Climate change, a topic which has become intensely political and partisan, is a clear example of human failure to address a terrifying long-term threat. It has been clear that our actions have been leading to global, rapid changes in climate patterns for a long time. However, some money-interested bad actors have done an incredible amount of damage by influencing elected lawmakers as well as sowing doubt about an established scientific consensus in the minds of the public. This project aims to quantify how that money, in this case spent by the Oil&Gas, Natural Gas Transmission, and Coal industries, coalition has shaped public and political opinion, and perhaps has led to a divergence of the two.
This project has used data from three seperate sources, looking at public opinion on climate change, campaign contribution data, and the voting records on climate-related bills of the 435 US Representatives. The sources for all of these data are:
First, here is the map from the LCV. Dark red is a very low climate rating and dark green is a high ranking (i.e. very pro-environment). Notice that this almost exactly mirrors the political map, with red being in Republican areas and green in Democratic areas.
Now, let's further examine the partisanship reflected in this highly-polarized map (notice there is lots of dark green and dark red... it appears that representatives are almost always voting 100% pro-environment or 0%). Here is a histogram, with both parties overlayed on top of each other on the same plot, of the 2016 ratings. Blue is Democratic, Red is Republican. The partisanship is pretty clear, with, as suspected, each party saturated off to opposite sides of the plot.
Now, let's take a look at public opinion. Perhaps it isn't as polarized as the representatives'? The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication gathers data on various questions, from which you can select, and display on the map.
In contrast to the previous map, almost all of these maps are actually quite uniform, in the upper middle range (i.e. lots of light green). Notice that some maps are generally more green than others, indicating stronger public agreement with the corresponding survey question. For example, the question, "Should we fund research into renewable energy sources" reached an average of ~78% across all the districts. That's pretty high. Also notice that the question, "Should we regulate CO2 as a polutant" reached similarly high numbers. Some other interesting observations:
Next, let's go back to the political side of this. We'll examine how monetary contributions might be effecting the voting records of congressmen. To do this, here is a plot of money received from a selected industry (you can pick from Oil&Gas, Natural Gas transmission, and Coal) vs. voting score as calculated by the LCV. Each point represents one congressman, and Blue is Democratic and Red is Republican.
While none of the 3 industries yields a plot with a clear linear fit (there's no reason it would have to be linear anyway), there is a clear trend in all of them. Notice that there are many congressmen receiving large sums from industry with low LCV scores. On the contrary, just about everyone getting a high LCV score is not receiving much industry money. It is difficult to prove cause an effect, but there is clearly some kind of an inverse relationship between industry money and pro-environment voting. Notice the partisan divide here as well.
Now, let's map this data to better visualize how it potentially fits in with the Yale and LCV data. Here's a map, where dark Purple represents more money received:
It's pretty obvious from these three maps that Oil&Gas is the biggest industry, by far, out of these three, in terms of donations to politcal campaigns. Looking at the map, contributions are the largest along the spine of Appalachia, as well as from Texas straight up the Great Planes through to North Dakota. Even out by the Rockies the donations are the pretty high as well. The other 2 industries exhibit a similar pattern.
Now, let's take a deeper look into the money received by representatives' campaigns, with a histogram. The following histogram is seperated by industry (i.e. Oil&Gas, Natural Gas transmission, Coal), and within that by party (Dem and Rep). We can see that generally, Republicans are getting more money from these industries, with each histogram having a longer sweep out towards the high-bracket contributions than its Democratic counterpart. However, it is worth noting that the majority of contributions for both parties fit into the lowest monetary bracket.
Lastly, let's take a look at the underlying question in all of this investigation: How do the industry money, political voting records, and public opinion relate to each other?
The following scatter plots industry contributions vs. the difference between LCV scores of congressmen and their constituents' response to survey questions. You can select the industry and survey question to update the plot. Naturally, some survey questions such as those focused on policy are more comparable to the voting record of the congressmen. The idea is that one would expect a representative to vote proportionally in accordance with the demographics of their constituency. In a perfectly fair world perhaps, if 60% of a rep's constituents felt one way on an issue and the other 40% felt the opposite way, the rep would vote 60% of the time in accordance with the beliefs of that 60%. Same here with climate; if most of a rep's constituency believes in concrete climate action measures such as taxing CO2 and subsidizing renewables, one would expect them to mostly vote in accordance with that view, rather than vote consistently anti-environment.