 We're good to go? Which is why I'm speaking in this mic. Hi, I'm Steve Tellis. I'm a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and a New America fellow alumnus and a part of the New Models of Policy Change project here at the New America Foundation, which is directed by Heather Holbert and also includes Mark Schmidt just walking in. The New Models of Policy Change project is designed to help understand the processes by which we might get cross-party cooperation in a polarized era, but especially in a period in which old school bipartisan kinds of forms of cooperation that come out of the center, that come out of establishment institutions no longer seem to be working. We're looking for what are the ways that those kind of cross-party coalitions might be created largely between junior and ideological true believers. And today is, in some sense, the negative case. We've done two other cases, which are available in your folder, one by John Bennett on the sequester, particularly looking at the bipartisan coalition to cut the Pentagon budget, and then one by David Dagan and, oh, me, called How Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration, which is maybe the best example of genuine, transpartisan coalition building between strong, ideological true believers. So this is part we have additional case studies, even now that are being completed. I'm led to understand. And so today, we have a literally all-star panel to look at the case of why bipartisan efforts, transpartisan efforts, especially efforts to engage evangelicals, failed. We have three speakers. The paper was written by Lydia with a little assistance from me. Lydia Bean was trained as a PhD sociologist at Harvard. Among her advisors was the great Dita Scotchpole. She's the author of the Politics of Evangelical Identity. I think it's not overstating matters to say that she's one of the foremost experts on the politics of evangelicals in the United States. She's now a senior consultant to Pico National Network. And since she's a very new America person, both a scholar and an activist, she's a social entrepreneur, maybe, if you wanted to use those kinds of terms. She works in Texas to help raise civic participation among low-income and modern income people of faith. The commentators are two, what I think of as interesting unorthodox thinkers on environmental issues and, therefore, very good to speak on this. Jerry Taylor is the president of the Niskanen Center. Prior to starting the Niskanen Center in 2014, Jerry spent 23 years at the Cato Institute, where he served as director of natural resource studies and editor at Regulation Magazine. And back in the day, he worked at the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is like saying that you are part of the society of the Illuminati. Finally, Ted Nordhaus is, his website tells me, is a leading thinker on energy, environment, climate, human development, and politics, all five of those. He is an expert on. His book in 2007, Breakthrough with Michael Schnellenberger. Again, his website tells me it was prescient. Although I think he may have been quoting somebody else rather than himself claiming the book was prescient. But Ted is, I think, one of the most interesting thinkers, not just on environmental issues, but all the issues around the future of infrastructure, energy, transportation, and the future of American politics. So I'll hand over the panel to Lydia. She'll give you the basic findings of our study. And then we'll go on to Ted and Jerry. And the panel is being moderated by Heather Hobert. Heather runs the New Models of Policy Change Project here at New America. Before that, she ran the National Security Network, worked in the White House, and has held a number of positions and major positions in foreign policy. So again, Lydia, the floor is yours. Start out by just gauging the audience. So what is an evangelical Christian? I tend to forget that I should define it. But we're talking here about 25% of the American population. But not only that, in places like Dallas, Texas, where I live and organize, we're really talking about over 40% of the population being evangelical. And in some districts, you can even have a flat majority of people who are just one evangelical denomination, like Southern Baptist. So this is not an optional curiosity over in the sidelines. We're talking about one of the major groups in American public life. What are the characteristics of evangelicalism, commitment to the authority of scripture, to personal conversion, to evangelism, and to actively living out your faith in your everyday life? Evangelical is a broad umbrella category. It includes a lot of different denominations. People argue about who is and isn't an evangelical. But generally, the phrase refers to many large denominations, including Southern Baptist, non-denominational Christian churches, whether charismatic or Baptist in origin. The assemblies of God now considered evangelical. And then other denominations like the Presbyterian Church and American Reformed. Christians are also often considered evangelical. So I just want to get a sense of who I'm talking to. Raise your hand if you have a close friend or a nuclear family member who is an evangelical Christian, or if you yourself are an evangelical Christian. OK, great, great. So this is a good room. And no judgment. In a place like Dallas, every single hand in the room would go up, unless I had handpicked a very unusual group of people. It's pretty tightly woven into the fabric of everyday life. But it's not in more liberal spaces, and it's certainly not in the environmental movement. Since the 1980s, evangelicals have been known for their opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and defense of a particular understanding of religious liberty. And they've become slightly intertwined with the conservative movement and with the Republican Party. So one of the most critical voting blocks, if not the most critical voting blocks, for Republicans. In my first book, The Politics of Evangelical Identity, I explored how this relationship between evangelicals and conservative politics came to be. We tend to take it for granted now as obvious or somehow coming from the content of evangelicalism. But this is in some ways an illusion that's been created by the success of the Christian right to convince you all that it's just in the deep fabric of their faith. Indeed, in most countries, evangelicals are not associated with conservative politics. Indeed, I made a comparison to Canada where religion and politics are not so closely intertwined and where you find a great deal of political diversity in evangelical churches that are just as theologically conservative and just as opposed to issues like abortion as their American counterparts. So I was curious in my first book to understand how this close relationship came to be and how it's reinforced in people's everyday faith lives. After I published this book, my interest turned to understanding the future of evangelical politics because since the mid 2000s, we've seen a flowering of alternative evangelical voices who are moving an agenda that is not so closely in lockstep with the Republican Party and the rest of the conservative movement. And these movements have been focusing on other moral issues besides abortion and same sex marriage and they include fighting poverty, working for racial justice, or protecting the environment. The goals of these movements have been varied. Some have tried to persuade evangelicals to rethink their allegiance to the Republican Party altogether. Other leaders in these movements have tried to reform the Republican Party from within by attempting to hold a line that is genuinely faith-based rather than moving in lockstep with the other parties and assume that we're all sharing the same values. But these efforts to date have not translated into changing voting or to reforming the Republican Party from within. The relationship between evangelicals and the Republican Party remains very strong. In 2012, 79% of white evangelicals voted for Mitt Romney, the same percentage who voted for George W. Bush. And that's a high watermark. George W. Bush's presidency was a high watermark for the marriage of evangelicals and Republicans. And furthermore, perhaps most upsetting, evangelicals have not been able to be as powerful countervailing influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. And you really see this with the success of Donald Trump, who has become the candidate of choice for white evangelicals. I was once asked on camera why this was and what it was about Donald Trump's personal history and his moral stance that could explain the support. And I wasn't prepared for the question and I just started laughing hysterically. That kind of tells you the moment in which we live. And not only that, I live in Dallas, Texas. A lot of the key players, that's their home base. And when you talk to Republicans behind closed doors, there's this quiet despair among many conservative evangelicals about their inability to translate, to be this countervailing voice within the Republican Party. So that's the context in which I wrote this case study. That's the motivation that it comes from, both scholarly and personal. Again, since I live in Texas and I organize faith communities there, the stakes are very high. Historically, the environment was not a concern of evangelical Christians, but since the 1980s, there has been a small and growing movement called the creation care movement among evangelicals to care for God's creation. And in the mid 2000s, this evangelical creation care movement became involved in an effort to pass climate change legislation. When the Evangelical Climate Initiative was first launched in February of 2006, it was hailed as a major step to build bipartisan momentum for creation care. And to outside observers in the media and in the secular environmental community, it seemed like climate care was now enshrined as a moral issue for evangelical Christians. The theory was that since evangelical Christians are a core group in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, having an evangelical voice in the movement for climate action could give cover to Republican members of Congress to support climate action. The Evangelical Climate Initiative was signed by prominent national evangelical leaders, including many board members of the National Association of Evangelicals, presidents of Christian colleges and universities, and leading evangelical relief and development organizations like World Vision. Among evangelical pastors, prominent signatories included Leith Anderson, pastor of the Multicampus Woodale Church in Minnesota, Joel Hunter, pastor of Northland and Florida, and even Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in California, an author of the best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life. The ECI, or Evangelical Climate Initiative, made a national media splash and magnified through paid advertising. And the NEA's director of policy, Richard Seizek, was even featured on a green issue of Vanity Fair for his religious leadership on climate change. In the mid-2000s, many in the environmental movement thought that support from the evangelical creation care movement could take them over the top and build a true bipartisan effort to act against climate change. On paper, the Evangelical Climate Initiative looked like a winning outreach effort, checking all the boxes of a standard outreach campaign as currently conceived in advocacy groups and foundations. Support from megachurch