Poles Apart: Political Divisions over Climate Change Among Younger Australians
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Poles Apart: Political Divisions over Climate Change Among Younger Australians Bruce Tranter 1 & Zlatko Skrbiš 2 & Jonathan F. Smith 2 Received: 8 January 2020 / Revised: 15 July 2020 / Accepted: 16 July 2020 # Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract Political polarisation over anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is an important barrier to climate action in countries such as Australia and the USA. Given the rising concerns expressed by younger people globally over the existential threat posed by global warming, are political divisions over climate change lessening among young people? Are young Australians more knowledgeable about climate change than their elders, and to what extent does knowledge influence their climate attitudes? We explore these questions with recent survey data from a cohort of young Australians (aged 26) living in Queensland and national data from the 2018 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes. We find that younger Australians are not more knowledgeable about climate change than older Australians. However, knowledge of climate change is associated with greater acceptance of ACC among younger Australians. Social and political factors are also important. Young men score higher on climate knowledge than young women, but men are less likely than women to accept that climate change has human causes. Those with vocational education score lower than others on climate knowledge and are also less likely to believe in ACC. While younger Australians are likelier to accept ACC than older Australians, political party allegiance remains the strongest influence upon the attitudes of young people, with Liberal and National Party identifiers far less likely than others to accept ACC, even after controlling for social background and climate knowledge. This research suggests that politics remains the greatest barrier to real action on climate change, even among younger Australians. Keywords Climate change attitudes . Climate knowledge . Political party identification .
Green voting . Australia . Young people
* Jonathan F. Smith [email protected]
1
School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
2
National School of Arts, Australian Catholic University, 1100 Nudgee Road, Banyo QLD 4014, Australia
Journal of Applied Youth Studies
Introduction The end of the second decade of this millennium bore witness to an unprecedented series of climate protests led by young people around the globe. Australia is no stranger to environmental protests with its long history of successful campaigns led by environmental organisations and groups (Hutton and Connors 1999), while the Australian Greens remain an influential minor party (Tranter and Kouser 2018, Tranter and Smith 2018) at the federal level and in the state of Tasmania (Crowley 2012). While Australia is increasingly affected by climate-related events such as droughts and bushfires, and Australians tend to express high levels of concern about the natural environment, scepticism about the causes of climate change remains high in
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