Nate Hochman is a senior at Colorado College, a Young Voices associate contributor, and a former editorial intern at National Review and the Dispatch. Nate is part of a growing movement of conservatives that are energized about climate change. He is also a Conservative Fellow at the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a non-partisan organization aiming to build bipartisan support across the U.S. for climate policies.
In this episode, we talk to Nate about his experience as a conservative in the climate change space. Nate elaborates on the partisan divide hindering Republicans and Democrats from working together and makes a case that conservatism and environmentalism should go hand and hand. To learn more about conservatism environmentalism, check out Nate’s piece in the National Review, “Toward a Conservative Environmentalism” here.
Guest:
Nate Hochman
Writers:
Ryan Lou ‘24, Rishab Jagetia ‘24
Hosts:
Ryan Lou ‘24, Rishab Jagetia ‘24
Audio Editors:
Emily Nagamato ‘24
Music:
générique , publicité , ambiance , action , musique de film,” by
NEITAS from Pixabay
Inspired to do more? If you want to learn how your time and skills can best help the climate, you can create a climate action plan at youchangeearth.org/operationclimate.
TRANSCRIPT:
Rishab Jagetia: Right now, climate action lacks critical political support. For example, while 90% of Democrats believe the federal government isn’t doing enough on climate change, only 39% of Republicans do, according to a Pew Research Study.
Ryan Lou: With climate change being such a polarizing issue, it is important that people hear different perspectives about how to approach it. Here today is Nate Hochman, a senior at Colorado College and Media Spokesman for Citizens Climate Lobby, a non-partisan organization aiming to build bipartisan support across the U.S. for climate policies. We hope he offers a perspective that both illuminates the conservative view towards climate action and raises awareness for bipartisanship on environmentalism.
Katherine Li: Welcome to Operation Climate, the one stop shop for environmental issues that matter to Duke and Durham community members. We’re a podcast run by Duke University students, aiming to inform and empower Duke at large to create lasting change in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation. This season, we’re focusing on climate activism and activism in general.
Rishab Jagetia: Hello, everyone. I'm Rishab Jagetia with Ryan Lou and we're joined by Nate Hochman, a person who is affiliated with Citizens Climate Lobby. Nate we’re so glad you’re here. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Nate Hochman: Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys.I'm Nate. I'm a senior at Colorado College this year, and as you mentioned, I'm a conservative fellow with the Citizens Climate Lobby, which is a, you know, this sort of big tent organization lobbying for carbon dividends mostly, and
one of the really amazing things about CCL and the reason that I'm involved with them is that they're really interested in doing outreach to more conservative communities, traditionally Republican constituencies, to try to make the case for, you know, the necessity of bipartisan climate efforts, specifically as it pertains to coalescing around this bill, which is, you know, attempting to price carbon.
And my job is to, you know, do advocacy in a variety of different ways. Go on podcasts, like this one, write articles for a variety of different conservative outlets to make the case for more broadly, just the idea that conservatives need to care more about climate change, but also more specifically, the fact that carbon pricing is the market based, conservative, pro-capitalist solution to climate change. So that's what I'm doing. I love doing it and it's been really productive so far.
Ryan Lou: Awesome. That sounds great. Climate activism itself is a bit of a hot button term. Do you consider yourself a climate activists and if not, why?
Nate Hochman: Yeah, it's a good question. You know, on one level, there's no, there's really no other way to describe what I do besides activism, at least you know as it as it pertains to CCL, right, I mean maybe a “climate advocate” might be a better term, I don't do a lot of organizing, I don't go to a lot of protests and marches and, you know, not necessarily because I have any sort of inherent dislike of the concept of a protester, but just because I'm not very organized, not particularly good at being productive in those contexts.
But I'm certainly someone who is invested in the political process in an activist way and trying to create change or, you know, produce a sort of different outcome than the one we're getting right now, specifically within Republican circles, so it wouldn't really make sense for me to issue the sort of climate activists title, even though when the average person in American politics thinks of climate activism, they probably think of someone who is diametrically opposed to my general worldview in a lot of really fundamental ways.
Rishab Jagetia: Yeah, and just on this topic of climate activism, like we're all college students. It seems like there's a certain stigma around protests and organizing especially skewed towards the left. So I just wanted to know, as a college student, what have you noticed about the culture of climate change activism on your campus or at least in college in general?
Do you think there's anything particularly alienating to conservatives, and I mean if you want to elaborate on that.