pastors, check. Support from head of national evangelical organizations, check. Strong messaging framed in the language of the target group, check. Paid advertising and earned media in national publications, check. The formula was there, but in retrospect, the Evangelical Climate Initiative was a house built on sand. The Evangelical Climate Initiative had not just taken on any issue. What they didn't realize is the climate care movement was a threat to more established Christian right interests and their Republican coalition partners, as well as for well-established definitions of evangelical interest in politics. And so as soon as the Evangelical Climate Initiative was launched, those interests fought back. There was a strong countervailing effort led by the Cornwell Alliance and was joined by the Heritage Foundation focused on the family, the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and many other well-known leaders in the Christian right. As we know, climate action did not succeed. That's why we're here. In June 2009, the House passed HR2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act known as Wax and Markey. But climate action was declared dead in the Senate in July 2010. And by that summer, even former champion Lindsey Graham had flip-flopped and declared that he was no longer persuaded by the science. And of course, as you know, in November 2010, Republicans retook the House of Representatives following the rise of the Tea Party. And for that, hopes for climate action has remained dead until the time being. So much ink has been spilled over the failure of this climate campaign between 2006 and 2009. And I'm here to talk about a small part of that campaign. In particular, the outreach to evangelical Christians. This outreach was promptly crushed by a counter-effort from the Christian right. And it crumbled and it took a long time for the effort to rebuild itself. And I wanna stress that even though this effort failed, it's a really important lesson that everyone needs to be studying closely. You know, it's true that we can learn more from failure than from victory. And I wanna emphasize my target for this case, they was not actually the climate care movement itself because they've actually learned from this defeat already. Everything in my paper is old news to them. My fear is that the secular environmental movement as well as the more general policy advocates of community has not learned the lessons that they've learned already. And unless everybody gets religion on what happened in the last climate change effort, those, nobody can be successful. The evangelicals can't carry it alone if everyone else is basically working from an outdated model of how policy change works. Nobody has a magic formula to create transpartisan coalitions. That's why we're here. I'm assuming that's why you're here. If you had the magic formula, you'd be outworking it. You wouldn't need to hear from us. And strategy is always based on educated guesses. The reason we need to learn from the failure of the evangelical climate care, the evangelical climate initiative is because it followed all the dominant thinking about how you create a bipartisan coalition, how you conduct successful outreach to new target groups and bring them in as non-traditional allies. And it's my claim that that dominant thinking was wrong then. And unfortunately it's still wrong now. The evangelicals in the creation care movement are crystal clear about why this dominant thinking was wrong. And they've built up an alternative theory of change. And in that sense, they're ahead of the game. It's not clear to me that the other parties in the environmental movement have learned the same lessons. So what happened? What went wrong? What can we learn? First of all, the evangelical climate initiative was from the start, a house built on sand because it didn't have deep roots within the evangelical movement. And that was not a unique failing of theirs. This is how outreach is done, right? This is the formula for how you create a strange bedfellows coalition, right? You have leaders from national groups make a statement and then you have a bunch of events, then you have a bunch of earned media, you have a slick marketing campaign. There's not the reasonable expectation that you're gonna build a real base among that group. But what it turned out was that the evangelical climate initiative was up against was an entrenched partisan coalition. And there was more at stake here than just climate. The fact is that most of the leaders who led the backlash against the climate initiative, including people like James Dobson, the Heritage Foundation, didn't really care about climate denial. If they weren't motivated by an inherent commitment to stopping climate action. What they were doing was protecting their coalition. Evangelicals who have made a coalition with conservative movement have an understanding about what is required of them as good coalition partners. They have to play by their rules. And what I was told by my informants within this Christian right movement is that they got the message in 2006, 2007 that climate action was bad for their allies in the economic conservative movement. And they needed to do what good allies do. They needed to squash it. They needed to get up their baseball bats and break some knee caps as a favor to their coalition partners. Because that's how good coalitions work. Strong partisan coalitions can't allow outsiders or even insiders to tear them apart from the inside. And so people like James Dobson, the late Chuck Colson did what was expected to them and defended their hegemony as the arbiters of the evangelical agenda. And in retrospect, it was unrealistic to think that the evangelical climate initiative could persuade some of this old guard in the Christian right. Because the old saying goes, you can't persuade a man to understand what his salary depends on him not understanding. Likewise, you can't persuade a political operative to understand what would completely rupture their place within their partisan coalition. And so it was inevitable perhaps that the Christian right would lead this backlash even if they had been privately convinced of the science behind climate change. So better messaging couldn't have saved them. Being more persuasive couldn't have saved them. I wanna emphasize that loud and clear. The problem was structural and the problem was strategic, not tactical. What I mean is, if we imagine a scenario in which the evangelical climate initiative had been more successful and had been able to at least be a countervailing influence among conservatives and maybe had not been attacked by the Christian right, that scenario would have to begin in the mid 90s. Because that's when the creation care movement and their funders and allies made a set of strategic decisions that led to the failure of climate action. So in the mid 90s, the creation care movement had some early wins around saving endangered species and that led funders and allies to have the wrongheaded belief that all they needed was a few token evangelicals, pet evangelical mascots to sign a statement on a policy issue and that would be enough to show evangelical support for their issue. That was wrong. It was partly because saving endangered species is not restructuring the economy and making a big introduction on climate. They're not the same thing. And so creation care did not have the chance to build up a strong evangelical base in the churches, in the real local places where evangelicals was their lives. So that meant that they were very grass tops and even the mega church pastors who signed the evangelical climate initiative statements did not actually have their own members behind them. And the Christian right knew that. They knew that this was a house built on sand. They knew that if they pushed back, the whole thing would crumble because what the evangelical climate movement did not have was mobilized power. They had what Michael Lindsey calls convening power. They had been very successful in using their identity as evangelicals to bring evangelicals together around a general message. And that moral message was compelling and winsome and had a pretty high hit rate of convincing evangelicals who were not invested so highly in Christian right politics that they couldn't afford to understand it. But what they didn't have was a large enough grassroots base to stay the hand of the Christian right. What would that have looked like? I would say other examples include racial justice. So there have been examples where the Christian right has been restrained from doing things because they have a large base of African-American Southern Baptist and Richard Land was deposed because he made inflammatory statements about the killing of Trayvon Martin. African-American Southern Baptist pastors mobilized and he was out of there. That's what it means to have a real evangelical base. If evangelical creation care movement had starting in the 90s built that base, the Christian right might have decided to set this one out and they would have told their allies in the economic conservative movement, look, you gotta give us a pass, we can't help you. You know, this has a foothold. We have these Southern Baptist pastors here and there. We have this mega church where everyone's convinced by climate action. It wouldn't have to have persuaded a majority of evangelicals, but it would have to been real enough so that the opponents of climate action in the evangelical movement decided it wasn't worth them spending political capital on. As things stood in the evangelical climate initiative, a single guy named Cal Beisner was able to pull this coalition together fairly easy. And what's amazing to me is the Cornwall Alliance, led by Cal Beisner, for most of the period in question when he was leading this anti-climate action movement among Evangelicals and conservatives, he wasn't even doing it full-time. So he was actually teaching classes full-time at a Christian university and doing this as a hobby. Right, so I don't want you to think that evangelical creation care lost out because the Koch brothers poured a bunch of money into it and they were washed out. That this effort wasn't well resourced. So the incentives were all about holding together the Republican coalition and it didn't take very much to do it. So in conclusion, what can we learn from this example? I think the most important conclusion, which I think I'll move this to the Q&A, sorry I don't want to tell you the whole paper, you'll have to read it on your own, but the most important lesson is that the dominant thinking about how to create bipartisan coalitions and how to do outreach to non-traditional allies is wrong. The theory of change is wrong. What the evangelical climate initiative taught us was that it was wrong, they know it's wrong. And now it's important that everyone else study this case to understand. The reason why other cases are more successful, we argue in this paper, is the older model of just wrangle yourself some pet group members of this group and have a statement that only works if that issue does not come up against entrenched interests within the target group's partisan coalition. So on something like dog fighting, right? Sure, nobody cares. There's nobody in the conservative movement who's for fighting dogs, right? So you could very quickly pull together a bipartisan coalition, you get a few evangelicals to stand up and say no to dog fighting and it's done, Republicans are persuaded. But on something where there's gonna be conflict between