American Public Opinion on Climate Change

Resources Radio, a podcast produced by the Resources editorial team and Resources for the Future (RFF), releases new episodes weekly, in which one of the hosts—Kristin Hayes, Daniel Raimi, or Margaret Walls—speaks with a guest about a new or interesting idea that’s related to topics like energy policy, environmental policy, climate impacts, and environmental justice.

Transcribed here is one such episode, in which host Kristin Hayes talks with RFF University Fellow and Stanford University Professor Jon Krosnick about the latest report in the Climate Insights series, a project that has gauged American public opinion on climate change for the past few decades. Krosnick is a social psychologist who extensively employs survey research methods. Krosnick leads the project with Stanford colleague Bo MacInnis, with support from RFF and survey firm ReconMR.

This interview was originally released on October 8, 2024. The transcript of this conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Kristin Hayes: Before we talk in more detail about this year’s results, can you say more about how long you’ve been conducting this work and how it’s evolved over time?

The first survey was inspired by something the Clinton administration did.

In the fall of 1997, the Clinton administration hosted the White House Conference on Climate Change. Al Gore was vice president at the time, and this was Gore’s opportunity to take the stage and sponsor presentations by leading climate scientists, with the goal of focusing the country on this issue, all of which led to the Kyoto Protocol signing in December of that year.

For me as a social scientist, and Ray as well, this was a special opportunity, because very rarely do we get warned in advance about something big that’s going to happen and that may move public opinion, which gives us an opportunity to collect data before that thing happens and afterward.

So, I was prepared in a way that allowed Ray and me to get money. Fortunately, the National Science Foundation is especially prepared, in instances like this, to zip funding to investigators when there’s an urgent need. Luckily, we were able to do that and watch what happened before and after that discussion.

Our first Climate Insights survey was in 1997. For a long time in between, we’ve been watching public opinion in a way that allows us to not only understand the dynamics of people’s thinking on this issue but also to compare these opinions on climate change to how Americans think about lots of other issues, as well.

We are only going to be able to skim the surface in our conversation today, but let’s hit the highlights as best we can. The first report in the series focuses on American understanding of climate change, and it covers a range of foundational questions on American beliefs about climate change. Where is American public sentiment around climate change today, in 2024?

Let me answer that by putting it in the context of what came before 2024.

What’s really striking is the consistency of American views on this issue. In that first survey in 1997—when I personally didn’t have a good understanding of what climate change even was—the American public was way ahead of me, with 77% of American adults saying they thought the Earth’s temperature probably had been warming over the last hundred years. And that 77% is almost identical to what we see right now (75%) which is typical of American public opinion. On the vast majority of issues, people formulate views, and those views are pretty stable over time.

We’ve observed some striking exceptions over the decades. For example, American views of race changed a great deal in the egalitarian direction. Another example is gay marriage. In a very, very short period, Americans went from leaning away from it to embracing it. So, we see those exceptions, but for the most part, the vast majority of issues that Americans think about and debate are accompanied by very stable views over decades.

In the case of climate change, this consistency is particularly interesting, because major events over the last 25 years very well could have changed opinions. Hurricane Katrina; Hurricane Sandy; Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth; literally hundreds of millions of dollars spent in outreach, advertising campaigns, and efforts to push the public. Claims are being made these days that the fossil fuel industry created a disinformation campaign; yet, what we see is essentially no notable movement in these numbers.

However, compared to our last survey in 2020, the new 2024 survey shows slight but statistically significant decreases in what I’m going to call the “greenness” of the American public on various issues involved in the climate change survey. One example is that, in 2020, 81% of American adults said they thought the Earth had been warming, and that number dropped to 75% in 2024—a drop of eight percentage points. You might say it sounds like Americans are turning away from a “green” direction, but as I said before, they’re actually going back to baseline. They’re going back to where they had been.

So, why was 2020 unusually high? I think the answer has to do with results found by my collaborator, Bo MacInnis, who has shown that you can think about the American public as divided into two groups: the people who trust scientists (that’s about two-thirds of the country), and the people who don’t trust scientists (about one-third of the country). For the people who trust scientists, the message from the scientific community has been very consistent that climate change is happening—that it’s a threat we need to deal with.

But for those people who don’t trust scientists, how are they going to answer our survey questions? How are they going to formulate opinions? Well, it looks like one of the things they do is stick a finger out the window and say, “What’s been happening to the temperature lately?” As it turns out, every early winter, in January and February, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA both put out reports on the past year’s average temperature. Those reports get into the news, and those people with low trust in science seem to be paying attention, or they somehow experience it personally, because their views go up and down in response to changing world temperatures. We fully expect the ups and downs for those folks to continue.

I’m going to summarize and say that it still sounds like 75% is a significant majority of Americans who still affirm the existence and the threat of climate change. Who do they think should be doing something about it, and how has that stance changed over time? And how does all that match their sense of who actually is doing something about it?