Nate Hochman: Yeah, I mean there is a lot that's alienating to conservatives and you know before sort of expanding on the real reasons that I think are legitimate reasons to criticize the sort of activist environmentalist left, it's worth stipulating that conservatives have pretty major flaws in the in the realm of climate change too, right. There are real reasons that they feel alienated from the environmentalist left but Republicans and conservatives still have to sort of broadly get on board with the idea that climate change is even an issue. Right. So there's some responsibility on the part of conservatives to actually take the idea more seriously. With that being said, it's pretty difficult for a lot of Republicans, particularly older Republicans, to even think of climate change is an issue that is something they should care about, because the face of environmentalism and the climate movement is you know, for better for worse, the Sunrise Movement and AOC and Bernie Sanders and the Green New Deal and these sort of campus activist class of people that we're all familiar with, and you know I have friends who are sort of in that demographic but are legitimately, and a lot of them I think would self identify this way, radicals in important ways, right, who are really pushing for broad systemic transformation in a lot of ways that I as a conservative and a lot of other Republicans find directly contradictory to the fundamental ideas we have about social policy, you know, size of government, all these different things.
And my project is that as a conservative outreach fellow is to make a case that it doesn't have to be that way. Right. That we can embrace common sense climate solutions that can be broadly palatable to a large swath of people from across the political spectrum.
But the sort of Green New Dealers often actively make my job much more difficult in insisting on the sort of intersectional Climate Justice approach which posits that you can't have any type of content solution that doesn't more broadly embraces this transformative progressive agenda.
Ryan Lou: So one of CCL’s slogans is getting people to like the “far middle”. Can you explain a little more about this concept and how it can be implemented to climate change progress, especially as you just mentioned about the increasing partisan divide?
Nate Hochman: Yeah, that's one of the things I love about CCL, and to a certain extent, it's what I was sort of just talking about, which is this idea that there is nothing inherent about climate change and about, you know, potential solutions to climate change that has to be left wing or right wing now. If there is a change in government policy, and that means expansion of government in some key areas, it actually also -- and this is the part that my progressive friends often have trouble sort of getting our heads around -- it means reduction of government in other areas, right, it means deregulation of important parts of the nuclear sector, so we can see innovation in nuclear, which is the most productive, by far, clean energy source.
You know, there's a variety of different things that the government is doing right now that is actually hurting the effort against climate change, so there are parts that will be equal parts sort of attractive and perhaps skepticism-causing for both the left and the right in a sort of comprehensive bipartisan climate endeavor, but the first step, which is definitely not where we are in American politics today, is building that comprehensive bipartisan climate coalition and that's what CCL is trying to do. And I think it's exactly the right approach. And it's why I think the “take no prisoners, no compromise”,you know, generally far left approach sponsored by people like the Sunrise Movement is so counterproductive, because in many ways it is diametrically opposed to an idea of building a broad centrist, for lack of a better word, climate coalition that, you know, Americans of all different political stripes can see themselves in right.
It's insisting on attaching things like Medicare for All and abortion on demand and these other very, very controversial hot button topics to what is at least in the narrow sense, just trying to reduce carbon emissions. Right. I mean, you can have real legitimate debates about climate justice, what that means, how climate change affects different sorts of communities differently.
Those are real conversations that should be put on the table, but in the near term, what we really need to do is just start doing things, you know, in a variety of different capacities, to reduce carbon emissions, and you can't do that if you're saying that you got to also pass Medicare for All, you know, alongside that.
Rishab Jagetia: Yeah. And that just touches on one of the most important things I've realized in the climate movement is that a lot of people on the right just don't feel involved, they don't feel like they're a part of this. So I just wondered, like you have a unique perspective on this, you’re a conservative but you're also in the climate change conversations and circles.
What do you think are some of the barriers to support on climate change among conservatives and what can conservatives do better to make climate change an issue that a lot of people can get around?
Nate Hochman: Yeah, I mean, it's a really important question and I think, you know, like I said earlier, there are things that it's just on conservatives to sort out. There are just things that conservatives are really bad at and need to solve themselves on climate change and there's also things the left is doing that are counterproductive and that they could do better if they actually are interested in building a broad climate majority.
So, you know, the problem is that climate change… one of the things that I always find really interesting is in the 90s, by some measurements Republicans were more likely than Democrats to accept the climate science, right, that's sort of shocking now for our generation who grew up in the era, we came in the political age and political consciousness when climate change was a starkly partisan issue, but it didn't used to be that way. And, you know, relatively recent memory.
So the problem is, it became a culture war issue over the course of the last couple decades, and it's been associated for better or worse with this sort of more broad culturally liberal
political philosophy, worldview. And progressive haven't helped that by sort of actively making
the issue of climate change indistinguishable from the larger progressive agenda, right, and
often insisting on it being part of a larger progressive agenda, right, it makes it much more difficult for Republicans and conservatives to separate the two in their minds.
You know, with that being said, there's also just been increasingly sort of stupid, stubborn resistance in the part of Republican circles, based on the fact that it is a cultural issue, right, and
“they’re our enemies and they care about that, which means we shouldn't care about that”, right, this sort of knee jerk instinctual reaction which, on one level is understandable, but it's not justifiable in any real sense. Right. Part of this is just the nature of partisan polarization. It's just what's going to happen in a polarized country.
But that doesn’t make it okay. And that's something that conservative media has not helped with, and in important ways Republican politicians and Republican elites haven't helped with either.