partisan, between members of a partisan coalition on an issue that threatens the standing of evangelicals as good coalition partners that kind of where they're actually trying to move the party around in a way that other partners don't wanna go. To do that, you have to have a real base. And that takes time. You can't make a two-year grant and turn evangelicals into Democrats or even turn the evangelicals into a counterbalance that actually throws their way around within the Republican Party. It's just not possible. And funders who believe they could do that relying to themselves. That's the most important message is that if you're serious about building the kind of transpartisan coalitions we're talking about, that is the kind of transpartisan coalitions that actually have the power to overcome the extreme polarization in which we find themselves, you have to have a longer time horizon. You have to think seriously about building a real constituency. And most importantly, you have to have real strong strategic relationships with the groups that you're working with. In the creation care movement, evangelicals were very much junior partners during this climate fight. They weren't at the big kids' table. They weren't part of the climate war room. They weren't even at the kids' table. They were over there doing, they had a lot of local knowledge about what was going on within the conservative movement and among evangelicals that they should have been able to share with the people who were actually making the strategic decisions. But instead, they were relegated to being at the kids' table. And a lot of strategic intel was lost. So I'll say in conclusion, you have to have real strategic capacity to build these bipartisan coalitions. You can't just sort of delegate it or subcontract it out to groups. They have to have a real place at the table making the core decisions. So that means in conclusion that environmentalism needs to change. And how the power and how the decisions are made within the environmental movement needs to change. They can't just sort of throw some grants out to some outside groups and let them sort it out. They have to rethink their whole theory of change in ways that includes non-traditional groups like evangelicals and conservatives. So I'll stop there and let the conversation begin. Great, Lydia, thank you so much. That is a lot to think about on various fronts. Jerry Taylor, a man who knows a thing or two about being on both sides of partisan fights within partisan coalitions. Let's hear from you next. Well, thank you, Heather. I think this is a tremendous paper. I'm very impressed with it and I greatly enjoy the work that Steve and Heather and others have done in this area. It's a real goldmine of information for people like me who are in this business reading what academics say work doesn't work and autopsies and successes and failures. I pay a great deal of attention to it and I would hope that others in my line of work would do that as well. In this particular circumstance, I can't say that I'm greatly familiar with the evangelical environmental community. However, I was raised a Southern Baptist to understand that culture relatively well. Not particularly a devote Southern Baptist these days, but I do understand that world. And my brother is an evangelical environmentalist who happens to also be the climate officer at the Heartland Institute. So I know a little bit about that too. But in the course of my professional career in Washington on this beat, I sure as heck know a lot of the conservative actors that are mentioned in this paper, the actors that the citizens for a constructive tomorrow see fact, Cornwall Alliance, the heritage people, they're all, as it were, my peeps. So I know these folks pretty well and have a pretty good understanding of their organization. And while I wasn't involved in this fight when I was at the Cato Institute and on the other side of the position aisle then where I find myself now, I did watch this battle from afar. And so everything that is reported in this paper certainly rings true. It's what I saw. And I think that Lydia's discussion of the dynamics of coalitional politics on the right is spot on. So I have no complaints whatsoever with the autopsy provided in this paper. But that's gonna be boring if all I do is say how awesome this paper is, which it is. So I'll find some places where I can disagree. And I guess the main place where I might disagree or at least provide a separate perspective is what I think the authors implicitly suggest the optimal strategy might have looked like had it been engaged in the 1990s. I certainly agree with them that a grass-root strategy would have been superior to a grass-top strategy. My concern, however, is that grass-anything strategy is largely unpromising. And the main reason for that is that it presupposes the public opinion drives policy change. And there is an ocean of evidence in the political science community that's not true. If you wanna look on the left, for instance, you can find work from Martin Geilins of Princeton. He has documented very persuasively massive differences between how the public feels about public policy and what public policy actually looks like. Huge changes. If public opinion really dictated public policy, we wouldn't have a dime going into foreign aid. Over 90% of the people opposed foreign aid. Yet we have foreign aid. Why? Because public opinion doesn't drive it. And he documents over and again when it comes to trade or immigration or all sorts of issues, corporate income taxation, minimum wages. If public opinion really dictated public policy, we'd have a very different set of public policies in this country. And then if you look at the literature reviewed by Matt Grossman, say, at Michigan State University, he finds that changes in public opinion, likewise, do not drive changes in public policy. Of course, this is not necessarily a view held by all political scientists, but his review of the policy change literature where you've got multi-decade case studies and movements finds that while public opinion is relevant, sometimes it's not that often as relevant as other factors that go into policy change. So even had the evangelical environmental community succeeded in its mission of mobilizing evangelicals and changing public opinion to evangelical community and increasing those numbers, I'm not entirely sure it would have made a whole lot of difference. So why is this? Why doesn't public opinion really matter that much? And I think that we don't want to overstate public opinion puts boundaries around what politicians can do. So if we think of a set of miraculous events that put Rand Paul into the White House and he decided to unleash a war on Medicare, I think you'd find out how relevant public opinion was. So I don't mean to overclaim, but the reality is while public opinion puts boundaries around what politicians can do, it doesn't drive what politicians do, simply because public opinion as an ocean of evidence tells us is very ill informed, rather incoherent and extremely malleable. To give you an idea of how malleable this is, there was a survey recently released with a set of findings that looked like this. 16% of Republicans when asked say they supported healthcare when they were told that Barack Obama supports, excuse me, supports universal healthcare when they were told Barack Obama supports it. When a different set of Republicans were given the same question, but then said, well, Donald Trump supports universal healthcare, support increase from 16% to 44%. 20% of Republicans supported the Iranian nuclear agreement when told that John Kerry supports it. When they're told that Donald Trump supports that deal, support increases to 53%. 57% of Republicans support protecting social security from budget cuts when told that Hillary Clinton embraces that position. 74% embraced that position when told that Donald Trump is there too. 15% of Republicans support affirmative action when told that Barack Obama supports it, when they're told that Donald Trump supports it, in support is at 33%. So what this tells me is that public opinion is more driven by partisan elites in tribal signals than it is that public opinion drives tribal coalitional politics. And the broader argument for those of you who wanna dig into it is by John Zoller who is relatively orthodox in this sphere. The idea that Zoller offers that I think most political scientists agree when we get to the public opinion conversation is that elites dictate public opinion. Public opinion does not dictate the position of elites. Now in the climate arena, we find very concrete evidence for this as well. Professor Robert Brewell from Drexel recently did a study in which he looked at public opinion on climate change over the course of about a decade. Every survey there's published and available for examination. And then he did a relatively vigorous regression analysis to tease out what accounts for movement in public opinion on climate change. And it does move. It's not steady. It moves quite a bit. Is it weather events? Is it media events like earth and balance coming out or something like that? Is it partisan signaling? Is it the amount of money spent in campaigns by Charles Koch or something like that? So we did a regression to try to figure out what accounts for these changes of public opinion. And what he found is that the main driver for opinion change on climate is what Republican office holders have to say about the matter. The reason for that is Democratic opinion is all fairly steady. Democrats, liberals, concerned about climate change, that doesn't change very much. It's a Republican opinion that changes. And what drives Republican opinion change is what they're hearing from their tribal leaders. So when John McCain and New Pingrich and people like that are talking about the need to address climate change, Republican support for addressing climate change goes up. When they go silent, Republican support for addressing climate change goes silent. We often forget in 2008 that John McCain, when the Republican nomination had a full head of steam of Republican conservative support, even though he supported cap and trade, aggressive action against climate change, and he looked nothing like anything you'd find in the Republican Party today. And yet, he was widely embraced by the GOP. There was dissidence, of course, in the primaries, but that got completely overwhelmed because the tribal signals suggested something else that Republicans were supposed to believe on this topic. So that said, I'm not sure that the grassroots strategy, which I believe, I agree, is superior to the grass-top strategy in this particular case, would even if undertaken, have produced very much. Now, would they have been better off addressing a lead opinion, which I've suggested is the main driver for public opinion and, of course, a lead opinion is the main driver, at least in Washington, of policy change? I'm not entirely sure that the environmental, the evangelical environmental community could have done that job very well either. The main reason is that, while, as Lydia says, the evangelical environmentalists weren't even at the kids' table when the Greens got together to do war rooms regarding Waxman Markey, likewise on the right, the evangelical community as a whole is not even at the kids' table in the war rooms on climate change in my side of the fence. That's not to say they're not relevant coalition partners on the right, but when people from my world gathered together to fight Waxman Markey and when people in the GOP were strategizing in various meetings here in Washington happened all the time on this issue, evangelicals might have been there. They weren't particularly relevant. They weren't offering a lot of advice, thoughts. They were coalition partners. They kind of watched what was going on. They weren't in play. And so given the fact that they aren't really well represented in the brain trust in the GOP on this issue, I'm not entirely sure that they would have a lot of weight in moving opinions in that arena. So grassroots strategies may well be their best play. And while success here would be helpful, I don't mean to say that it'd be utterly irrelevant. Public opinion among self-identified conservatives is already there, oddly enough, if you look at climate. For instance, in a report released in August from a team of GOP-oriented polling companies, 53% of Republicans agreed that quote, we should require power plants to pay a fee for the carbon they emit and return that fee directly to consumers as a tax credit. 