Do They Care?
Let’s take the US as an example here!
In order to focus on climate-related quotations, we selected a set of keywords related to “Climate Change” for retrieval from 2008 to 2020. Check the Word Cloud of these keywords!
Important Indicators
Political Attention – How much do they care?
Potential climate policies are a major part of politicians’ “promise bucket” during their campaigning. In this case, we assume that the propotion of climate-related topic occurrence in English news articles each year is related to the politicians’ attention to it, which refers to Political Attention Value.
Strating with a relatively high attention for climate issue from american politics in 2008, the value firstly experienced a small rise in 2009 and then drop continually between 2009 and 2012. Apparently, year 2012 is a watershed in the past few years, whose value reached valley among all. Since then, the political attention value has climbed, and especially stayed high in recent years. As chief political camps, mass media coverage does reflect intergrowth of political attention trending in climate change issues.
Political Attitude – Positive or Negative?
For a long time, political groups remain divided over climate change causes, which probably leads to inconsistence of government policy-making. In order to obtain Political Support Rate on climate change, we applied Sentiment Analysis for all retrieved quotations.
Unsurprisingly, we found that it follows a similar pattern every year, where positive quotations are dominant and neutral quotations are the least. This is consistent with common sense in a way that most politicians are in favour of taking actions to climate change.
In general, over 50% of quotations are positive in all years. Starting from 2008, the political support rate rises continually from 59% and reached the peak of 63% in 2011. After that, the rate decreases all the way again to 59%, followed by a slight rebound between 2015 and 2018. In recent years (2019-2020), it seems that the attitude of politicians turns to be more climate denial, with the political support rate falling to record lows of 55% in 2020.
Actual Emission
Overview
EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) provides the Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks for the public. The annual report covers total greenhouse gas emissions for all man-made sources in the United States, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and nitrogen trifluoride. With the help of this report, we have detailed information about the actual emission.
Starting from 2008, there is in general a decreasing trend of annual CO2 emission, accompanied with some fluctuation. In 2009, the emision dropped greatly by 6.3% due to factory shutdowns caused by the financial crisis. In 2010, the CO2 emission from industry production rises again, then followed by a continued decline from 2010 to 2012. However, from 2012-2014, the annual CO2 emissions shows a worrying upward trend, increased by 3.6% from 6586 MMT in 2012 to 6825 MMT in 2014. After that, the CO2 emission begins to drop continually and reaches the lowest point of 6483 MMT per year, followed by a significant increase in 2018 and again a small drop in 2019.
How are they correlated?
We performed a linear regression on the three mentioned above. The R-squares of the two regression models are not satisfactory, and since the p-values are far larger than 0.05, neither of the two predictors are significant. Therefore, the occurence of climate topics in newspaper has little impact on the actual emissions.
However, we had another interesting finding that there is a significant negative correlation betweeen political attention value and support rate.
Possible Explanation:
When politicians focus more on the climate topic (increase in political attention), the more more objections there will be.
- Normally when a ruling party uses too much fiscal expenditure on environmental protection but without much progress, it becomes a weakness that could be easily caught out on and criticized.
- Politicians tend to have the consensus that actions should be taken to mitigate climate change, but when a lot of politicians are constantly arguing about it, the opposite opinions will more likely to emerge.