They don’t do much else, like practicing what they preach, because this is a cultish political movement, not science
Climate change activists look to increase voter turnout in 2022 and beyond
When engineering geologist Betsy Mathieson, 66, thought about her retirement, she imagined putting her scientific expertise to use by volunteering for an environmentalist organization like the Sierra Club. But when the U.S. elected climate change denier Donald Trump president in 2016, she decided to retire early to volunteer on increasing voter turnout.
“I came to realize that if people who care about the planet don’t vote, my environmental volunteering would be of little use,” Mathieson, of Alameda, Calif., told Yahoo News. So instead of volunteering for a traditional environmental advocacy organization, she now spends several hours a week phone banking on behalf of the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on increasing turnout among irregular voters who are likely to care about the environment.
Founded in 2015 by Boston-based lawyer and activist Nathaniel Stinnett, EVP has just five staffers and a singular mission: to identify registered voters who don’t always vote and — based on demographic and consumer data — would be likely to name the environment or climate change as their No. 1 issue, and to get them to vote.
Stinnett was inspired by polling that showed a larger proportion of Americans rate climate change or the environment as their top issue than the percentage of likely voters who choose climate as their main priority — a tendency replicated in EVP’s own polling.
At the end of the day, few people actually consider ‘climate change’ as an important issue, hence why, even in far left states like Washington, people will vote against this. Because it’s popular in theory, not practice.
