This is the fourth in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?

This post has more of my personal opinions than previous posts or the report itself.


Other movements should try to avoid becoming as partisan as the environmental movement. Partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular, it made legislation more difficult to pass, and it resulted in fluctuating executive action. Looking at the history of environmentalism can give insight into what to avoid in order to stay bipartisan.

Partisanship was not inevitable. It occurred as the result of choices and alliances made by individual decision makers. If they had made different choices, environmentalism could have ended up being a bipartisan issue, like it was in the 1980s and is in some countries in Europe and democratic East Asia.

Environmentalists were not the only people making significant decisions here. Fossil fuel companies and conservative think tanks also had agency in the debate – and their choices were more blameworthy than the choices of environmentalists. Politicians choose who they do and do not want to ally with. My focus is on the environmental movement itself, because that is similar to what other activist groups are able to control.

I am more familiar with the history of the environmental movement than with most other social movements. The environmental movement is particularly interesting because it involves an important global issue that used to be broadly popular, but has since become very partisan and less effective at enacting policy in the United States. It nevertheless can be risky to over-update on a single case study. Much of the advice given here has support in the broader social movements literature, but the particulars are based on the history of one movement.

With those caveats aside, let’s look at what we can learn.


Here is a list of advice I have gleaned from this history:

  1. Make political alliances with individuals and institutions in both political parties.

    This is the most important advice.

    Allying with the Democratic Party might have seemed like a natural choice at the time. Climate scientists might have already leaned left, and so found allying with Democrats to be more natural – although the evidence for this is weak. Al Gore was committed to their cause, and was rapidly building political influence: from Representative to Senator to Vice President, and almost to President. 

    The mistake was not simultaneously pursuing alliances with rising Republicans as well. At the time, it would not have been too difficult to find some who were interested. 

    Building relationships with both parties involves recruiting or persuading staffers for both Democratic and Republican congressmen and analysts for both conservative and liberal think tanks. Personal relationships with individuals and institutions often matter more than the implications of a fully consistent ideology.
     
  2. Don’t give up on one side once partisanship starts to be established.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if some environmentalists in the late 1990s or 2000s thought that the issue was already partisan, so it didn’t matter that they were only working with one side. They were wrong. Partisanship could and did continue to get worse. Environmentalism is now one of the, if not the, most partisan issue in the country.

    In 1995, after Newt Gingrich had won control of the House of Representatives opposing the BTU tax, there was still only one conservative think tank that regularly promoted climate skepticism. Environmentalists might have been able to gain influence at other conservative think tanks to weaken the reframing efforts of fossil fuel companies.

    In 2006, Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth did not change the opinions of the public overall, but did encourage a new generation of activists. He might have been able to reduce the partisan effect of the documentary by collaborating with a prominent Republican who supported climate policies, like Schwarzenegger or McCain. 

    Ongoing decisions by environmentalists and their allies continued to reinforce the partisan divide.
     
  3. Proposing flawed legislation, and losing the resulting legislative battle, seems quite bad.

    There were two key legislative defeats as environmentalism started to become partisan: the BTU tax in 1993 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. 

    In both cases, the legislation seems poorly designed. The BTU tax focused on energy, not greenhouse gasses, with exemptions for favored industries. The Kyoto Protocol had already been rejected by the entire Senate. 

    Unpopular legislation proposed by environmentalists and their allies made it easier for other politicians to rally against environmentalism. 

    Drafting good legislation is important both to get what you actually want enacted and to not offer as many opportunities for others’ attacks.
     
  4. Be cautious and intentional about mission creep.

    Mission creep is the gradual expansion of an institution’s or a movement’s goals beyond their original intention. For an advocacy group focusing on a complex issue, some mission creep is inevitable: as your understanding of the problems grows, there should be some changes to the goals you are pursuing to address these problems.

    Mission creep can also involve expanding your goals to include goals of your current political allies, even if they are not directly related to the original intention. This seems bad. Environmental organizations today promote liberal positions on many other policy issues and reliably endorse one political party.

    If the organizations in a movement endorse controversial positions aligned with one party, it should not be surprising if many people associate them with that party. Allowing mission creep makes it harder to build bipartisan coalitions. There are more people who agree with you on environmental issues than there are people who agree with you on environmental issues and abortion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and … .

    Your movement should try to avoid having public opinions on most issues and only focus on the issues central to your original intention.
     
  5. Focusing on local issues makes it easier to form idiosyncratic partnerships that cut across party lines.

    In its first few decades, the modern environmental movement focused primarily on local concerns: air pollution in Los Angeles, the Cuyahoga River fire, the proposed Bodega Bay nuclear power plant, and proposed dams in the Grand Canyon. In the late 1980s, much of the attention of the environmental movement shifted towards climate change, an inherently global phenomenon. This does not reflect public opinion, which seems to be more concerned with local environmental issues than climate change.

    Local politics in the US is less partisan than national politics.[1] It is often not obvious how the national parties would respond to specific local questions, so there are fewer elite cues to divide people into partisan camps. Different localities compete with each other for population and economic activity, and so respond to where people are choosing to live in addition to how people vote. For these reasons, local issues often involve idiosyncratic partnerships cutting across party lines.

