By 51 percent to 43 percent, more respondents said it is more important to protect air quality than to reduce regulation of industry. Forty-nine percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrats and 41 percent identified themselves as Republicans.

The Lung Association also oversampled in battleground states Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as Maine, finding, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points, that all three states were less likely than the national average to believe protecting air quality trumps preventing regulation. In Ohio, the numbers were upside down, with killing regulations winning 53 percent to 42 percent.

Riehle said he wouldn’t put much stock in the left’s focus on cleaning up air quality. Polls show that 65 percent to 70 percent of adults are very satisfied with air quality, he said, noting that “almost every group is participating in that majority.”

“My warning would be that you have not made the argument on health effects” to most voters. “People think the air is cleaner than it was, and it is.”