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Crises have split European voters into five ‘tribes’, survey suggests (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Maybe that differs per culture, but here in the Netherlands I know plenty of right-wing voters who don't deny the issue at all. They acknowledge it's a problem, sometimes even want to put effort into fixing it. Their arguments against are usually "we're such a small country, so whatever we do won't really affect anything anyway" and "it's already going quite well, no need to be ahead of the curve". I'd say that's actually by far the largest group of right wing voters in my personal experience.

Now personally I don't agree with them of course. Yes we're a small country, but als relatively rich and relatively bad for the climate. Also, adding all small countries together still adds up to a big amount of emissions. If all small countries would reason like this nothing would happen. And we're not exactly ahead of the curve either, even though we're relatively rich.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

We had more of that here in Germany maybe 10 years ago, the people wouldn't claim we are that small but the closely related argument that we are already doing more than the US and China and they are so much larger than us. Today there is more denial but also more of that "we are for everything that is against what the Greens want" attitude.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Maybe that differs per culture, but here in the Netherlands I know plenty of right-wing voters who don’t deny the issue at all. They acknowledge it’s a problem, sometimes even want to put effort into fixing it. Their arguments against are usually “we’re such a small country, so whatever we do won’t really affect anything anyway” and “it’s already going quite well, no need to be ahead of the curve”. I’d say that’s actually by far the largest group of right wing voters in my personal experience.

It is not just happening in the Netherlands, I can see it in Germany too and there is this study that found it all over Youtube. It is the same group and the same denial, just their agenda framed differently, because they could not win over people with right out denying climate change anymore. They just switched the narrative to "can't do anything against it" :

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/16/third-of-uk-teenagers-believe-climate-change-exaggerated-report-shows

The report published on Tuesday shows a shift from the “old denial” – that climate change is not happening or not anthropogenic – to the “new denial”.

These new denial narratives that question the science and solutions for climate change constituted 35% of all climate denial on YouTube in 2018, but now represent the large majority (70%). Over the same period, the share of old denial has dropped from 65% to 30% of total claims.

The report authors believe that this shift is because the scientific evidence is now more accepted and hard to dispute, so those aiming to win people over to climate denial and delay must discredit the solutions and people pushing for climate action.