People often hate Congress but love their members of Congress.
In light of new polling, perhaps the saying should be: People hate Congress but love their Amazon deliveries.
Leftist politicians often speak of billionaires’ greed and selfishness, but the people seemingly disagree. When our lives came to a screeching halt via COVID-19 in March 2020, we had no option but to trust public health bureaucrats. As politicians seized an opportunity to exert power, the private sector took to serving communities with new innovation.
Why would our confidence in politicians be any greater when it comes to climate change? According to new polling from my organization, the American Conservation Coalition, it shouldn’t be.
Amazon and Microsoft had favorable views of 64% and 62% from people ages 18 to 30, respectively. In comparison, the Democratic and Republican parties received favorable ratings of 40% and 30% from these respondents, respectively. Even Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, viewed much less favorably than their corporations, still scored higher than politicians.
There’s a lesson for climate change here.
While the private sector is on the front lines of climate solutions, the government often constructs extra hurdles for innovators to leap through. Most young people seem to agree — 58% of respondents indicated that “cutting regulations on private businesses and corporations so they can innovate clean technologies faster” is an effective strategy to combating climate change. Bill Gates’s TerraPower is leading in pursuit of the next generation of nuclear reactors. Still, Gates initially took the project to China because of overbearing nuclear regulations in the United States. After three years of development, Gates brought the project back to the U.S. But thanks to governmental hurdles, the timeline for our first advanced reactor is still very much up in the air.
On the other hand, China just started operating its first small modular reactor and is poised to surpass the U.S. as the world’s top producer of nuclear energy as early as 2030. In contrast, half of the American nuclear fleet is at risk of closing by then because of misinformation about nuclear safety peddled by Democrats and special interest groups such as the Sierra Club. Nuclear certainly isn’t the only viable clean energy solution, but experts agree it’ll be impossible to reach net-zero emissions without deploying more nuclear power.
We should be streamlining regulation to unleash the power of innovation against our growing emissions challenge. The private sector has made incredible strides across sectors and industries and was crucial to helping the nation through the worst of the pandemic. And if COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s how fast the market can solve problems when the government gets out of the way.
Danielle Butcher is the executive vice president at the American Conservation Coalition.
