Podcasts contributor Megan Vahdat sits down with UCLA professor and political scientist Megan Mullin to discuss the growing polarization in environmental politics, the aftermath of the 2025 Los Angeles County fires and her personal journey as an environmental advocate.

Megan Vahdat: I’m Megan Vahdat, and this is Bruin to Bruin, a Daily Bruin podcast that interviews influential members of the UCLA community. Today, I am joined by political scientist Dr. Megan Mullin, a UCLA professor of public policy who holds the Luskin Endowed Chair in Innovation and Sustainability. She is the faculty director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, which partners with civic leaders on research to advance equitable public policy addressing environmental challenges. She is also leading UCLA’s commission tasked with developing policy recommendations to help Los Angeles recover from the 2025 wildfires. Mullin’s research has appeared in leading journals including Nature, Science and the American Political Science Review, and she has been named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley. Thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Mullin.

Megan Mullin: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

MV: In the wake of growing environmental turmoil, withdrawals from international agreements like the Paris climate accord, raging wildfires across the West and increasing concerns about water quality, climate policy has become more polarized than ever. A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that environmental issues are now the most divisive topics in Congress, surpassing even immigration and the economy in terms of partisan division. But what’s often forgotten is that not long ago, environmental policy wasn’t as sharply divided along party lines. In fact, George H.W. Bush called himself the environmental president, and many environmental policies were championed by Republicans. So to start off today’s interview, I wanted to ask you what changed? As a political scientist, what do you think has driven this shift in attitudes about environmental protection between the parties?

MM: Thanks for that question. It’s such a hard question and such an important question, and I think it’s really important for us to look at the current moment of division and keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be this way, partly because we can only understand our moment by looking at the historical context and understanding how we got here but the other part is to provide a lens of possibility, right? Perhaps we can return to a political context in which we can talk with each other about common challenges and try to figure out solutions that will work for all the different parties who come into environmental conversations. We all care about clean water, we all care about clean air, and if you put it to the test, we all want a climate that’s livable for human populations. How we get there becomes the real challenge. It’s been a 30-year trajectory of division. In 1990, the environment was the issue on the public agenda where Democrats and Republicans had the most agreement, more agreement than many of the other issues you described. Over those 30 years, we have seen the two parties grow apart. Part of that is polarization, which we know is rampant throughout society. It’s not only dividing us on our political positions, but it’s dividing us socially and religiously – it’s drawing this wedge, and that’s affecting the environment. But there are feedback effects. Over those 30 years, the way environmental conditions have manifested for people, and the conversations about who pays the cost of environmental regulation have fed polarization, too. The emergence of climate change on the environmental agenda was, in some ways, an accelerant of a division that was already underway.

MV: You mention how polarization has increasingly shaped our political landscape, especially regarding environmental issues. And I think that we are in a digitized and media-driven era, where media narratives significantly influence public perception. How do you think the growing polarization of the media in particular will influence how Americans shape their own opinions on environmental issues?

MM: Yeah, we do see this fragmentation in the media landscape that is a part of this process of polarization and partisan division. Whereas we, you know, 30 years ago, had more, you know, broadcast networks and nightly news that people, you know, sort of joined together in watching and consuming, and set the stage for building a public agenda or at least a common understanding of the challenges we faced. Now we have this fragmentation, and that builds multiple understandings, and there are fewer institutional filters, right? Part of what happens with social media is that there aren’t editors and there aren’t sort of institutions compiling and synthesizing messages, right? It’s all happening direct – we can choose who to tune into. We can, you know, select what we’re consuming, and that is part of what is driving our division. As you say, the space of the environment becomes even more complicated because some of the environmental challenges we face are hard to see, or we see their manifestations but have to trust in science to tell us that these manifestations are linked to these processes that are more difficult to observe. The more abstract the problems we are confronting, the more we are relying on the media and, you know, folks we’re listening to, to help us interpret these problems, and that makes this fractured media environment have all the more impact on our understanding.