Well, our surveys have asked about four categories of actors: the US federal government, governments of other countries, businesses, and ordinary Americans. What we’ve found is, when we ask people about how much effort the federal government, for example, has been putting into this issue, what we see is about 80% of Americans saying they would like to see their government doing a moderate amount or more. They see similar numbers for businesses (about 78%), and for ordinary people, the number is a little bit lower (around 70%). That’s understandable for me, personally, in the sense that I can change the car that I drive, but I’m going to have essentially no impact on the planet. Having that kind of effect requires big-level changes.

But what’s really striking in these surveys is that Americans are not seeing nearly the effort that they would like to see. In contrast to the people saying they would like the federal government to be doing a moderate amount or more (about 80%), only 51% think the government actually is doing that. And the percentage of Americans who tell us they want the government to be doing more than it is doing is 67%, so a huge majority is saying that, no matter what level of action they want on climate change, they want more than they’re seeing. And that’s true for foreign governments; businesses; and ordinary Americans, too.

The Biden administration has leaned into climate change as one of its issues. It’s passed some seminal policies. And the survey speaks to individual policy choices related to climate change, asking about a range of policy options that span everything from taxing electricity and gasoline (which might lead to reduced consumption) to subsidizing certain types of clean energy. Of the policies that the survey covers, which policy options do you see as least and most popular? Any surprises?

To start with, it’s important to note that, in the newest survey, Americans endorse the idea of government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, which we have seen before. In the newest survey, 74% of Americans said the US government should limit greenhouse gas emissions by businesses. That’s what we call the “principle” side of it. And then we get to what we call the “implementation” side of it: What policies should the government enact to cause that outcome to happen?

In many arenas, we see what’s called a principle implementation gap, where people say they would like racial equality in principle, for example—but then, any policy to achieve that principle, people don’t like in nearly the same numbers. We don’t see that for climate change.

Americans are clear that they’re actually willing to pay for policies that will reduce emissions. They’re not so enthusiastic about policies that might reduce emissions or might reduce emissions by unknown amounts. The nice thing about mandates is that, in principle at least, the government can say we are going to reduce emissions by some amount, and the Congressional Budget Office and others can do a calculation of what that’s going to cost, and then we can ask Americans about their willingness to pay for that outcome.

But if I were to ask you, How much are you willing to pay for your next car? Well, we’d have to decide what car you’re going to buy, and is it new or used, and all kinds of other details you’d want to know before you’ll tell me how much you’re willing to pay for it. No one would ever go into a car dealership and have the car dealer say, “Okay, I’ve got a car for you. How much are you willing to pay for it?” before you even know what the car is. In this case, we see the same thing in surveys: if we ask vague questions, we get vague answers. If we give people specific questions, we get much more concrete answers, especially about willingness to pay.

And in the surveys we’ve done so far, the American public as a whole appears remarkably willing to pay what the Congressional Budget Office has said it would actually cost to produce those reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

But as we know, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the Biden administration’s centerpiece of climate efforts so far, is really not about mandates; it’s about incentives. When people sometimes talk about “carrots” versus “sticks,” the Inflation Reduction Act is a “carrot” policy.

Americans are less enthusiastic about that, because there’s simply no guaranteed beneficial outcome. Now, the Biden administration might very well say, “It’s the best we can do. You wanted us to do something!” But the fact of the matter is that Americans would be more enthusiastic about mandates, and the new survey shows that.

On the other hand, an example of something that people traditionally have not been enthusiastic about, and remain unenthusiastic about, is consumer incentives. Some economic theory says that if you want to get people to drive less, just raise the price on gasoline by raising taxes. If you want people to use less electricity, raise the taxes on electricity. If you ask most Americans, Are you doing a lot of discretionary driving that you could just choose not to do? They would say no. If you say, Are you turning off the lights as often as you can already? Probably. So, is there really that much discretion? Maybe not.

So, over time, we have seen only about 20% of Americans being willing to support increasing taxes on electricity to cause people to use less of it. About 30% of Americans say they support increasing taxes on gasoline. Those numbers are unusually low in the new survey: Only 15% favor increasing taxes on electricity, and 28% favor increasing taxes on gasoline.

The evidence in the survey shows people are willing to pay, so why are they resistant to such taxes? On one hand, our survey question didn’t tell them what happens to that tax money. And there’s no guarantee that anybody is going to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions at all as a result. Maybe if you went and took a lot of economics classes, you would see wisdom in taking that type of action, but since most Americans haven’t, it’s understandable that they might be skeptical of that type of policy.

You mentioned that, overall, the public is comfortable (if that’s the appropriate word) with mandates, but I wanted to ask you about an exception that jumped out to me in the data. It seemed like we see a trend toward people saying that maybe the government should just stay out of certain climate interventions, in a way that I didn’t really see in past years. Humor me while I talk through just one example of this.

