Why men are less worried than women about climate change
From petro-masculinity to electric trucks: why men disengage from climate action and what might bring them back. Mike Smith had been a US fighter pilot
From petro-masculinity to electric trucks: why men disengage from climate action and what might bring them back. Mike Smith had been a US fighter pilot for more than a decade when he took what he describes as a 'hard turn' out of the navy. He decided to trade a life of deployment, fighter jets and cruise missile operations for one of planting trees and sustainability. Though he didn't realize it at the time, the seeds for that change of pace and path were sown when he was just nine and watching a mega-fire burn through forest near his home in central Idaho. The Lowman fire wasn't enormous by today's standards, but to a boy raised in the outdoors it felt apocalyptic. The blaze burned so fiercely it formed what looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud. "It felt like the whole state was on fire at the time. It was just very, very memorable to me," Smith said. The fire that tore through land near Mike Smith's childhood home led him to start reforesting Image: Mike Smith The fire didn't only scar his memory, but the land it tore through. More than 20 years later, when Mike returned to Idaho with his wife to show her where he grew up, what he saw stopped him cold. "You know, when you go back to the place you grew up, you see all the things that have changed. And so what became jarring was seeing the thing that hadn't changed. It was just black, still black dirt, 22 years later." He started a company focused on post-fire reforestation for carbon offset production.
He got involved in planting a couple of million trees and founded a climate tech company that helps businesses cut emissions. Along the way, he became aware of more women in the climate space than men. Do men and women relate to the climate crisis differently? What Smith was seeing was not unique to his experience but is in fact a widely recorded phenomenon known as the green gender gap. In short, the idea that women are more concerned about the climate than men. And as Amanda Clayton, a University of California political scientist found during her research on the topic, "the gender gap grows as a function of country wealth." As countries get richer, it is more likely that women will be the ones expressing greater concern about climate change. But not because they are suddenly more concerned. "It's actually that men tend to decrease their concern about climate change as countries become wealthier," Clayton said. "The growing gender gap is actually men's growing skepticism." Donald Trump has made every effort to cling to fossil fuels Image: AP Photo/Alex Brandon/picture alliance One reason seems to be a fear of the perceived costs — financial and cultural — of transitioning to a clean energy future. Costs that feel especially threatening to men raised with the traditional expectations of being the provider. This is where politics comes in because she also found that as countries get wealthier, climate change becomes politicized. "And when climate change becomes a political issue on the right, we see political and industry elites starting to promote climate-skeptical beliefs," Clayton said. This might involve narratives that target men more than women.
The BriefWire