Politicization of Climate Science & Conflicts of Interest Politicization of climate science and issues has constrained Extension’s role in, funding invested, and external support for C/EW programs. Furthermore, regardless of whether they believe the science of human-induced climate change, there are broad swaths of traditional Extension
partners and audiences who feel they’ve been singled out and blamed for the problem. Extension’s connections with industry, reliance on private-sector funding in many cases, and conflicting interests were also identified as difficult political challenges for increasing Extension C/EW programs. ● “[A challenge] is just the varying beliefs about climate change. Some people believe in it and believe that it’s human caused. Some people don’ t believe in it at all. Some people have kind of in- between beliefs. And then not only that, it’s what their priorities are. At Extension we're promoting research-based factual information, but that doesn't always align with what people believe. And so that, I think, is always the biggest struggle. Right now for my programming, I would say it's definitely trying to get people to be more open minded about things” (R02) ● “Through some of these federal programs, there have occasionally been times, and I'm thinking, in particular during the George W. Bush administration and a little bit during the Trump administration, when we were asked to talk more about climate and weather extremes, and drought and resilience, rather than talking about climate change . And so that would be kind of a suggestion that ... the phrase ‘climate change’ is very sensitive right now. Better to talk about your programs in terms of how you're working with natural resource managers to increase resilience to climate variability or to weather extremes, or something like that.” (R06) ● “ On the left, I get comments saying ‘you're too conservative, your climate projections underestimate the disaster that's facing us , you're painting too rosy a picture when you mentioned success stories, you know we're all going to die.’ So, so that you know that's actually a harder one to deal with.” (R06) ● “[Clientele]... they range the whole gamut. I’ve got constituents who ar e absolutely convinced that this is all a hoax and designed to just rob the wealthy nations of their electric power and our ability to travel and so forth. All the way to the other extreme to people who say ‘We’ve got to do something right now or we’re going to destroy the Earth’s atmosphere by 2040’ or something.” (R16)
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