On September 23rd I was unable to drive to work at the Brookings Institution because activists in Washington DC blocked key intersections. They were part of worldwide demonstrations designed to draw attention to climate change. Like my economist colleagues at Brookings, I was struck by the size and passion of these demonstrations. As I think about them, three things are particularly surprising about it to a Baby Boomer policy analyst like me.
The first is that there is such strong support, especially among younger Americans, for tough policies in climate change, even though the major threat is well into the future yet proposed policies mean economic pain today. The conventional wisdom in political science is that it is extremely difficult to generate public support for any pain-now/gain-later policy. Climate change defies that pattern.
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