MV: A lot of people can take information they’re gaining from the media or from politicians that they follow online and perceive those things as facts, like you were mentioning, especially when it comes to scientific concepts, which are deeply entrenched in environmental politics. You know, something that comes to mind a lot is the narrative that’s so prevalent in our media that climate change is a hoax. I’m curious, when did that narrative really take root? Many Republican figures deny its existence, yet at the same time, we see Republican-led states like Florida, led by DeSantis, making major investments in wetland protections, or Texas and Iowa, both deeply conservative states, being leaders in wind and solar energy. So I was wondering, how do we reconcile these seemingly contradictory trends?

MM: It’s important to recognize that what has happened, right, so climate change emerged on the public agenda about 30 years ago, right? So this 30-year time span I’ve been talking about pretty much covers the period of time in which the broad American public came to recognize that this phenomenon called climate change – or global warming – or the greenhouse effect exists, right? And there was scientific conversation about this for decades and decades prior, but this 30-year period is the period of time in which it came onto the public agenda. When it first came onto the public agenda, it was greeted with equal measures of attention and concern between Democrats and Republicans, right? It was this scientific phenomenon that jeopardized human society, and we needed to understand what was going on and try to confront it with the scientific capacity of the nation and the world and the political capacity of the nation and the world. What has unfolded over that period is this division, and it’s important to recognize that some of that division was an intentional, deliberate misinformation campaign by companies that had an interest, right, in maintaining the fossil fuel economy. Not only did they lobby against any action to confront climate change – which is what they should do, right? That’s what we all do, right, is we seek government action in order to reflect and pursue our own interests – they not only lobbied but they misinformed, right? They deliberately spread a campaign of misinformation about the severity of climate change, about its very existence as a scientific process, and that is part of what drove the division. It also then pushed climate change down the agenda of issues that the government was ready to take on, and so we sort of stopped the conversation. There was an effort in 2009 at the federal government level to take on climate change with serious legislation. It went pretty far in Congress but didn’t quite get there, and then for another decade, the federal government didn’t want to take it on again, right? So we have action going on at the state level, we had action going on in the cities, but back to your question of what happened – there was a deliberate misinformation campaign that then intersected with this growing division. It not only divided us, but it stalled our attention. I feel like now there are very few people who are continuing to deny climate change as a phenomenon. Now we’re back to the conversation that we started 30 years ago – now we’re back to the conversation of how severe is this problem, who does this problem affect, how much cost are we willing to take on to transition to a new economy that will confront this problem, and how are we going to ease that transition for those who will experience the heaviest costs?

MV: And you mentioned that a huge center of this conversation is how much cost can we bear as Americans to take on this challenge and to mitigate the effects of climate change. You know, I think very recently to President Trump’s executive orders on just his first day taking office where he used the words “climate extremism.” He cites that environmental governmental regulations have fueled inflation and burdened businesses, and you know, this, I think, reflects a very common tension in American politics – the idea that environmental protections and policies hurt the economy. How should the country navigate this balance between environmental responsibility and economic growth?

MM: Well, first we should confront the presentation of that as a necessary trade-off, right? It’s not a necessary trade-off – we can have both. At the same time, we have to recognize that change involves costs, right? There are not transitions – fundamental economic transitions – that produce immediate benefits for everyone, right? Instead, we have transitions that are lumpy and difficult, and it moves economic activity, it moves jobs, it moves livelihoods from one sector to another, from one geographic region to another. We need to be straightforward and honest in confronting those challenges, and we need to build policies and political conversations that recognize those challenges – that recognize that transition and any kind of change is scary. We are asking people to change some of their everyday habits, and we are asking some people to change their very livelihoods, and that’s difficult. We need to be honest about these things and then be creative in building policy solutions that build better living conditions for all of us, right? Not only benefit the aggregate American public and the aggregate world by stalling climate change and helping to adapt to its impacts but also produce concentrated benefits for those who will experience the most acute effects of that transition.

