Before we get to new data on how climate change could become a winning political issue, let’s get caught up on some breaking news:
Trump administration backs off plan to end ocean monitoring: The administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368 million ocean monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill.
The politics of a warming planet
Conventional wisdom among the political class holds that climate change is not a winning issue.
Most voters are more concerned with kitchen-table topics like affordability, the thinking goes. Under this logic, environmentally focused Americans are already going to vote for climate-friendly candidates. And climate deniers can’t be won over by a little campaign messaging.
As Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer wrote earlier this month, many leading Democrats are shifting their messaging on environmental and energy issues, no longer calling for an end to oil and gas and de-emphasizing the direness of the threats posed by climate change.
But a wave of recent polling suggests that the politics of climate change are more nuanced than that. Global warming is, in fact, a serious concern for many American voters, the polling suggests, and with framing that emphasizes solutions instead of sacrifice, it can be a powerful motivator for real policy change.
Take, for example, April research from Gallup, which found that 44 percent of U.S. adults “worry a great deal about global warming or climate change.” That’s among the highest percentages since 1989, and just short of the all-time high of 46 percent registered in 2020.
Another 22 percent of Americans worry “a fair amount” about climate change, meaning it’s an issue that is solidly on the radar for two-thirds of U.S. adults .
A survey last year from George Mason University also found that about 65 percent of Americans were “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about global warming.
And unlike in some previous studies, when climate change often ranked near last among voters’ major concerns, that poll found that the threats posed by a warming world were squarely in the middle of the pack, above issues like crime and health.
A partisan gap
At the same time, climate change has never been more partisan.
A full 72 percent of Democrats say they worry a great deal about the issue, the second-highest figure on record, according to Gallup. Just 6 percent of Republicans say they are worried about climate change, the lowest figure on record.
That’s no big surprise. Many Republican politicians and voters are following the lead of President Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and drastically rolled back federal support for clean energy and pollution controls, among a host of other moves.
That partisan split is echoed in a new report from Potential Energy Coalition and the Rockefeller Foundation, two nonprofit groups, which surveyed 88,000 adults in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The survey found that the partisan gap on climate issues was by far wider in the U.S. than in other countries, and it also had the widest ideological gap of any issue tested in the U.S.
The results showed that 93 percent of left-leaning Americans call climate change an urgent problem, compared with just 54 percent on the right. That’s a 39 percentage point split.
Compare that with France, where the survey found that the issue “is essentially non-partisan,” with 84 percent of left-leaning voters and 79 percent of right-leaning voters calling it urgent. In Britain, there was a 12 percentage point partisan split on the issue; in Germany, there was a 19-point gap.
But in the United States, the partisan split is only getting worse.
After four years when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. anchored much of his domestic policy around efforts to curb planet warming emissions, the Trump administration has worked to undo many of those efforts, while promoting fossil fuels and deriding clean energy initiatives promoted by Democrats as the “Green New Scam.”
What messages work
Another insight from the recent polling: It turns out some of the most common sustainability buzzwords aren’t great at engaging people.
In the Potential Energy report, words and phrases like “decarbonization,” “net zero” and climate “crisis” were shown to be ineffective at getting people to support policies that promoted clean energy and reduced reliance on fossil fuels.
By contrast, when Americans were exposed to plain-spoken messages about the fact that pollution is leading to rising costs and damaging extreme weather, they were more likely to support climate action.
“It’s not whether you should talk about it, it’s how,” said John Marshall, executive chair at Potential Energy Coalition. “When we pick messages that feel too ideological, or feel too big, or feel too constraining, or feel too liberal environmentalist, it doesn’t move people.” But, he said, when you talk to people about climate change and focus on “the costs and consequences of pollution, you actually move them a great deal.”
This was also true when it came to Republicans, the poll found.
When voters were exposed to messages that centered on sacrifice, scarcity or bans, support for climate action waned. But when the message centered on promoting health, increasing affordability and reducing pollution, support increased.
Some of these findings make intuitive sense. Voters will naturally respond more positively to messages that articulate a brighter future, rather than being told what they can’t have.
But describing a problem as all-encompassing as climate change brings a risk of being Pollyannish, too.
It’s all well and good to talk about the benefits of clean energy. But whether or not voters like the term “net zero,” the science is clear that it will take a huge global effort to stop the worst effects of climate change. Until politicians, businesses and consumers do the hard work of phasing out fossil fuels, temperatures will continue to rise.
Renewable energy
Trump administration to pay millions to cancel more wind projects
The Interior Department said on Wednesday that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million to abandon plans to build wind farms in the Atlantic and Pacific, in the third such deal struck by the Trump administration to cancel offshore wind leases.
Under the agreement, Invenergy will voluntarily surrender four leases in federal waters for wind farms that would have been located in the New York Bight, off the Central Coast of California and in the Gulf of Maine. All of those projects were in the early stages of development and had little chance of moving forward under the Trump administration, which has halted all federal permitting for offshore wind.
Invenergy said it would put the money toward the development of at least five new natural gas-fired power plants in the Midwest, as well as in geothermal projects in the Western United States. — Brad Plumer
Quote of the day
“Certainly FEMA operates in a unique environment where there are challenges and setbacks that impact our ability to respond.”
That’s President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Cameron Hamilton, yesterday in a confirmation hearing. Scott Dance reports that Hamilton acknowledged that sharp staff cuts may challenge the nation’s readiness for disasters, but said the agency was moving to fill critical vacancies and that he had “full faith” in its employees.
Hamilton is a former Navy SEAL, who previously oversaw emergency medical technicians on the southern border for the Homeland Security Department and worked as an emergency management specialist in the State Department.
”He faced no questions about his background Wednesday,” Dance writes, “despite criticism from some disaster survivor groups that he lacks the extensive résumé that federal law requires of FEMA’s leader.”
More climate news from around the web:
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Planet-warming emissions rose slightly last year in the European Union, Politico reports.
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The International Energy Agency projects that there will be a global oversupply of oil next year, according to Reuters.
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