53% of Republicans agree with that sentiment right now. The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication this year found that 56% of Republicans and even 54% of self-identified conservative Republicans agreed with the statement that they support regulating carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas as a pollutant. So it's not even all that clear to me that moving public opinion and the GOP or even moving public opinion on the conservative street is that much of a heavy lift or that it's even necessarily something that is a long way off. You already find a mountain of surveys, I've just cited you too, there's probably about 10 or 12 you could cite, where a majority of Republicans and even a majority of self-identified conservative Republicans already agree with aggressive climate action. The problem here is not with the Republican Party or even conservative Republicans broadly speaking, it's with a certain segment thereof, the Tea Party movement and the people who are identifying in that community. They're the real challenge here. And how could the evangelical environmental community get at that? I'm not entirely sure, even though the Tea Party largely overlaps with the evangelical environmental community, it's just that climate change is a low salience issue for them, right? People don't join the Tea Party to go fight pro or con on climate change and probably never will. My guess is that this small subset in the GOP that is the real blocking agent on climate, the Tea Party movement, is going to be broken from one of two ways. Either the Tea Party movement and the people associated with it continue to shrink in American politics. Surveys have recently found the Tea Party's strengths about half what it was at its high watermark in 2010. So the weaker the Tea Party movement is broadly speaking, the weaker their ability to hold the GOP hostage on climate. Or the Tea Party has countervailing mobilized power from some source in the GOP on climate. I'm skeptical that's ever gonna happen because people don't join the Republican Party to produce change on climate change. They joined the Democratic Party for that reason. You might find a lot of conservative Republicans or free market libertarian types like me who believe in climate action. In fact, if you look at the surveys, you'd be shocked to find that the subset of the American public with the highest support for the proposition that climate change is happening, industrial emissions of the cause, an aggressive action on greenhouse gas emissions needs to be taken by the federal government isn't with liberal Democrats. It's with libertarians, 80%. 80%. Of course, libertarians at a quarter of a cup of coffee is not a whole lot of us out there, unfortunately, despite what the libertarian moment people would tell you. But notice that libertarian public sentiment is not well represented by libertarian institutions here in Washington. You'd be very hard pressed to find any libertarian organization or self-identified libertarian organizations safe for say the Niskanen Center, maybe to the extent to which our street might be identified as proto-libertarian, who would take that line. So I'm not entirely sure I have any great ideas for how better the evangelical movement could execute its ambitions of changing public policy in a positive direction. I agree with the authors that they certainly pick probably the most suboptimal policy one could have imagined. I'm not entirely sure an optimal policy that would get us excited really exists, but perhaps I remain to be convinced that maybe they can surprise me. Thanks. I think we're gonna have a lot of fun with that in the Q&A. And I think Lydia wants to come back on a couple points before I let her do that. We have Ted Nordhaus sitting up here who has been on first a one man, then a two man, then an institutional crusade to shock, surprise and shift the paradigm of elite public opinion for more than a decade now. So Ted. Great, thanks Heather. And thanks to New America for hosting this event and having me here. And especially thanks to Lydia and Steve for writing a really fascinating and I think important paper. And the first thing I wanna do is sort of, I think affirm one of the really, I think key conclusions of that paper, which is that sort of top down strategies by sort of big environmental philanthropy to fund conservative elites who agree with them are likely to continue to fail to break the gridlock that we're currently faced on taking action on climate change. I think that was the case with evangelical, the evangelical creation care movement in the last decade. And I think it's likely to be the case with efforts to fund sort of various libertarian sort of tax shifting efforts in the current decade. And I think if the rise of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and Ted Cruz sort of suggest anything, it's that sort of strong partisans who tend to vote and really dominate things like primary processes are even less likely to take their cues from establishment elites today than they were a decade ago. So I wanna suggest a couple of further lessons from that just basic conclusion. You know, the first one is that if you look, and I think it's implicit in Stephen Lydia's paper, if not explicit, it's that the creation care movement and really even, you know, McCain and Graham and John Warner's legislative cap and trade efforts in Congress were really only viable as long as there was no real threat of policy being enacted and really or at the very least that Democrats were gonna dictate the terms of climate policy that was going to be enacted. And really I think if you look at the timing of the collapse of the creation care movement, it really followed or occurred in lockstep with the Democratic takeover of first Congress and then in 2006 and then the presidency in 2008, at which point I think the pressure for sort of conservatives and Republicans to close ranks against efforts to move policy in opposition were pretty overwhelming. And that really leads me to sort of a second lesson or thought from this and more broadly, which is I think there is some sort of Nixon to China the dynamic here in terms of congressional action on climate change. Congressional action I think is probably more likely under Republican leadership if not in Congress than at least Republican presidency than under the present arrangement. And really when you look at major environmental policy victories going all the way back to Nixon, that's been the case, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Engangered Species Act, the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. They all actually happened under Republican presidencies in all those cases with Democratic control of Congress, but I think the larger point still holds which is that I think for conservatives to, or at least for Republican office holders to get behind action on climate change, they're probably gonna need to be in a situation where they are better able to control the terms of the debate. And I think that really leads me to sort of my last lesson from this which is that I think conservative engagement on climate change is gonna have to happen on its own terms that as Lydia and Steve point out, in the papers Lydia pointed out on the panel, evangelicals were really junior partners in the climate action effort and I think that probably actually, I think as Lydia herself acknowledged, probably overstates it. And really the sort of entire framing of the climate issue has been defined from the left and by environmental issues from the very beginning as an apocalyptic threat. One, the response to which would require sort of sacrifice, fundamentally changing our way of life, a massive expansion of the federal regulatory state to deal with the problem and very significant public subsidies for renewable energy technologies. And little surprise that in response to sort of what have been often overheated representations of climate science entangled with, you know, and often sort of offered up as sort of inseparable from liberal policy preferences that many arguably most conservatives have said, if that's what the science says, I don't believe you're science. And in contrast to that, I think the creation care movement really largely embraced the green climate agenda in whole cloth and I think that among other things assured its demise. I feel that contemporary efforts sort of that I see today face many of the same problems. You know, market-based approaches to climate and before that to clean air issues may have originated, originally been sort of quote unquote, Republican ideas, but they've been so co-opted by Democrats and environmentalists that I think it's gonna be very difficult for conservatives under the guise of various revenue, neutral or refunded carbon taxes to rehabilitate those ideas as conservative ideas. And all the more so I think after conservatives spent several years attacking cap and trade as cap and tax. So, but then let me actually sort of end my remarks with a bit of optimism maybe coming from this from a somewhat different angle. You know, what I find consistently when I talk to groups of conservatives or skeptics is just really overwhelming almost unanimous support for three technologies, nuclear energy, natural gas and fracking and hydropower. Just find very, very little opposition to those technologies. And I think in part just to be honest is because environmentalists have so strongly opposed those technologies. But, you know, fortuitously those three technologies account for virtually every significant case of decarbonization we can find anywhere in the world over the last 50 years. Go look at, you know, whether it's nuclear in France and Belgium and Sweden and a number of other places, hydro energy in Sweden, Brazil, Norway, natural gas in Great Britain and now the United States. Go look over that time period and look at where emissions have really declined rapidly. Look at major economies with very low carbon intensity or relatively low carbon intensity and every case you see those technologies playing really a major role. By contrast, the sort of democratic, liberal environmental agenda to address climate change, which has mostly been really his sort of carbon caps, carbon taxes and renewable subsidies has very little track record anywhere in the world of driving significant reductions in emissions. In a few places if you really squint you can find it but it's actually really hard to see. So rather than joining Democrats and environmentalists, let me suggest that