MV: Conversations and political conversations about the environment are the backbone of helping people accept the risks, especially the financial risks associated with environmental change, which you believe are fundamentally necessary. Environmental topics are complicated, deeply technical, and data driven. How do we bridge that gap? How can we make these issues more accessible and relevant to the general public so that they not only understand them but feel compelled to act, like you were mentioning?

MM: I don’t know, right? I think what we need to do is provide many avenues for people to engage, right? You talked earlier about media fragmentation, and it’s easy to shine a light on a lot of the challenges that media fragmentation has created for us in coming together. But there’s also a lot of opportunities that come with that media fragmentation, right, which is the opportunity to read really interesting, deep investigative journalism about the environment in ways that typically had not been available to the general public. To read people’s personal narratives and their personal essays about how climate change or water quality or living on the front line of toxic exposure affects their lives, their families and the opportunities for their children. There’s an opportunity for us to be exposed to a lot of different kinds of information that meet our needs, right? I’m a faculty member in a university, and I tend to read a lot of really sort of boring technical stuff, right? But that’s what my brain grabs onto. Other people tend to read rich narrative, and that’s how they come to understand the world. Other people listen to podcasts, and that’s how they come to understand the world. So, fragmentation also provides this opportunity for people to enter into these conversations through the variety of different modes and understand the environment in the way that matters to them, to us, right? And therefore, provide an avenue for engagement, right? Across any issue – whether it’s the environment or any other issue on the public agenda – we don’t have to know everything in order to exercise our voices as citizens and residents of this country, right? What we have to do is say, “I matter because I live here, and I’m impacted by this problem, and I’ll be impacted by whatever decisions you make, public officials, to confront this problem.” We don’t have to know everything –our voice still matters, right?

MV: And I think just recently that idea that you were talking about – that I matter, that my political decisions about the environment can directly impact my way of life – became crystal clear, especially with massive environmental challenges and natural disasters like the devastating wildfires of 2025. The conversation about climate change and the government response to that has really intensified as a result, and I think, like you were mentioning, these fires have forced so many people to confront just how vulnerable our way of life is to climate-related disasters. You know, along those lines, you’ve been selected to lead a commission at UCLA tasked with developing policy recommendations to help Los Angeles recover from these wildfires. Can you share a little bit about the work you’re doing and the key priorities for your team?

MM: Sure, yeah. The wildfires, which have been so devastating in Southern California, especially in the Los Angeles area, the Pacific Palisades, and the community of Altadena but also in some other communities that were harmed as well – and still others that had fire racing toward them and barely escaped devastation – these fires really brought home for all of us the everyday risk that we’re living with. They’re a good example of what climate change is bringing to communities throughout the United States, which is an escalation of things we already knew and what we already lived with, right? So Southern California has always lived with fire, but because of the impacts of climate change, these fires are bigger, faster and more dangerous than ever before, and they’re wreaking more damage and harm than ever before. That same sort of dynamic is happening in flood-prone areas in the Southeast, right? They always lived with floods, but these floods are becoming more intense, more frequent, and more severe – heat, etc.

So, you know, what we’re doing now – our team – I lead a UCLA research team that is supporting an independent Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire-Safe Recovery. This is a commission of professionals and civic leaders, mostly from the Los Angeles region, some spread a little bit farther geographically, who have expertise in resilience and climate-safe building. They’ve been tasked with thinking about how we rebuild communities to be more safe for the climate impacts that we now live with, as well as communities that can minimize their contribution to this climate change challenge that’s wreaking such harm. So it’s an independent commission. We at UCLA are supporting that commission by bringing in the best research on the questions that the commission is confronting, whether it’s infrastructure rebuilding, building safety and hardening, or community-based processes for making sure that the social fabric of communities is maintained as we seek to rebuild these communities. We don’t just rebuild in a way that displaces the residents who had been there already and brings in new people but instead maintains some of the integrity of what had been before.

MV: Looking back, imagine that as a college student with a passion for the environment, you couldn’t have predicted where your journey would take you – engaging with these issues at so many levels. But your journey started with grassroots activism, specifically your time with the Sierra Club, which you’ve mentioned. I’m curious, how did those on-the-ground experiences shape your interest in environmental policy? What lessons from that time still influence your work today as you’re building solutions, for the wildfires for instance?

