Americans Support Climate Policy More Than They Think

Climate and clean energy policies are far more popular with Americans of all political persuasions than most Americans suspect, a new study finds.

Research psychologists at Boston College, Princeton, and the University of Indiana at Bloomington found that “nearly all Americans have created for themselves a ‘false social reality,’ in which their beliefs about what their compatriots think about climate change are dead wrong,” reports Bloomberg.

The magnitude of this “pluralistic ignorance” is “large enough to fully invert the true reality of opinion,” write Boston College researcher Gregg Sparkman and his team.

“Supporters of major climate policies outnumber opponents two to one, but Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true.”

Published in the journal Nature Communications and based on a representative sample of 6,119 adult Americans surveyed in the spring of 2021, the new study compares what those surveyed believe to be the public appetite for climate policies, with actual levels of public support as revealed by public opinion data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Participants were asked to estimate public support for instituting a carbon tax, mandating 100% renewable energy by 2035, putting renewable projects on public lands, and adopting a Green New Deal.

“Most respondents put the number between 37% and 43%,” Grist reports. “In fact, polling suggests the real number is almost double that, ranging from 66% to 80%.”

This tendency to underestimate support for climate policies crosses the political spectrum, with Democrats tending to ascribe slightly higher levels of support for such policies than Republicans, but nowhere near the point of mirroring reality.

“No state population was wrong by less than 20% in their judgments about what other people think,” Bloomberg writes.

Online “echo chambers” are a major driver of this “society-wide misperception,” say the study authors. Another cause is a natural reliance on heuristics—mental shortcuts or rules of thumb—that simplify complex evaluations: such as the tendency in media to perpetuate the erroneous approximation that the public views climate policy along deeply partisan lines.

“Here, they might rely on a rule of thumb like ‘some liberals and no conservatives in the United States care about climate change,’” Sparkman told Bloomberg. “So, we might have to provide people with a better rule of thumb, in this case that ‘all liberals, about half of conservatives, and most independents care about climate change.’”

Even just informing people that a policy has widespread backing is an effective way of mobilizing the public, said climate strategist Danielle Deiseroth, a polling analyst at Data for Progress. “It reinforces a sense that the policy is popular and gives people social ‘permission’ to support it themselves.”