conservatives might be better served to compete with them, offering a hard energy path to energy security, economic competitiveness and cleaner air that brings decarbonization as a co-benefit along for the ride. And interestingly, doing those things doesn't actually allow one to have to change your mind about climate science or be a believer that climate change is a major or apocalyptic threat. But I'd also suggest that if we understand much of the skepticism about climate science as actually a response to climate policy and not to the science itself, then I think it's at least possible that advocacy of a different set of solutions that are better aligned with conservative policy and technology preferences might create a good deal more space for conservatives to actually ultimately accept climate science. And I wanna be clear that I don't think that that's going to end differences between Democrats and Republicans on climate and energy issues. But I do think it's the key to progress that compromise and negotiation on this issue is gonna require that conservatives have competing, affirmative and clearly differentiated solutions to how to take on the problem. So thank you very much. Lydia, back to you. Oh, thanks, thanks. Yeah, I was just frantically writing down notes to remember what I wanted to talk about. I think with the issue of opinion leadership, I agree with you, Jerry, on this issue of do, I think standard thinking, which is wrong, part of the standard thinking which is wrong is that the goal of public outreach is to get public opinion among a key demographic above 50% and then I don't know exactly where the theory of change leads from there. I think the fantasy is that you take the stats in and you show a chart to a Republican and they're like, you are right. I will now do what you say. A majority of Republicans support this issue. I think that's how the fantasy goes. That obviously doesn't work because, for example, we didn't get immigration reform. A majority of Republicans support immigration reform, still do. In Texas, we have this desperation among a lot of Republican business elites who are like, please pass immigration reform. Like we need the train's to run on time. We can't, our economy collapsed and you don't legalize these folks and they can't get what they want. Even though public opinion is there, a lot of the money interest is there, it's ridiculous. So what is driving this train? In the case of immigration reform, it's not the money and it's not the public opinion, so who is it? I would argue is that you have to think about opinion leadership as being a little bit more complex. In political science, the phrase you use is the two step process of opinion leadership. You have the national elites. In my book, I distinguish, I call them generals of the culture war. So people like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, or in more recent years, Richard Land. They're the generals, the national elites. And then below them though, you have what I call the captains of the culture war or more local opinion leaders who are actually in the home districts of these Republicans. And these local opinion leaders are the ones who are leading this political conversations in their church, that deacon who gets up and says, well, I think we should take climate science seriously or the flip side of that, the deacon who says, I think all this climate science is a liberal economy conspiracy, right? That's the kind of opinion leader that we need to be thinking about, not just the national leaders. And the thing is there's actually a feedback of the relationship between them. In the case of evangelicals, those local opinion leaders, those captains, I call them, with the troops, are actually very important because in evangelicalism, there's not a pope, right? We don't have a top-down hierarchy. The pope appoints the cardinals and the bishops and everything and everyone has to kind of fall within. You can't have Pope Francis. There's no evangelical version of Lodato Si, right? So what it means is that leaders, if they want to present themselves as an evangelical thought leader, they actually have to have a real evangelical base of some shape or form. I mean, James Dobbson, the reason people listen to him is because he has a radio show that teaches you about how to raise your kids right. And a whole generation of people were raised on that wisdom and they listened to his radio show and it gave him helpful insights on how to raise a Christian, how to raise Christian kids and create a Christian home, right? That's why he gets to make these pronouncements on politics. He had to earn that. And likewise, these national, these generals in the culture war have to give some thought to how is this gonna play in Peoria? So for example, Richard Land makes inflammatory statements about Trayvon Martin. His Tea Party, older white base loves it. But he basically didn't realize but a bunch of African American Southern Baptist pastors, including a few of the people I work with in Texas went to war with him. They went to war with him. And he had to step down because of that, right? So they can't just do whatever they want without regard to what the local opinion leaders say. And then when you look at the level of pastors, pastors are not free to take whatever stand they want, right? So what we saw in the evangelical climate initiative is you have mega church pastors who step out. Then when the Christian right strikes back, were they authorized to go to war with Chuck Colson? No, they were not. They did not have that authorization. They had an authorization. It was okay for them to sign this statement on climate if nobody was really opposed to it. But once it became controversial within the evangelical world, and there was just basically one guy doing this as a hobby while teaching at a Christian university says I don't like this and all of a sudden it becomes a controversy. That's all it took to get these mega church pastors to stand down, why? Because they knew they didn't have the support of the rank and file in their churches. They knew they didn't have authorization to go to war with people like Chuck Colson and James Dobson. If they had had real support from their base, if their church has been brought along with them, they can say, okay, I'm sorry, James Dobson, but we have a problem now. This is a moral issue and we're just gonna have to have a difference of opinion. And you would have had a much more interesting fight. And if that had been the case, probably people like James Dobson would have just sat on their hands and said, I'm not gonna fight this battle. I don't really care when we're the other. But that's what having a real base gets you. So my argument is not you have to get public opinion above 51% and then it will magically make Republicans do as you say. It's a much more complicated argument about relationship between national elites and these local captains of the culture war. And these captains, that's the kind of tea party leadership, the tea party really does have a real ground game in people's home districts. And that's what made people like Lindsey Graham basically flip flop, right? This terror about losing in the primary. That's what we don't have in any sort of evangelical countervailing effort. There's no countervailing effort where people are afraid of, for example, the social justice evangelicals. No one's like, oh no, they're coming for me in the primary. Whereas the tea party are real. They're real and they're mean and they're coming for you. And honestly, they take their cues more from people like Donald Trump than from faith leaders, right? So knowing that, that's why having a real base matters. So that's my response. I think actually Deryn and I are more in agreement than you might think. In response to Ted, I really pretty much agree with everything you have to say. So I don't have a lot of interesting things to say about your comments, but I will extend your point about how evangelical environmentalism really just needs more latitude to work on its own terms and to be more genuinely conservative. I don't think the delusion that environmentalism was somehow gonna pull evangelicals out of the Republican Party and make them into Democrats, that was some crazy talk, right? I just wanna shut that down right now. If anyone says that to you, you just punch them in the face right there because that's not gonna happen in the short term. At least partly because the younger evangelicals who care about climate, who disagree with their elders, that doesn't make them Democrats, it just makes them non-voting Republicans basically. So distancing yourself from politics has not changed the power dynamics, right? And becoming a political is not a solution. So I would say that one of the things I heard in my interviews from the actor in the evangelical climate movement is that they wished they had held stronger on having a different voice from secular environmentalism, but instead they felt a lot of pressure because environmentalists basically held the purse strings. There was a lot of pressure to sort of be good players, be good coalition partners as it were, right? And in retrospect, a lot of people wish they had held stronger on the impacts of the global poor and to the economic impacts on low income people as far as rising energy prices. And it's one of the things I heard over and over is I wish that we'd really held that forward and been strong on that in a way that created tension with secular environmentalism, which unfortunately has not tended to be strong on the economic justice angle in environmentalism with a few notable exceptions. So that's, I think that really fits that and also speaking as conservatives rather than letting themselves get swept up into this narrative, this mid 2000s narrative of like, evangelicals are for grabs politically. And I think that was very harmful to the climate initiative. And if you look at why Christian right leaders went to war with climate, the climate care movement, part of what they said in their public statements, this is not me psychoanalyzing this, this is what Chuck Colson and James Dodson actually said is we are opposing, their main objection is that this is an effort to divide our power politically. This is a way to dismiss the united political witness of evangelicals, if you wanna read between the line, it's also to dilute our voting block, right? And so if there had not been, ironically, if the focus had been really more about inside games within the Republican party, playing in Republican primaries rather than trying to make some empty thread about how we're gonna change the outcome of general elections, I think in retrospect, that's what the players are telling me they wish they had done. So let me ask you all one question and then we will go to the audience. We, when we started this project, it grew from Steve and Mark Schmidt and I writing an article looking at how do you get anything done, how do you move any policy advocacy in an era of partisan polarization. And we hypothesized that there were three or maybe three and a half different paths that one could choose. And I think I hear each of you saying there's really only one path and you're not each saying it's the same path. So I wanna ask you each what your theory of change is in a way, because what we said was the sort of the half method was you can put your resources into a 20 year campaign to change public opinion. And what both Lydia and Jerry are saying is yeah, ultimately that doesn't really matter. You can rely on the traditional bipartisan coalition building