Americans increasingly alarmed about climate change
The one country in the world where climate change scepticism still features heavily in opinion polls is the US. To be sure, there is a vocal minority of climate change sceptics and deniers in Australia, the UK and other countries, but nowhere in the world is climate change scepticism more prevalent than in the US. As I usually put it: Thousands of climate scientists around the globe are engaged in a vast conspiracy and the only people who are telling the truth are US billionaires and oil company executives. But “the times, they are a‘changing”, as Bob Dylan would say.
In its biannual survey of public attitudes towards climate change, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication showed that attitudes towards climate change in the US are shifting at an increasing speed . After two years of hurricanes in Texas and the Southeast of the US, wildfires in California and Colorado and most recently tornadoes in Alabama in March (!) that caused 23 deaths, more and more people in the US are convinced climate change is happening and it affects them personally. The percentage of Americans who are worried about climate change rose from 53% in 2013 to 69% in 2018 and the percentage of Americans who are alarmed about climate change doubled to 30%. At the same time, the share of Americans that are dismissive or doubtful about climate change has shrunk from 30% to 18% over the last five years.
But the most important shift is the rising number of people who are convinced climate change is happening (73%, up from 62%) and people who think they have personally experienced its effects (46%, up from 33%). If almost half of the population has had experiences that they ascribe to changes in the climate, the problem becomes so salient that political pressure to act on it is so strong that real action is likely to follow in coming years.
I have written in the past about how states and municipalities are already acting to push renewable energy in the US and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but this shift in public sentiment will also influence federal policies over the next five years, in my opinion. What gives me confidence in this outlook is that climate change is no longer a partisan issue in the US. Asked if the “US should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do”, 85% of Democrats agreed as did 68% of Independents. But also, most moderate republicans (55%) agreed with this statement and almost half of conservative Republicans (45%) agreed with it. In total, two out of three Americans now think that the US should reduce greenhouse gas emissions independent of what other countries are doing, and that the political elites that continue to fight against climate change measures are increasingly out of touch with the country overall.
Attitudes of Americans about climate change
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.