Racist Attitudes and Climate Denialism are Strangely Correlated

Americans are notorious for having a population who does not believe in climate science, and things may be more complicated than they seem. A new study has come out suggesting that racist attitudes and climate denialism are correlated through a phenomenon called "racial spillover." The author of the research article in Environmental Politics is political scientist Salil Benegal from DePauw University. Benegal surveyed white and black Americans on how important they thought the issue of climate change was before and toward the end of the Obama presidency. The research showed that: 

White Americans became 18 percent less likely to see climate change as a very serious problem over the course of Obama's presidency.While the reasoning behind this racial divergence remains hypothetical, Benegal suggests it's possible that white voters with high levels of racial prejudice may have associated Obama with climate change and related policies.

In another dataset, he found that 

White Republicans who scored at the highest level for racial resentment were over three times as likely to disagree with the statement that climate change was real than white Republicans who tested at the lowest level of the scale. A low-resentment white Republican had a 57 percent chance of disagreeing with the statement that climate change is caused by humans, while their high-resentment equivalent was 84 percent likely to do the same thing.

Overall, high levels of racial resentment significantly predicted whether or not people agreed with the scientific consensus on climate change. It seems that issues like climate change and healthcare became associated with President Obama, and this racialized the lens through which they saw those issues. Benegal sees this as an important factor when considering science communication, and when looking to solve issues of polarization.