Several people asked me to comment on this Jonathan Chait essay from the L.A. Times last week in which he sought to explain the partisan nature of the climate issue. While I think there are some elements of truth in Chait’s perspective, I think that he misses the elephant in the room.

Climate change is indeed a partisan issue. This is confirmed time and again by opinion polls, most recently this poll released last week.

Chait seeks to explain this partisanship as follows:

How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It’s certainly true that many of them are. Leading global warming skeptic Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), for instance, was the subject of a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. The bottom line is that his relationship to the energy industry is as puppet relates to hand.

But the financial relationship doesn’t quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.

The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement.

Your typical conservative has little interest in the issue. Of course, neither does the average nonconservative. But we nonconservatives tend to defer to mainstream scientific wisdom. Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.

National Review magazine, with its popular website, is a perfect example. It has a blog dedicated to casting doubt on global warming, or solutions to global warming, or anybody who advocates a solution. Its title is “Planet Gore.” The psychology at work here is pretty clear: Your average conservative may not know anything about climate science, but conservatives do know they hate Al Gore. So, hold up Gore as a hate figure and conservatives will let that dictate their thinking on the issue.

Chait’s suggestion that non-conservatives defer to the scientific mainstream while conservatives do not gets the cart and horse mixed up. Chait falls victim to the idea that for some people — those rational beings in the reality-based community — political perspectives flow from a fountain of facts. And if one’s entire view of the relationship of science and politics is grounded in very recent Republican-Democrat conflict it is easy to see how this perspective might be reinforced. On the very hot-button issues of climate change and the teaching of evolution, Republican political agendas require confronting current scientific consensus.

But a broader look at science and politics shows that challenges to a current scientific consensus occurs across the ideological spectrum. Consider genetically modified agricultural products and the European Union. The EU has strongly opposed these products for political and cultural reasons (sound familiar?) in the face of a scientific consensus that indicates little risks. Consider also smoking, where a robust scientific consensus exists, yet far more people smoke in left-leaning Europe than in the United States. When I testified before Congress last February I pointed out that the Democrats organizing the hearing had decided not to invoke a recent consensus statement on hurricanes and global warming in favor of relying on a few selected studies most convenient to their political agenda. The reality is that we all filter facts through our pre-existing values and biases, and each of use is perfectly capable of ignoring or selectively interpreting facts as is convenient. Those who stubbornly refuse to accept the previous sentence would be a good example of these dynamics.

The blindingly obvious and somewhat banal answer to the question why climate change is a partisan issue is that climate change is a partisan issue because it has evolved as a partisan issue. The fact that at some point the issue took on partisan characteristics has led to a reinforcement of the partisanship. The important question to ask is how it is that climate change became a partisan issue. There are several answers to this question.

1. George W. Bush. Everything George Bush touches becomes a partisan issue (and seems to break). George Bush squandered an opportunity to become a great president in the aftermath of 9/11 and instead will be remembered as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. In this context, his early-2001 decision to unceremoniously abandon the Kyoto process and flip the bird at Europe more than anything fed the partisan nature of the climate debate. In the 1992 presidential election climate change first became a high-level partisan issue as Al Gore and George H. W. Bush used the issue to score political points, with GHWB calling Gore “ozone man” and promising to counter the greenhouse effect with the “White House effect.” Of course the deeper history, back to the 1970s, involves the Republicans as the party of the extractive resources industries and the Democrats as the party of alternative energy. These debates conveniently mapped right onto the 1980s emergence of climate change as Dan Sarewitz and I documented in 2000 in the Atlantic Monthly. Of course, if one were to go back to the 1950s and 1960s these partisan roles were somewhat reversed, as Frank Laird documents in his excellent book on the history of solar energy.

2. Al Gore. Long before George W. Bush was in politics Al Gore was in the business of politicizing the climate issue. I have no doubt that he feels strongly about climate change, but his actions for several decades bely his oft-stated claim that climate change is not a partisan issue. Today Al Gore’s leadership on this issue is by its very nature a partisan issue:

Appearing before a Congressional Committee, Gore said that Global Warming is “not a partisan issue; it’s a moral issue.” However, polling data suggests that among the general public it’s a very partisan issue. By a 65% to 9% margin, Democrats say that Gore knows what he’s talking about. By a 57% to 11%, Republicans say he does not. Those not affiliated with either party are evenly divided.

So long as the main protagonists in the U.S. climate issue are the opponents from the overwhelmingly partisan 2000 presidential election, how in the world can the climate issue be anything other than partisan?

3. The Chorus. Given the dynamics described above, it is entirely natural that the climate debate attracts participants ranging from experts to the lay public, who together I call the chorus. And people are attracted to the issue because of its partisan nature, and the nature of blogs and media coverage amplify the voice of the chorus. And in turn the chorus reinforces the partisan nature of the debate through several forms of dynamics.

First, climate change is a perfect issue for the scientization of politics. This refers to the tendency to characterize political debates in terms of technical disputes — remember the Hockey Stick? There is an endless supply of climate science to debate and discuss and always the presence of irritating skeptics who challenge the current consensus (see discussion at RealClimate). This situation elevates the authority of subject matter experts in political debates, which makes it appealing for some experts, but also inevitably politicizes the expert community as they self-segregate according to political perspectives.

Second, self-segregation is not unique to experts. A short tour around the web reveals the truth of Cass Sunstein’s notion of internet-based “echo chambers” in which people talk only with those who share their views and lambaste as evil subhumans those who they disagree with. It is a rare discussion on climate change that involves a thoughtful exchange of ideas from people who hold fundamentally different political views. The self-segregation has the effect of increasing the partisan nature of the debate as people come to believe more strongly of the absolute truth in their views and the absolute lack of morals in their opponents.

Third, forced segregation. For those who do not fit easily into the partisan nature of the climate debate, partisans go to great effort to force these perspectives into a partisan framework. For instance, here at Prometheus we’ve consistently advanced views on climate policy (held long before George Bush came around) that emphasize the importance of adaptation and immediate, no-regrets mitigation to occur in parallel (see my 2006 Congressional testimony for the full spiel), and we’ve experienced a steady effort by some to frame our views as “right-leaning” simply because they are not “left-leaning.” The repeated attacks on us from the environmental Gristmill blog are a case in point, despite the fact that there appears to be an enormous substantive agreement in our views. Of course, if the political right actually accepted the views on policy that we have been advocating then those on the political left would probably be rejoicing! On the climate issue, because the chorus has little stomach for perspectives that deviate in any sense from the partisan framing, it is any surprise that the partisan framing dominates?

The bottom line is that climate change is a partisan issue. It will likely remain so in the United States for a long time. Political action will happen nonetheless simply because the Democrats have succeeded in making it a political issue during a time of their ascendancy. If Al Gore runs for president, as I suspect he will, it will further increase the partisan nature of the debate. To the extent that Democrats continue to raise expectations that climate change is central to their agenda, action will inevitably occur. Republicans will eventually accept that action will occur and will do the best to use it as a vehicle to advance their own interests, as typically occurs in all political situations. For those interested in effective policy action, as opposed to scoring political points real or symbolic, there will be a continuing need to keep a focus on policy options and their likely consequences. Die hard partisans will do there best to make that task difficult as discussion of options requires the sort of nuance not present in political horse races.

Soon climate politics in the United States will come to resemble the current dynamics in the EU, in which the issues will be messier and more complicated. When that occurs, like old Cold Warriors the climate partisans will long for the days of good guys and bad guys, and will likely hang on too long to the past.