method which entails getting the great and the good together and then doing a sort of rent and evangelical as we used to call it on the national security side rented general model. Or you can pursue a purely partisan we're just gonna pick a side, we're gonna decide Republicans are never gonna be serious about climate change and we're gonna fund the heck out of Democrats until they take back the house which might be a 40 or 50 year project. And then there's the transpartisan. We're gonna collect strange bedfellows, we're gonna sort of sneakily break down both the coalitions from inside which I hear some skepticism about as well or at the very least, Ted what you seem to be saying is you'd have to create a different transpartisan coalition than this one. So where's, what's the, if you, if we had some of the funders that we're beating up on here and you were asked to advise them how to invest their next five or $10 million, which, what strategy would you use? You guys have to say, I have a few comments but I'm curious. Go ahead Ted. Yeah. Boy, you know what, I mean I actually have about, that's how I have said this to some of these funders and haven't. I have not seen this strategy action taken up fully yet but, you know, I, you know, on climate, just the thing that I know best, you know, I would say it's two things. You know, one is to sort of create some safe space to acknowledge the problem and acknowledge that we should do something about it and not be apocalyptic about it. So right now you're either apocalyptic and it's the end of the world or you're a climate denier and in a bunch of ways intentionally from both sides the debate has been intentionally polarized in that way. And frankly it is not a very good reflection of actually what this consensus climate science that we're supposedly arguing about actually suggests at least what we know now. You know, which is more that it's gonna be a sort of chronic problem of modernity that's gonna have potentially quite significant impacts and we can manage them better or worse and we get to decide how well we wanna manage them and I think there is sort of, I think an opportunity and a crying need for sort of some space, especially explicitly political space to sort of identify one's self more in that way. And then as I said in my initial remarks, I think the climate issue is not exactly, because of what Jerry says, which is that it just remains a low salience issue. Frankly, for almost everyone, including if you really kind of look at the revealed preferences of environmentalists, it's a low priority. They're not that really, if you were truly apocalyptic about it, you would be advocating different things than the environmental movement actually advocates. But I think that for conservatives, it's a low salience. Actually, they get a lot of benefits in various contexts from beating up on environmentalists. But I do think in a more general sense, it's sort of a brand problem for conservatives and for Republicans along with a set of other things like immigration and their position on immigration and their position on a whole set of social issues which really kind of, especially if you look forward in terms of changing demographics, it's just a problem for them. So I think sooner or later, a set of conservative elected officials actually in office are going to decide, again as they did have it various times in the past, that they need to say something about climate change other than, I'm not a scientist and it's a United Nations conspiracy. And I think the opportunity there is to sort of find a way to sort of acknowledge the problem without being apocalyptic and offer genuinely distinct solutions that their sort of base actually wants already. And that's where I think sort of focusing on a set of these energy technologies. I think a Republican, I think Republicans, conservatives could actually have a more plausible climate strategy than Democrats have right now if they actually sort of took a set of things that they already actually believe in and sort of put them together as a climate strategy. I'm gonna tease you by saying that your strategy, your shorthand strategy is fund Republicans. No, I think it would be fund, I think actually it's pre-fund Republicans. I think it's more create sort of a sort of some discursive space. Maybe it's fund me. But some sort of discursive space to start with where we can sort of start to talk about climate in a very different way. Well, looking at your various models for policy change, we've thought a lot about this when we launched the Niskanen Center last year, what our theories of policy change were, much of it informed by conversations with Steve and reading your works and others as well. And to reiterate, if you wanna argue that the route to policy change lies through changes in public opinion, which will hopefully give you electoral victories and somehow the electoral victories will then produce the policy change you want, good luck. There's very, very little evidence that that is true in all the investigations we've done in the political science community. And yet, let's be very clear, it's the most popular strategy. It's popular for Tom Steyer, it's popular for Charles Koch. The entire libertarian establishment of Washington is all about that. The bulk of the conservative establishment is about that. James DeMint, or Jim DeMint, when he came into heritage, turned heritage from an insider working with governing elites operation, in my opinion, a very effective one, into just another adjunct, tea-party-ish grassroots operation. So for whatever reason, political actors are hypnotized with this war outside of Washington to wage and win public opinion fights and then wage and win political campaigns, thinking that if you do these things, policy change happens. Very scant evidence that that works very often. So let's dispense with that. Since I don't think anybody here has argued the contrary, at least right now. So now let's look at the centrist coalition model that you mentioned, Heather. That may well have been a successful means of going about passing legislation, but as you and Steve have convinced me, in an era of polarization now, where there are very, very, very few centrists in either party, and you've got each party now moving into the polar extremes, there's just not enough material in the center to make any of these coalitions work. So I believe that used to succeed. I think that it's very hard to now pull off today. There just aren't centrists to cut deals. So that leaves trans partisanship, finding coalitions where people on the polar left and the polar right can somehow find common denominators to then move policy forward. I think that is the only, excuse me, before I get to that, there was another model you mentioned, which was just bet heavily on the red dog or the blue dog and try to beat up on the other side until your side has enough power to ram its agenda through. How often have we seen that succeed? Well, recently we saw work with the Affordable Care Act. Well, I think political historians are gonna look back on that event and consider that one of the most remarkable feats in American politics, because it happens once in a blue moon. Every once in a while, you can just pound the other side and steamroll them and move your partisan, polar position through to law. But it happens extremely rarely and it requires all the suns and moons and stars to align perfectly to pull that strategy off. So while it can work, I believe it is a one-off strategy and I wouldn't be betting the house on political campaigns which requires to do that again. When I talk, for instance, on the right, my brother or Myrta Bell at CEI or David Kreuzer at Heritage or Robert Bradley over at the Institute for Energy Research, and I say, so, you don't like this idea that I'm peddling and just as an aside, what I peddle is an argument for a carbon tax in lieu of the existing regulatory structure, a trend. And they say, well, no, environmentalists ever go for that deal. You're wasting your time. And I say, okay, what's your strategy to get rid of the clean power plan and all the interventions and federal and state programs that you rail against on the climate front? Just elect more Republicans, they say. Just keep fighting. I say, really? So you envision a day in which there won't be 40 votes in the Senate to fill a bust or whatever you're gonna do. Really? Have I ever seen that day? What is the color of the skies in this world in which you live? Because it has never existed. The Republicans had that kind of power. And it only exists for Democrats once in a blue moon as well. So unless, and it's like, wow, we can go through the budget process. I'm like, yeah, that's a thermonuclear war that we didn't uncork even when we were reading heavy about ANWAR back in the 1990s or in the 2000s with George Bush. Nobody goes there because that leads to a war of all against all politically. So people talk about it, but they never do it. They don't have a strategy. They're just gonna invest heavy there. And I think that for environmentalists to invest heavy on Team Blue, thinking they're going to get a replay of the Affordable Care Act, I think is a bad investment. That leaves trans partisanship. It's hard and we're learning by doing and it's a different topic of what we're learning. So I won't get into it right now unless you wanna talk about it later. Ted's point, I think though, is very well taken. Trans partisanship is not going to work very well if it is perceived as an exercise in which right of center polarized policy advocates somehow see religion and embrace Waxman market. It's not going to happen. You need to be able to frame these coalitions in compelling fashions to both people on the left and the right. And some of these approaches are simply not saleable to one or the other side of the pole. I agree with Ted completely on that. I also agree with him that a Republican moment is probably necessary here. And Nixon goes to China dynamic. Oddly enough, if John McCain's went in 2008, we'd be having a very different conversation about climate. I believe he would have had a national cap and trade and reasonably aggressive one as well. Didn't work out that way. One might argue that we're not for an economic collapse. The climate history would be very, very different. I don't know. I'm not handicapping what John McCain would have done absent the financial collapse. But the point is, we forget that political leadership really does matter. Again, think about the Tea Party. Think about Republicans in general. If there's one bloody shirt that's been waved for eight years with great vigor, it's the socialization of healthcare, this horrific Obamacare. If there's one thing the Tea Party believes in their blood, it's that America is becoming Soviet Russia thanks to this massive overhaul of the healthcare system called Obamacare. And yet, when Donald Trump now says he's in favor of universal healthcare, which brings you to even further down that road into alleged quasi-Marxism, 44% of Republicans support it. Only 16% support it when they don't know that Donald Trump supports it. This tells you the political leadership really, really does matter. The key, I think, for policy change, to wrap it up, where I think what my theory of policy change is, is that it is most useful to find a way to influence the opinions of governing elites in Washington, DC, which are rather stable actors on the political stage, with the caveat that the elected actors, the John McCain's, the George Bush's, the Ted Kennedy's back when he was alive and in the Senate, these people count 10 times more than David Kreuz or the Heritage Foundation or Jerry Taylor or Cator than the Scanning Center or Rich Lowry at Nash Review or all the other people that I do try to influence. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider them utterly irrelevant. But moving elected officials, tribal heads, is easily the best way to move public opinion and eventually public policy. And so the trick is, how do you do that? That's a different conversation. So with that, I think we should take some questions from the audience and please wait for the mic and Sarah here and tell us who you are. Sarah Posner. So Lydia, I thought the report was great. I have a cynical political observation that I'd be curious to get your thoughts on. And that is during the period when you started to see these mega church leaders like Rick Warren and Joel Hunter sign climate statements, they were in the midst of their own rebranding effort to rebrand themselves as not part of the Christian right, but still theological conservatives who had a broader agenda than just abortion and same sex marriage. And that this was politically beneficial to them to go out there and sign a climate statement, but that they didn't really have the commitment to it when push came to shove because this was part of a broader effort to portray themselves as having a bigger agenda than just the traditional culture war issues. I think that's fair. Especially in the case of Rick Warren, I think for the other guys, there was a deeper commitment. They just didn't have the base behind them on it. But I think Rick Warren is a great case study. And that is ongoing by the way. I mean, the majority of evangelicals don't like the Christian right brand. They vote obviously 79% in 2012 voted for the Republican, but so they're not, they don't like the Jerry Falwell stereotype. They don't like the idea that they're just about two issues. They still vote based on those two issues, but they don't want people to be seen as that kind of people, the stereotype you see on TV. We're like, we're the nice Republican evangelicals, but we care about everybody. So I think that's fair. And those people are still out there and they still have that self-interest. And I think there's a, we're in a moment of quiet desperation where, for example, I mentioned Donald Trump, this is a crisis of identity for evangelicalism that they can't put forward a candidate who is genuinely, plausibly a religious conservative. I mean, Donald Trump is, how do I put this? Nobody thinks they're gonna see Donald Trump in heaven. I'm just like whatever theology is, Donald Trump making the cut, everybody knows it. I mean, there's this great video of him being prayed over by these Pentecostal pastors and he, in the middle of the prayer, he just kind of starts looking around and kind of like musically looking at all the people praying for him, like this is interesting. And so that's a problem for evangelicals as a branding issue and also as a political power issue that they can't put forward. I mean, what happened to Mike Huckabee, right? He's become a stereotype of himself. And so I think the reason why evangelical creation care still matters is because those people are still out there, they still have a powerful interest in distinguishing themselves and defending the honor of evangelicalism and not having it dragged to the mud by sort of older, angry white people. So the middle-aged to younger white people, the lesionary evangelicals and everyone else is still worried about defending the brand. And that's gonna be an ongoing opportunity. While Cheyenne is walking over to give Steve the mic, one of my favorite quotes in the papers, you quote a signer of one of the statements that was later disavowed, saying, oh, I wasn't gonna do anything. I was just part of the shimmering penumbra of signatures. And that, from the point of view of how you do advocacy, that ain't how you do advocacy. Steve. So I'm just gonna read that quote in an interview that I gave myself, so I'm very jealous to Katherine Wilkinson who was the one who drew out that amazing quote. I can tell a similar story which was I was on a radio show back in 2005 with Richard Chiswick. And at some point, the host asked him, he said, well, so given your strong feelings about climate change and newly reelected president Bush, position really not doing anything about it, who did you vote for? And he said, well, I have to say the rights of the unborn are paramount to me and I voted for Bush. And I thought it was very telling in terms of sort of where the deep kind of political commitment really remained even among the sort of leading lights of the creation care movement or at least one of them. A couple of things on the discussion that we had so far. On Jerry's point, I think Lydia got at this well. One of the basic points, I mean, the question is why does everyone work on this? I hate the phrase theory of change, just to make it clear, but it's longer for using that phrase. The theory of change of that, oh, you're gonna do something, you're gonna change public opinion and that's then gonna change the behavior of public officials. Well, part of that is, who's the political consulting class? It's pollsters, right? So when people go and they ask people who are supposed to be the people who you go to to tell them how do you change stuff? They go to political consultants who often come out of polling and work on elections and in elections that makes a little bit of sense because what you want is someone to make a fairly low-cost action once, at the moment they go into voting booth. So if you think, well, that's what the outcome is, then polling and figuring out how to push it and how to get them to do that makes a certain sense. If what you need is determined, concerted, long-term, high-cost action out of people, which is what you often need in politics, that kind of polling which doesn't get an intensity or anything else doesn't get you that. So I think this is in part part of the problem of the political consulting class who tell people about what strategy, at least the strategy, the people who give political consulting advice on the democratic side. I think one way to put this, right, and again, I think it's good that Jerry made the argument he did so we can make it clear that wasn't what we were saying, right, that I think what we're saying is the model we're talking about is a kind of two-level game. If you think about those evangelical leaders, the real ones, the ones who run the Southern Baptist Convention, organizations like that, right, they're in a two-level game and one, right, they're playing a coalitional game with their party counterparts, right, including economic conservatives, right, but they also have this base below them, right, that determines what kind of positions they take. And the real problem, right, is that evangelical environmentalism isn't strong enough, right, where they say those people are part of our constituency and we can't mess with them, right, and therefore, not that we're gonna agree with them, but we can't roll them over either, right, and I think that's an organizational story. It's not a public opinion story. And just to go to Ted's point, which I think is a really important point, right, which is that the thing that allows, if you compare this to the crime case that we had, the criminal justice case, right, one thing is that evangelicals really had an engagement on that, that was a distinct engagement, right, they were doing prison ministry, right, and a lot of the position-taking they eventually were led to grew out of that practice. And again, this is something I've learned from Lydia, right, that evangelicals often think about that their political positions is growing out of the way that they actually practice faith in their ordinary life, right. So there, the idea of being concerned about prison conditions, about prison reentry came through having that human relationship of people you're doing prison ministry with, right. That suggests to me that global warming is the absolute worst issue for engaging evangelicals on, right, because it's the one that's least rooted in the actual way that people practice faith, right, as you compare it to the people who are actually out there doing, you know, surfer or Christ, right, they're doing, you know, or people who are taking people out on, you know, in national park lands, right. Those are kind of things where you can actually say, well, that's a thing where you can imagine somebody's faith being rooted into it, right. People arguably who are trying to do issues around food, right, around family and all those things, or you can imagine sort of, you know, what you would think about slow food or whatever is one thing, right, but I can imagine that having a really tight sort of rooting in the beliefs about family and all that, right, which again, if you actually read the works of people in slow food, they're incredibly conservative and family-centric in that way, right. But global warming is such an abstract issue and so hard to root in actual practice that I think my position actually going to what you should do is to simply say, look, there's a bunch of environmental issues on which you can actually build a movement, right. This is the absolute worst one. So we're gonna take two more questions and so first, the gentleman over here and then the woman back here and those will be our last two and then we'll let you guys and while Cheyenne is going around, I know many of you were lured here under the understanding that you would get to hear from Steve Tellus. So I think because it is New America and this is a big part of our branding, it's only fair to let you know that Steve and I swapped roles in order that Steve could prioritize, caring for a newborn who showed up a month earlier than expected. So thanks, Steve, for coming out and contributing anyway. I'm Mitch Hescox from the Evangelical Environmental Network. It's kind of fun to sit here and listen to you talk for an hour and a half on the ministry that I lead. And obviously Lydia and I have had several discussions. And what I'd like to point out is I guess there's a couple of things. One is that the first statement that Lydia made today is this is past history. It is past history because everything that the people have been talking about today in this panel is already being implemented at least by us. And the ECI isn't dead, by the way. It still exists. Its foundation led the Evangelical Environmental Network and Evangelicals to be the single overriding force four years ago on the securing of the Mercury and air talk standard. We now have over 800,000 grassroots people. 