    The environmental movement’s shift from local issues to one international issue made it easier for it to become consistently tied to one political party.

    There is some reason to have caution here. You do not want a particular local partnership to turn into an alliance that defines your movement. This feels like a solvable problem by not becoming too committed to local partnerships and managing mission creep well.
     
  6. Getting messaging right seems hard.

    Both underselling and overselling your arguments seems like it could have bad results. Either of them seems like they could undermine public trust in your expertise. 

    Explicitly stating numerical uncertainty to the public is fine, and does not cause people to trust you less.[2] Telling policy makers both your politically plausible asks and your more ambitious hopes also seems fine.

    Failing to distinguish between empirical and normative claims could be effective in the short term: if people accept the validity of the empirical claims, conflating them with policy proposals can make it easier to get these policies enacted. It seems counterproductive in the longer term: if people do not accept your policy goals, it can also make them more dismissive of your empirical claims.

    I am of the opinion that you should use good epistemics when talking to the public or policy makers, rather than using bad epistemics to try to be more persuasive. Most subject matter experts are not also experts in public messaging, and so typically do not know how to use effective rhetoric and narrative-crafting. Being publicly revealed to have been dishonest to the public seems like it damages trust much more than using good epistemics in a not rhetorically optimal way. I would rather have a reputation as someone who trusts the public and policy makers to understand my key points, rather than as someone who looks down on their ability to understand what I’m worried about.

    It is unclear whether any one actor could have dramatically improved the messaging, or if that would have required an unrealistic amount of discipline within the movement. It was not hard for activists on either side to find climate scientists who were willing to confidently argue their position to the public.

To me, the AI safety movement feels sort of like environmentalism in the 1960s or climate change in the 1980s. The movement is still really young. Most of the public is still uncertain what to think about it.

Despite this uncertainty, a decent amount of the public seems to support the goals of the AI safety movement. Polls indicate that many people are skeptical that AI will have a positive impact on society, and that some amount of government regulation is broadly popular.[3]

This does not inherently imply that the AI safety movement will succeed if, for example, it proposes a ballot measure for the next election. The public is still more uncertain than supportive. The details of the proposal need to be proposed and promoted. Various leaders and groups may respond in unpredictable ways. Public opinion might look very different after a major political push than it did before. But I do think that these polls indicate that there is latent public support that the AI safety community could develop in support of its policy goals.

When trying to build this latent public support, it is important to cast as wide of a net as possible. Many different people might be interested in and willing to support the AI safety movement – including people who are culturally very different from the people who are currently working on AI safety. The movement should try to build relationships with as varied a group of people as possible. 

A broad bipartisan movement would be more effective at enacting policy than a movement closely allied to one political party.

  1. ^

    Amalie Jensen, William Marble, Kenneth Scheve, & Matthew J. Slaughter. City limits to partisan polarization in the American public. Political Science Research and Methods 9. (2021) p. 223–241. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b74a2ebfcf7fda680a56b29/t/63bdb31d5fbd7153248b5f47/1673376544024/JensenEtAl_PSRM_2021.pdf.

  2. ^

    Anne Marthe van der Blesa, Sander van der Lindena, Alexandra L. J. Freemana, & David J. Spiegelhalter. The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.14. (2020) p. 7672-7683. https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1913678117.

  3. ^
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8 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:
[-]trevor150

For those of us who haven't already, don't miss out on the paper this was based off of. It's a serious banger for anyone interested in the situation on the ground and probably one of the most interesting and relevant papers this year.

It's not something to miss just because you don't find environmentalism itself very valuable; if you think about it for a while, it's pretty easy to see the reasons why they're a fantastic case study for a wide variety of purposes.

Here's a snapshot of the table of contents:

(the link to the report seems to be broken; are the 4 blog posts roughly the same piece?)

Thank you !

The links to the report are now fixed.

The 4 blog posts cover most of the same ground as the report. The report goes into more detail, especially in sections 5 & 6.

Do you have a link to this paper? It would be great to read, thanks!

Newt Gingrich started out as an environmentalist (and a former member of the Sierra Club), but later turned away from it.

Even after he left congress, he still had some sympathy for environmental issues, as he wrote the book "Contract with Earth" (with an EO Wilson forward). 

Newt can be surprisingly high openness - a person oriented towards novelty can be pro-drilling (accel), pro-geoengineering, and pro-environment (which can be decel), and maybe not reconcile the two together in the most consistent way. He has been critical of both parties on climate change/environment issues (just as Mitt Romney has been, who scores low on the LCV but who really does care about addressing climate change, just not in the "punitive" way that the Democrats want to see it addressed). Free-market environmentalists who do care have different approaches that might on the surface be seen as riskier (just as making use of more energy gives you more resources to address the problem faster even while pumping more entropy into the system).

But his high openness (for a Republican) seems to have also made him more stochastic, or inconsistent.

