American Support for Environmental Justice Policies: The Case of Climate Change

• In Event: Environmental Justice

Abstract

For many decades, scholars have shown that the poor and members of racial and ethnic minority groups in America have experienced more hardships in the domains of housing (Grinstein-Weiss et al., 2020), policing (Davis et al., 2018; Glaser 2014), health care (World Health Organization, 2018), and education (Brown, 2010; Noltemeyer et al., 2012). And along these lines, climate change has been increasingly viewed through this prism of justice and fairness.

The research field of environmental justice (EJ) is motivated by evidence that many forms of environmental pollution have disproportionate negative impact on the poor and people of color, by no fault of their own. For example, as natural disasters and extreme heat cause property damage, displacement, hospitalizations, and deaths, less privileged groups have suffered at higher rates. Indeed, many of the negative consequences of climate change are borne disproportionately by those with fewer resources—people who often belong to racial and ethnic minority groups (Schlosberg, 2007).

Furthermore, poorer people have fewer adaptive resources, as was observed, for example, during major natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina (Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009). Because many disasters garnered significant media attention that mentioned climate change as a potential cause (Houston et al., 2012), the general public has seen many ways in which climate change has affected the daily lives of people who are poor and of color. Therefore, efforts to reduce environmental pollution can be viewed as inherently progressive, reducing unjustified social inequalities.

Recent research has shown that members of disadvantaged subpopulations who are at especially high risk of harm from climate change are most likely to view climate change as real and requiring ameliorative action (e.g., Krosnick and MacInnis, 2020). Individuals who were objectively at greater risk for suffering from climate related disasters and those who lack the resources to recover from such disasters correctly view themselves as more personally vulnerable to the negative consequences of climate change. And these people are also more supportive of government efforts to address climate change than were people who did not see themselves as especially vulnerable.

In this research, we develop and test a theory of support for action to address environmental injustice, particularly predicting support for government policies intended to address environmental injustices by reducing the unequal burdens or damages brought about by climate change-induced extreme weather events, such as wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding.

The present study examines various novel inequality-reducing policy measures, including general support for EJ policies directly particularly to disadvantaged people, such as means-based wildfire or hurricane insurance subsidies (separately for homeowners and renters), flooding insurance subsidies, and buyout subsidies. This conceptual framework proposes injustice awareness to be a primary predictor of justice-enhancing policy support. People aware of injustice are predicted to be especially supportive of support for policies designed to reduce unequal hardships.

The framework proposes two moderators that regulate this predictive relationship. One moderator is the desire to reduce socioeconomic inequality, and it is hypothesized that injustice awareness predicts support for equality-restoring policies stronger when one desires to reduce inequality than when one does not. The other moderator is in-group identity: the respondent’s perception that he or she is a member of a disproportionately harmed group. It is hypothesized that injustice awareness induces inequality-reducing policy support more strongly among people who are members of groups bearing the hardships of injustice.

This model is tested using newly collected data from a national survey of a representative sample of American adults who are currently being interviewed by telephone via Random Digit Dialing. Professional interviews follow optimal practices to reach out to selected potential respondents over a period of months in order to maximize the survey’s response rate. The survey includes innovative measures of perceptions of climate change injustice that have not been administered previously. And this research will constitute the first investigation of the proposed mediation and moderation hypotheses.

Although this study is focused on climate change injustice in particular, its findings will have implications regarding support for progressive policies in other areas of life. That is, evidence in support of the proposed model will justify applications of the same concepts in the study of public support for progressive policies outside of the arena of the environment.

Authors

• Jared McDonald, University of Mary Washington

• Jon A. Krosnick, Stanford University

• Bo MacInnis, Stanford University