As the California wildfires continue to rage, devastating land, homes and livelihoods, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump has announced plans to declare a “national energy emergency.” This would grant him the authority to increase U.S. energy production and, as he puts it, “drill, baby, drill.” To a standing ovation on Inauguration Day, Trump announced sweeping legislation to end the Green New Deal and “electric vehicle mandate” — a mandate that does not actually exist — and to replenish American oil reserves, exporting American energy worldwide.
Last year was the first calendar year to pass the 1.5°C target temperature threshold for climate warming and the hottest on record, according to the European Copernicus climate service, a global climate data provider. The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as COP29, saw nearly 200 countries convene to establish a collective action plan. A primary pillar of the COP29 initiative is to increase financing for developing countries from developed countries from $100 billion to $300 billion annually by 2025. Ironically, some of the world’s largest emitters — namely, the United States and China — were absent.
During the past weeks, I’ve comforted and consoled friends from California with families and homes surrounded by raging flames and ember-filled winds. While evacuation orders and fire containment statuses continue to fluctuate, their anxiety and fear are constant. At time of publication, there have been 255 wildfires, 50,683 acres burned, 16,188 structures destroyed and 28 fatalities. As California burns, our Capitol has pledged to further backtrack America’s path toward sustainability, all to the roar of thunderous applause.
How can one of the most powerful countries in the world refrain from action, even at the cost of its citizens? Moreover, how do U.S. citizens fail to grasp the severity of our climate crisis and our country’s capacity to be a world climate leader? University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, professor Joan Williams answers these questions in her Harvard Business Review article, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class.”
Williams’s theory of the “class culture gap” explains what drives the resentment between the upper and middle classes, between elites and blue-collar workers. “One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class resents professionals but admires the rich,” Williams writes. She notes the difference between the working class and the poor, specifically referring to a gap between American society’s top and middle rungs. Blue-collar workers respect those they perceive as “deserving” of their wealth, she explains — that is, those who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, as opposed to educated elites who inherited their position in life and hold unfair, arbitrary authority over their blue-collar counterparts.
Williams explains precisely how Trump, who announced a forthcoming “revolution of common sense” in his inaugural address, appeals to these working-class sentiments. “Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it,” she writes. “Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era when men were men and women knew their place. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump.”
Trump, with his direct, “straight-talk” rhetoric and emphasis on the material interests of the working class, plays directly into the class culture gap. Trump prioritizes economic policy, namely grocery store and gas price inflation, appealing directly to middle-class workers who feel they have been ignored by the Biden-Harris administration’s pursuit of loftier goals — such as bolstering the renewable energy industry. Climate change seems to be an ambiguous, distant threat with limited implications for many Americans. There is no incentive to care about investing in offshore wind turbines or electric vehicles when a working-class breadwinner can’t afford to put food on the table. Trump has framed the Democratic Party as a group of smug elites concerned primarily with social and cultural issues that contradict traditional American values. He conflates the climate crisis as one of the “woke” objectives that disadvantage the working class, and so working-class voters feel alienated from the Democrats and seen by the Republicans.
Trump’s inaugural address promises a return to American traditionalism and pride and pledges to alleviate economic concerns, delivering a perfectly tailored plan to return dignity to America and its working class. He frames working-class struggles as America’s struggles and elites as removed and distinct from ordinary Americans. Unfortunately for Californians, the rest of the country and the rest of the world, climate change mitigation and adaptation is not a priority of our new administration or the majority of the public who elected it.
If the United States truly hopes to fulfill its role as a global climate leader and combat increasingly warming global temperatures and impending disasters, we desperately need to bridge this class culture gap. To return to a unified America requires more than promises of bipartisan legislation; it requires a deeper understanding and reconciliation of the fundamentally different lives and accompanying values of the upper and middle classes. Elites — like myself and many at Dartmouth — ogle at people who applaud pro-fossil fuel legislation but fail to consider why or how people might hold these views. Many of us look past or scoff at material self-interest, tradition and familial or cultural practices, but these are valid voter concerns with implications for effective climate policy.
America can be the key to solving the climate crisis, but only if we act as a unified front, embodying respect, understanding and empathy for our fellow citizens framed as enemies by those in power.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