We know the public wants the federal government to do something about climate change, and a survey question asks specifically about whether the government should encourage the manufacture of cars that use less gasoline (more fuel-efficient cars, other types of alternative-fuel cars, and the like). When I looked back at one of the early surveys in 2006, 44% of the respondents said that the government should mandate the production of more fuel-efficient cars. 40% said the government should encourage that production through tax breaks, which are, as you mentioned, central to the Inflation Reduction Act. And 15% said the government should stay out of this entirely. So, definitely leaning toward doing something, as opposed to nothing.

But in this latest survey, those numbers are reversed, in some sense, with 37% saying the government should stay out of it entirely, and only 19% wanting those mandates for fuel-efficient cars. What’s your interpretation of the difference in these survey results?

You’re certainly right that this question about fuel-efficient vehicles is one of the various measures that show movement away from support of those kinds of emissions-reduction policies in the latest survey. What’s interesting to me is: What American wouldn’t want the best gas mileage they could get? Do people love going to the gas station and filling up with gas because it’s so fun?

One potential answer is that people actually are pleased with fuel efficiency in recent years, with cars and trucks now more efficient in their gas mileage. Fuels themselves also may be more efficient, which may contribute as well to the sense that we’re making progress on this issue.

As we all know, the big discussion these days involves electric vehicles. I remember, a year or so ago, seeing CEOs of major American car companies saying that, by 2040 or 2050, we will be making only electric cars. And if I understand this correctly, there’s been a pullback from that in the last six months or year or so. The Biden administration has been making efforts to push the country toward electric vehicles. And the reality is that, in our new survey, public support is the lowest we’ve ever seen (46%) for the government encouraging electric vehicles.

Well, you can make an electric vehicle if you want, but then it depends on how you make the electricity. At the moment, we have not dramatically reduced the amount of fossil fuels that we are using to make electricity. We are increasing the proportion of electricity coming from green sources, but the amount that comes from fossil fuels has remained remarkably stable, and it’s still the dominant source of electricity generation in the country. So, you can’t blame Americans if they say, “To be honest, I’m not all that thrilled about the idea of an electric car, because I just don’t see the benefits for the environment.” But it’s a chicken-and-egg problem that Americans are not going to be enthusiastic about electric cars for the purposes of climate change until those vehicles actually help significantly with climate change—as opposed to the promise of hopefully helping.

Each year, the Climate Insights survey has some new questions. A previous survey included electric vehicles, and this year, one new set for 2024 focused on what I’ll refer to as the differentiated impacts and costs from climate change on poorer versus richer households. Tell us about that set of questions and what you’re hoping to understand from those.

Well, the theme of environmental justice is one that has come front and center for many people who have been thinking about climate change in recent years. You might be tempted to think that climate change is a global problem that affects everybody equally, but in fact, environmental justice scholarly communities note that’s not true. Folks who have more limited income, who don’t have air-conditioning, who don’t have the strongest infrastructure, who don’t have fire insurance and other kinds of protections that wealthier people have, are more vulnerable to the impacts of environmental changes. Whereas I can just turn up the air-conditioning, someone else might not be able to.

Secondly, some communities of people simply live in harm’s way more so than others. They live along coastlines where serious storms are likely to hit them. They live in wildfire-prone areas.

So, the question is: To what extent do Americans perceive unequal impacts of climate change, and to what degree are Americans willing to have government help when those effects occur? If the impacts of climate change are affecting more vulnerable subpopulations more, are Americans willing to help those individuals more?

When it comes to perceptions of the inequality of the impact, we asked this question: In the future, do you think global warming will hurt poor people in America more than rich people; will it hurt rich people more than it will hurt poor people; or will it hurt poor and rich people about the same amount? We found the country is split. Only 52% of Americans said they thought climate change would hurt poor people more than rich people. And almost everybody else (42%) said they thought it would hurt poor and rich people equally.

But what was particularly interesting is when we then said to respondents: Do you think that the government should, or should not, provide help to poorer people to deal with these events after they happen? Americans differ in their view of how people should deal with hardships. Some people say this is a capitalist society: People get what they deserve, and they deserve what they get. So, if people are poor, there’s a reason for that, and it’s not my job to solve their poverty.

On the other hand, lots of Americans say they don’t want to live in a country like that. If you’re passing by somebody who accidentally trips on the sidewalk, of course you’re going to stop and help them stand up. Do we do the same in the case of climate impacts?

And in that context, this next number I’m going to tell you is jaw-dropping. Fully 85% of American adults said that the government should help poor people more than rich people in coping with the effects of climate change. So, even though only about half the country gets the premise, most people embrace it in a big way.

It’s particularly interesting to view all this in light of some important work done at the University of Michigan years ago, through the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior. That study and others have shown that, instead of poverty being a chronic state for some people, it’s actually a temporary state. It’s like tripping and falling on the sidewalk: for most people who get into circumstances of poverty, they’re in it for a relatively short period and then back out. It’s understandable if Americans say, when somebody trips, they want to help. And that seems to be the way people are thinking at this moment.