The book generated a storm of media attention in late 2007 and early 2008 as the U.S. presidential campaign began to heat up. Gingrich in particular made numerous media appearances arguing that the Republican Party was losing popular support because their response to environmental policy was simply, as he put it, "NO!" Maple toured the country as Gingrich's stand-in, most notably before the Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP, www.repamerica.org) during their annual meeting (at which John McCain was endorsed as the most "green" of the Republican presidential candidates). In 2008 Gingrich published another book that advocated oil drilling, Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less, and many pundits called his environmental commitment into question. However, this book's fifth chapter provided an argument for environmental protection. Like many aspects of Gingrich's career, his interest in environmental issues has generated controversy.

https://archive.ph/LsZeh

Ronald Reagan was surprisingly pro-environment as governor of California (Gavin Newsom even spoke about it when he visited China), but later was seen as anti-environmental by environmental groups as president (esp due to his choices of Secretary of the Interior and https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/politics/supreme-court-epa-neil-gorsuch-chevron/index.html ) and his generally pro-industry choices. George H.W. Bush was surprisingly pro-environment in his first 2 years (ozone, acid rain..), but was advised to no longer be pro-environment b/c it would not sit well with his base..

worth reading: https://kansaspress.ku.edu/blog/2021/10/13/when-democrats-and-republicans-united-to-repair-the-earth/

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the LCV seems to take the view that all drilling/resource extraction (or industry) is bad. But it still is done somewhere, and if not done in America, it's just outsourced elsewhere (eg https://time.com/6294818/lithium-mining-us-maine/), where it is done with lower standards that cause more local destruction to the environment/pollution (albeit not the kind that Americans feel).

See https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/qa-the-debate-over-the-45x-tax-credit-and-critical-minerals-mining/

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Now that CA appears likely to pass SB-1047, it seems more probable that Republican states will go against it (simply because they, esp Desantis [who valorizes not being CA], want to "own the libs" - esp as @BasedBeffJezos notices). 

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https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2024/06/26/what-curtis-victory-in-utah-means-for-climate-00165123 is a possible source of hope when a new Trump presidency may potentially gut much of the EPA and many other environmental regulations... Republican voices for the environment have especially high leverage during a time when Trump focuses much of his platform as the negation of the "other side" (just as he wants to revoke Biden's EV mandates and Biden's executive order on AI).

https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2024-01-18/column-meet-john-curtis-the-utah-republican-who-cares-about-climate-change-boiling-point

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I once saw a graph showing which counties in the US believed that climate change came from humans... It strongly corresponded with partisan affiliation, though somewhat less in WA and CA - the two states where more than 50% in many red counties believed that it did... Source here: 

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IFP (which has some writers who seem more right-wing than left-wing) has a lot to say on the cost-benefit analysis of environmental regulation. NEPA has done a lot to slow down all forms of infrastructural development, and made projects of ALL kinds move much more slowly. But IFP also recognizes the positive externalities of reduced pollution levels. 

Thanks, this is really useful.

I am of the opinion that you should use good epistemics when talking to the public or policy makers, rather than using bad epistemics to try to be more persuasive.

Do you have any particular examples as evidence of this? This is something I've been thinking a lot about for AI and I'm quite uncertain. It seems that ~0% of advocacy campaigns have good epistemics, so it's hard to have evidence about this. Emotional appeals are important and often hard to reconcile with intellectual honesty.

Of course there are different standards for good epistemics and it's probably bad to outright lie, or be highly misleading. But by EA standards of "good epistemics" it seems less clear if the benefits are worth the costs.

As one example, the AI Safety movement may want to partner with advocacy groups who care about AI using copyrighted data or unions concerned about jobs. But these groups basically always have terrible epistemics and partnering usually requires some level of endorsement of their positions.

As an even more extreme example, as far as I can tell about 99.9% of people have terrible epistemics by LessWrong standards so to even expand to a decently sized movement you will have to fill the ranks with people who will constantly say and think things that you think are wrong.

Agreed. Advocacy seems to me to be ~very frequently tied to bad epistemics, for a variety of reasons. So what is missing to me in this writeup (and indeed, in most of the discussions about the issue): why does it make sense to make laypeople even more interested?

The status quo is that relevant people (ML researchers at large, AI investors, governments and international bodies like UN) are already well-aware of the safety problem. Institutions are set up, work is being done. What is there to be gained from involving the public to an even greater extent, poison and inevitably simplify the discourse, add more hard-to-control momentum? I can imagine a few answers (at present not enough being done, fear of the market forces eventually overwhelming the governance, "democratic mindset"), but none of those seem convincing in the face of the above.

To tie with the environmental movement: wouldn't it be much better for the world if it was an uninspiring issue. It seems to me that this would prevent the anti-nuclear movement being solidified by the momentum, the extinction rebellion promoting degrowth etc, and instead semi-sensible policies would get considered somewhere in the bureaucracy of the states?

instead semi-sensible policies would get considered somewhere in the bureaucracy of the states?

Whilst normally having radical groups is useful for shifting the Overton window or abusing anchoring effects in this case study of environmentalism I think it backfired from what I can understand, given the polling data of public in the sample country already caring about the environment.