MM: Yes, that’s right. Just out of college, after I finished at UC Berkeley, I worked for the Sierra Club. I was the junior member of the lobbying team for the Sierra Club in Sacramento. My job was to connect the legislative lobbying team with the grassroots of the Sierra Club, which was tens of thousands of volunteers around the state who were working to advance environmental solutions in their own communities. I wanted to make sure that what the lobbyists in Sacramento were doing reflected the preferences of Sierra Club members up and down the state. Sometimes, I wanted to persuade the Sierra Club members that some legislative compromise or agreement that we were entering into was maybe the best solution for that moment in time.

It is funny to think about the work I was doing then as related to the commission work that I’m doing now, right? Because, in some ways, it is full circle – bringing this synthesis of information and the multiple voices that are relevant and necessary in these conversations, bringing it together in order to try to find some agreement to push forward on the agenda we all care about.

MV: I think that we have so many students on our campus who share similar interests to you when you were working for the Sierra Club and have a real passion for environmental issues and want to get involved just like you did straight out of college. But I think with the scale of climate change and the complexity of environmental policy, it can often feel overwhelming, almost insurmountable, for students to get involved like you did. So, to finish off today’s interview, I wanted to ask, what advice do you have for college students who want to make a difference? What’s the most impactful way for them to get involved in driving real environmental change at a young age?

MM: It’s a hard question, you know – find an avenue, and it can be any avenue. You know, I think you talked about where my journey started and mentioned the Sierra Club. My journey started before that. I’m a two-time college dropout. I started college, I paid my own way. I was a Pell Grant recipient. I ran out of money. I dropped out. I worked and worked. I went back. I ran out of money again. I dropped out again. I moved to California because I heard that the California university system was not only reflective of research excellence and academic excellence but also committed to access and was an affordable alternative, right, to the kinds of places that I had been going. And it was true. I got here, and I was able to get residency and go back and finish my undergraduate degree. At no point in that time period did I imagine I would do anything except get a diploma, finish this task I had set out for myself to get my undergraduate degree, and I thought that would be the end, and the saga would be over. But instead, it turned out that I met the right people. I was exposed to new ideas. I learned that I could be committed to something – normatively committed to something – where I had a vision for the future, but I could also approach that with a scholarly hat on, and things fell into place that allowed me to do the work that I’ve been doing over the last few decades. That work not only was out of sight for me – I didn’t even know that work existed, right?

And that’s when I was an undergraduate, and a little bit of an older undergraduate than most of the undergraduates that I teach. So, it’s easy to think in the moment in time when you’re an undergrad that you have a view of what is possible. But there’s so much more, right there, and I have to remind myself of that when I have students in the classroom – like, “Oh, you don’t even know what more there is out there,” right? You don’t even know what avenues might be available. So, when it comes back to advice, my advice is to take the best thing in front of you in that moment, make the best you can make of it and then take the next step, right? No step is decisive. Each thing you do, you build a skill set. Each thing you do, you understand better what parts of it you like and what parts of it maybe rub you the wrong way, and you take that to the next opportunity.

One of the – you know – I now direct a research center. It has about 20 staff. The skills that I draw on every day in working with this fantastic staff at my research center – I developed when I managed coffee shops during that time period when I was in and out of school. Those were skills I developed at the age of 19 and 20 in managing coffee shops, figuring out how people thought, figuring out what helped motivate them, figuring out when they were frustrated but weren’t really showing it. I draw on those skills now, and so every experience you have makes a difference for the next thing you do.

MV: Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Mullin, and for your invaluable advice. We really appreciate your time.

MM: Thanks, Megan.

MV: This episode of Bruin to Bruin was brought to you by the Daily Bruin podcasts. You can listen to this episode and all other Daily Bruin podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. The audio and transcript of today’s interview are available at DailyBruin.com. I’m Megan Vahdat. Thank you for listening.