Voters actually agree on climate change fixes.
SO, WHY NO ACTION?
Editor’s note For 37 years, USA TODAY has been home to America’s conversation. That role is even more important now, with deep divisions standing in the way of thoughtful debate. Leading up to the 2020 election, we’ll spotlight areas of agreement and offer solutions to help us come together.
AElizabeth Weise
s Australia burns and the Earth just ended the warmest decade on record, Democrats and Republicans disagree so sharply on climate change ideas that there's no hope of working on the problem, right? Actually, wrong. Despite all the squabbling, the majority of Americans – of all political parties – say climate change is real and agree on many things we need to do to fix it. A new Public Agenda/ USA TODAY/Ipsos survey finds a preponderance of Americans – Republicans, Democrats and independents – support increasing energy efficiency, modernizing the electric grid, investing in research to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and government help for cities and states to fight climate change. “The data say – robustly – that Republicans and Democrats agree that climate change is a problem and that we have to do something about it,” said Peter Kareiva, director of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles. Overall, 86% of Democrats, 55% of Republicans and 78% of independents say they want to reduce the effects of global climate change. That’s a total of 72% of Americans who support it. Ideas for solutions cover substantial ground. Majorities in the poll support: Modernizing the power grid to reduce
waste in energy production and distribution: 70% of Republicans, 83% of Democrats and 81% of independents.
❚ Government investment in technologies to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhousegas-causing pollutant, from the atmosphere: 55% of Republicans, 81% of Democrats and 64% of independents.
❚ Creating stronger energy efficiency standards for new and existing buildings: 63% of Republicans, 82% of Democrats and 71% of independents.
Not that there aren’t differences. The biggest is taxation. Republicans are less enthused about using government funds to assist U.S. cities and states to fight climate change. Eighty percent of Democrats support it and 50% of Republicans.
The survey captures the difference between responses people give based on their political leanings and their actual beliefs when it comes down to what policies they’d like to see put in place, the pollsters said.
The survey results underscore almost two decades of often unappreciated accord among Americans on various aspects of climate change.
Belief in climate change has shifted over the past 20 years but overall has never dipped below 57% of all Americans, according to surveys by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. In 2019, it was 69%.
What’s changed is the context. “When you look beneath the hood, concern about this issue has soared among Democrats, increased among independents but has stayed flat among Republicans,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale program.
He attributes the strength of the hard-line dismissives in part to fossil fuel interests putting money into delaying carbon reduction policies for as long as possible.
The portion of Americans who consider themselves
“alarmed” by climate change reached 31% in November, an all-time high, according to Yale data. That number tripled from 2015 to 2019. Six in 10 Americans consider themselves either “alarmed” or “concerned.”
Video of horrific fires and dead and dying kangaroos and koalas in Australia, massive flooding in the Midwest and the deadliest and most destructive fires ever recorded in California make the reality on the ground difficult to ignore.
“You constantly hear people saying things like: ‘I have never seen it this hot before. I have never seen it flood like this before,’ ” UCLA’s Kareiva said. “This is just normal people, and it wasn’t the case five years ago. It’s direct human experience with climate change.”
The good news is that there’s far more agreement than most people realize, said Will Friedman, president of Public Agenda. There’s a lot of belief among Americans that it’s necessary – and possible – to do something about climate change, and a fair amount of agreement on what people say should be done.
“We’re trying to dispel the myth that the reason we can’t make progress in this is because the public is at each other's throats on these issues. The public is actually in broad accord on a number of areas. The stopping points are coming from elsewhere,” Friedman said.
“That’s something that feels heartening because changing public opinion is tough,” said Chris Jackson, a vice president with Ipsos. “The fact that public opinion is already there suggests there's a lot of potential energy to deal with climate change.
“It could be a much calmer, more rational, reasoned debate if we ever actually get past taking sides.”
The findings from the Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos poll are part of an election-year project by USA TODAY and Public Agenda. The opt-in online poll of 1,006 adults was taken Jan. 10-13.