250,000 of them took action on the clean power plan even though we said we'd prefer a carbon tax theory which is my, what coming out in the fall would agree that carbon tax is. So we've built it, we've learned that lessons. I guess my biggest question, Lydia, that I would throw back to you is the statement that is taking 10 years. I think your 10 years started when the ECI was initiated in 2006. And we're already moving to that area. And I would really like to just distress that that, in many ways, you've been affirming everything we've been doing for six or seven years today. But it's kind of interesting to have a discussion that looks at the backward and not goes to the forward. Can I respond? Let's just get the last question and then we can go through all the ones. Hi, Lisa, Daughtry Weiss with Sojourners. And one of the things that stood out to me about what your recommendations were, well, I'm not sure if you've made it in the report because I haven't had a chance to read it, but is the impact of racial justice on environmentalists? And I would like to sort of pose to you that what is needed is more people of color involved in helping shape the environmental agenda and helping shape the movement and trying to get more activists from them to be heard because a lot of the solutions, obviously, that are being put forth as solutions to climate change would actually harm people of color and communities. And also to point out increasing salience upon various issues. So how climate change would impact help, how it impacts economics, how it impacts a whole range of issues is a way to help rather than just getting it moved up to issue more taken an integral approach that the Pope was suggesting. Thanks. Okay, yes, I agree with both of those statements. So I fully endorse them and let me just elaborate on why I agree with both of them. I think, as I said earlier, the audience of this paper actually isn't the evangelical creation care movement because most of my findings actually are drawn from interviews of what they learned in their own words. So they already know by definition. My concern is actually for the secular mainstream environmental movement. And if you ask, we talked about like what is our theory of change or what is our proposed solution? I mean, I honestly think all the mainstream environmental players, funders and think tank leaders should be shipped off to Peoria, Illinois or Tyler, Texas for two years and made to live there. And they would probably come out with a fresh insights on how to do nationwide state-to-state environmental work and we'd all be better off. So I would say all of these things go back to this question of strategic capacity. So who's in the table in what environmentalism it's about and who it's for? Right now, mainstream environmentalism is despite a few token efforts to engage conservatives right over here. Oh, some conservatives. Let's have some people of color. Let's have some poor people. Let's get the pours in here. But the fact is, and I don't think this is a controversial statement. Let me know if it is. But mainstream environmentalism is still extremely wealthy, white and coastal. So they need more of everybody else which is literally like 80% of the population, right? So I think that if you had a climate change solution that was run by people from Texas, it would probably be pretty awesome because we're all working for the energy industry already. So you'd have some really smart engineers on it. But unfortunately, because of the way environmentalism is structured, they're not, that's not how the conversation is happening. Likewise, we have a major climate change proposal that doesn't think about the disparate impact of rising energy prices on poor and blue-collar people. That's a pretty big blind spot. That would never have happened if you had a single, I mean, even the unions, the unions said that they were at the kids' table, but they said, well, even the kids' table was too, too strong, right? They didn't have a real place at the table. Blue-collar people didn't have a place at the table. All of the strategic missteps that we're talking about could have been avoided if they've had a more diverse set of people strategizing from the beginning. And to your point, I think that my main concern right now is just that, given what's at stake, and given that evangelicals are 25% of the population, 26% of the electorate, and many of the Republican held states, like Texas, are as much as, like, say, 35, 40% of the population, the evangelical climate initiative should be now and should have been in the 2000s, should have been more than a sort of side project, right? So when I talked to foundation executives, it was so dismaying to hear that they didn't really give a lot of thought to evangelicals. It was like, this was an optional experiment. They were running on the side. Well, I live in Dallas, Texas. This is not an option, it's not optional, and it's not an experiment. This is like our whole world here. So for me, my main concern is that this kind of work should be a much bigger piece of the pie. I mean, there's so much money in environmentalism. Foundations should not feel good about themselves. We're like, oh, we made a $500,000 grant. Wow, yay. When you think about billions and billions of dollars that went into trying to get climate change passed, that's chump change. You know, that's chump change. And then the same thing, who's deciding about how the money is spent? Are there any evangelicals in the room? No, no they are not. And that's a problem. So you're gonna make stupid strategic decisions if the decisions are being made by a very small percentage of the population, which however well-intentioned and however right they may be about the science. Great. Closing thoughts from either of our commenters. Well, let's talk as if we had environmental donors in the room. I'll say a few kind things for the environmental donors since no one else will do it. The first thing is, as far as the rhetoric is concerned, yes, I made a great living cherry picking quotes from Earth and the Balance and telling conservatives that the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the American way of life is being put in jeopardy by this passage and this paragraph and this sentence. And it's very easy to do. And oftentimes when environmentalists talk about totally reordering the global society so to make sustainability the number one priority, conservatives and libertarians just wanna drink strict night because they don't believe that. They believe the role of governments protect life, liberty and property and pursue the happiness, not to turn this into little green drones. So yes, rhetoric is going over the top. On the other hand, if you accept mainstream climate science, in other words, you don't have to go, James Hansen, which believes mainstream climate science is too conservative in talking about risk. Let's just look at the IPC and use that as our lodestone for what is mainstream centrist positions on science. Even if you do that, there is a 10% chance that climate change will increase global temperatures by more than eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. That's stunning. That is apocalyptic. And to discuss the risks that are in play may very well be politically inconvenient, but they are correct. And one of the biggest problems environmentalists have is that 70% of the American public believes climate change is a problem. They do. You break it down, lesser numbers for Republicans, more for Democrats, but around 70% believes it's a problem that we need to address and it's number 21 on the list of things to concern about because that observation that there's a, we're rolling a dice, 10% chance we live in water world. If you remember that old movie with Kevin Costner or something akin, some catastrophic set of scenarios like that, well that's a big deal and they can't get that message across and it drives them unto madness and I can certainly understand. As far as policy reforms are concerned, I think that the main challenge right now is to move the blocking agents in the GOP. They've already won the debate in public opinion. They've already won the debate in the Democratic Party where they are having problems is with blocking agents in the GOP. The main blocking agent is the tea party-ish world. Everyone else is more or less in the camp of do something. And then how do you break that blocking agent? That needs to be where they spend the bulk of their time and energies, not the chump change time and energy because they're not going to get an affordable Care Act win of that sort, I think, in any foreseeable future. Ted, last minute. Yeah, I guess I'll maybe offer a slightly different, something a little different than what we talked about today which is, because I think we tend to get focused on how do we break the grid block to get a sweeping kind of, some kind of sweeping climate solution in place. And I think it's worth remembering that sort of really, first of all, U.S. emissions over the last decade have fallen faster in any place in the world. And the main driver of that has been just that we discovered just an unbelievable amount of really cheap natural gas through a very extracted, through a very controversial extraction method. But I think coal generation today is down from over just over 50% 10 years ago and it's down close to 30% of the U.S. generation mix today. That is not because of a clean power plant, it may be peripherally because of various clean air measures that have come in that have made it more costly to run coal power plants. But the main reason is just that gas is cheaper, it's a better fuel, it works better for electrical generation purposes and for all sorts of reasons. And there was a lot of very important entrepreneurial genius in George Mitchell and a number of other kind of players in the natural gas industry who did that. But there was also a set of very obscure government programs that really relatively didn't cost very much money and that no one really paid very much attention to that were in place for really about 30 years starting in the early 70s through about 2000. A small tax credit, a bunch of just really just long-term support for unconventional gas drilling and methods in the U.S. over 30 years that really played a huge role in making the shale gas revolution possible. And no one paid much attention to them even as it was not only a small part of the overall budget and the energy department budget, it was a really small set of things within the federal unconventional fuels budget program that was much smaller than the things that everyone paid attention to that actually had a huge impact. So I think it's worth remembering that the pathways to better environmental outcomes are often more complicated and more oblique than what we think they are. And that I think it's possible that 20 years from now we will not, when we've made great progress on climate change, continuing progress on it, we will not be sitting here and talking about how we broke the deadlock and got some sweeping equivalent to the Clean Air Act or something like that past. But that it was a set of technologies that were advanced through just long-term sort of public-private interactions, technology, changing business models, things like that that really made the difference. So I think, again, one can get very concerned and apocalyptic about these problems, but I think there's also a lot of ways that we'll find our way through them. Well, as Jerry said, we've got the seeds of several future conversations and debates here among the folks on this stage. So if you want to know more about climate change and how what happened in coming weeks and months in the US overseas and industry affects policy change possibilities, you should definitely follow all three of these good people. If you want to know more about how to get anything done under conditions of political polarization, you should check out the political reform program here at New America and specifically the question that Jerry raised of what we're learning about how to do this kind of strange bedfellow coalition work. You will want to check back with us frequently. We will be putting out more reports and we will be bringing in more people like the mix of folks you see on this stage to talk about these issues again and again exploring them through other issue areas. So thank you all so much for coming out and helping us break in our new conference room.