Trump voters not the climate enemies you think they are

Another day brings another monster tide for residents of Carteret County, North Carolina, whose coastal towns and villages are being swallowed by the rising Atlantic.

Nonetheless, its voters returned Donald Trump to the White House, a man who denies the science of climate change and had withdrawn his country from the Paris Agreement on climate change (for a second time) before the sun had even set on his first day back in office.

It is a contradiction that has captured the imaginations of many. In 2017, when Trump first quit the agreement which symbolically pledges countries to limit global heating to well below 2°C, the word “denialism” lit up late-night talk shows and circulated at annual UN summits.

Denialism evokes a pathological rejection of the reality of climate change. It has come to imply a public that can no longer tell fact from fiction, often to their own detriment. Meanwhile, climate-conscious leaders in a handful of Democratic states have repeated their commitment to scientific facts.

As an anthropologist, I felt uncomfortable with the way the fabled Trump voter was spoken about while rarely being allowed to speak for themselves. I have participated in climate politics as a researcher, activist and diplomat, and I felt there was little reflection among the treaty’s advocates about their own role in the US departure.

I started a PhD to understand the non-participants of climate politics. It took me to coastal North Carolina where, like so many other American communities, the effects of climate change sit alongside a seeming indifference to the crisis.

I wanted to understand how people here related to climate science, and what this thing called denialism actually looked like. I spent a year talking to