Ryan Lou: So what has COVID-19 demonstrated about climate change and what can we learn from the pandemic in terms of drafting policy and achieving this bipartisan support that we need?
Nate Hochman: Yeah, that's another good question. I mean, in one sort of just basic sense, we have sort of seen a rapid decline in global emissions from the developed world, right, and that's obviously just the sort of top level thing to take away from it is like, that happened. Now it happened at the expense of massive human pain and suffering, right, like so we shouldn't be celebrating that on its face, right, because it's not worth it. In an important sense, to have millions and millions of people dying and, you know, millions more, you know, families going through heartache and suffering, people losing jobs, massive economic destruction at the expense of lowering global temperatures. Um, but it is sort of like, in some ways, it's not an opportunity for reset because we're still producing carbon emissions, but I think it's a really good opportunity to actually step back and sort of look at things from a new perspective rather than sort of being stuck in the way we're going and evaluating as we come out of this. What we could be doing that we weren't doing before that's productive in this sense. Now it's a pretty cliche answer.
I think the sort of Biden team’s “build back better” slogan is also very cliche, but in one sense it's a real aspiration. Right. And it's particularly in this sense, I think, which is, we do have, not a clean slate to start from, but a much cleaner slate than most human societies have gotten in a very long time, to think about what sort of society we want to be in terms of climate policy going forward.
And, you know, my hope, the optimistic takeaway, right, is that that will present all types of new opportunities that wouldn't have happened, were it not for this really tragic pandemic that we've been struggling with, um, and, you know, hopefully that that presents new opportunities for us to work on climate policy.
Rishab Jagetia: Yeah, and I guess one of the most interesting things I've noticed is that if you look at the disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, it's often that Democrats want to build more than just COVID policy, but try to achieve the means to education opportunities, and other aspects of public policy through COVID legislation, and I feel like this debate also like, as you mentioned happens with climate change, like, are we going to decide whether we're going to embrace structural change as a lot of Democrats say or are we going to focus on reducing emissions, but as democrats would argue, perhaps leave behind the questions that we need to answer. And that's just a debate that I feel like it's going to guide us for a long time. You give me a lot of hope Nate because I really hope that at some point we're going to come together, but it's just interesting that these questions are going to loom around us for so long.
Nate Hochman: Yeah, and I think to a certain extent, they're never going to go away because that is the nature of political disagreements in a diverse multi-ethnic democracy. Right. You know, that this is always what American politics is going to look like. We are a sort of a rowdy, dynamic, complex society where people disagree really strongly about everything, and to hope that… you know we're particularly polarized now, certainly we've been more polarized than we are now throughout our history. But, you know, that is never going to go away to a certain extent. And I think the with that understanding, we should look for places where we can compromise on something, like climate, understanding that, like you said, we're never going to agree on everything right. The idea of a broader structural change on top of climate action, that's certainly something we're going to disagree about, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pursue common sensical bipartisan climate policies, and I'm hopeful. I really am. And I'm not just saying that that.
You know, this next generation of up and coming conservatives are much more invested in the idea of climate change as a real issue and that will hopefully present cool new opportunities for comprehensive solutions.
Ryan Lou: Just one last question, what exactly does activism mean to you?
Nate Hochman: A good question. Well, you know, it's like I said before, it is something that has, for a lot of conservatives and I think not for completely illegitimate reasons, has some negative
conceptions attached to it.
But I think… I'll sort of give you a cop out answer, which is, I think that the the label that I prefer to think of when I think about a conservative approach to what someone on the left might call activism, is stewardship. You know, I don't think that, you know, activists, advocates, stewards, whatever you want to refer to, you know, young, energetic, people who are invested in the political process. I think the way that we should think about the way that we're working in our communities is as stewards, right, is as taking the things that we love about our communities and want to protect and preserve and pass on to future generations, and trying to make sure that those are cultivated in productive ways rather than thinking, first and foremost, of the sort of changes that we want to foist onto onto specific communities so I think that the way that conservatives think about politics, and this is certainly true of conservatives who are invested in environmentalism, is stewardship.
Rishab Jagetia: Well, Nate. Thank you so much for joining us. We're so glad we could steal a little bit of your time to talk about climate change and COVID-19.
Nate Hochman: Yeah. Thanks so much guys. That was fun.
Rishab Jagetia: As Nate showed, conservatives and liberals may never agree about how exactly to address climate change, and whether incremental, reformative change or broader, systemic change is necessary. However,we can all agree that establishing bipartisanship is crucial to any climate action.
We encourage you to check out Nate Hochman’s piece, “Toward a Conservative Environmentalism” in the National Review. The article will be linked in our description below.
Ryan Lou: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Operation Climate, and make sure to subscribe to stay updated on future episodes!
Katherine Li: For more information on who we are, what we’re doing, and a full transcript of this episode, visit our website at bit.ly/operationclimatepodcast to learn more.