When you step into the voting booth, is climate policy on your mind? Or do other issues take precedence?
While Americans continue to deal with the shrinking spending value of their dollar, and companies that – if they follow past trends – will look for ways to keep their prices at their inflated rates even after interest rates and costs begin to decline, along with a myriad other domestic issues from housing costs to border concerns, it may seem climate change is a distant worry. That is, if it’s a worry at all.
But, according to the activists and journalists at Covering Climate Now, surveys show it’s a growing concern for voters.
According to a recent op-ed from the organization:
A clear majority of the American public — 56% — is now either “concerned” or outright “alarmed” about climate change. That’s according to a new study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the gold standard in US climate polling. Yale’s findings are essential reading for US journalists in particular in an election year when voters will decide who governs the country that, more than any other, influences climate policy and outcomes around the world.
The percentage of Americans who want more coverage of climate change is “actually much higher than [56%],” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale program, told Covering Climate Now. Only the 11% of the public that still denies climate change doesn’t want more information. The overwhelming majority of Americans do “want to learn more about the causes, consequences and solutions to climate change,” Leiserowitz added. (Separate surveys show that many Americans don’t recognize that burning oil, gas, and coal is the main cause of climate change, underscoring the importance of making that connection in news coverage.)
What makes Yale’s findings especially authoritative is that Leiserowitz and his colleagues have been surveying Americans’ opinions about climate change for 15 years. Their landmark 2009 “Six Americas” study identified six categories of thinking among the public: “alarmed,” “concerned,” “cautious,” “disengaged,” “doubtful,” and “dismissive.” Since 2013, the percentage of “alarmed” Americans has more than doubled, while the percentage who are either “alarmed” or “concerned” jumped from 40% to today’s 56%. The percentage of deniers has remained stable, at 11%.
Yale’s work measures how Americans’ views about climate change have shifted over time and thus implicitly cautions against how the media covers polls in general. Polls are snapshots of public opinion at a given moment in time, which should make reporters and pundits much more careful about drawing conclusions about what today’s polls mean about elections that are, in the US, still 10 months away.
The Yale findings do, however, have this lesson for 2024 campaign coverage: A clear majority of Americans would welcome more reporting on climate change as an election issue. “The Alarmed are the group who most prioritize climate change as a voting issue and thus are most interested in information on the positions of different candidates (and that’s not just at the presidential level, but for all federal, state, and local races),” Leiserowitz said. “The Concerned are also interested… although climate change is less likely to be one of their top voting issues.”
While it might not be a top issue for all of us, it might be one we should start considering. Temperatures are continuing to increase. We’re seeing more extreme weather events across Kentucky – from more powerful tornadoes to larger, more devastating floods. If they aren’t all directly caused by climate change, the evidence does seem to suggest some are.
It might not be as immediate and pressing as concerns about how we’ll pay the rent, the utilities, and the grocery bill, but the Covering Climate Now folks have one thing right; it’s worth staying informed about.
