 I'm Dan Berset, President of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and I'm very happy to welcome you all today to Congressional Climate Camp No. 2. The topic of today will be public polling on climate change. This is the second of a four-part series. The first installment was two weeks ago, and we talked about the budget and appropriations process and how that might be affected this year by things like debt ceiling increase, things like that. We'll be back in two weeks to talk about non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, and then we'll be back a month from today on March 9th to talk about implementation of the Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. But today it's all about public polling on climate change, and we have a tremendous set of panelists today to help us learn about the issue. And I'd like to start by saying special thanks to our host today on Capitol Hill, Representative Paul Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Coalition, with a special shout-out to our friend, David Shutt, who helped us get the room today. So thank you, Representative Tonko, and thank you, Seek, for helping us be here today. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide policymaker educational resources with an emphasis on Congress. And we've been doing that ever since. Our focus is congressional staff. We understand how hard it is to be a congressional staff person, how much information is hitting you all at once. And so our job is to provide timely, relevant educational resources that are science-based and that are also topical so that you all have answers when your bosses ask you really tough questions, which I also know happens all the time. We do lots of things. This is about the us. I'm not used to the clicker. This is the about us slide. I'm going to skip through that. Some examples of what I mean by policymaker education. Well, the first is we do briefings and webcasts. This is our second of the year. This is one that we did a while ago. That's Anna in the back joining me on the webcast. Let's see, given who is involved in this one, it had to have been ambition and opportunity in America's new climate commitment. We also have a biweekly newsletter called Climate Change Solutions that came out on Tuesday. It comes out every other Tuesday. It's a great resource about climate change topics here in Washington. It includes our legislative tracker, but it also includes links to all of our upcoming events, and there are a ton of them coming up in the next few months. We also do lots of fact sheets. This is our climate change FAQ, which is very popular. From time to time, we do reports, and this is our report on a resilient future for coastal community that pulled together findings and recommendations from 42 experts across 16 briefings in 2019 and 2020 about coastal resilience challenges. These are the ones coming up for a congressional climate camp. You can RSVP to all of these by visiting us online at www.eesi.org. If you RSVP, but then you can't make it, it's okay. We have an in-person audience today. We have a livecast audience, but everything is available online, including presentation materials, and a couple of weeks after the briefing happens, we'll also do summary notes, and you won't want to miss any of that. We also will be doing a lot of briefings coming up starting in April about the Farm Bill. You all will have to become Farm Bill experts in short order, and we can help you with that, and then we'll be looking at other topics, including an overview of DOE nuclear programs. We'll be looking at organics farming. We'll be looking at the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, which will come out in March, so that'll be super exciting. But we have a great panel. We won't spend any more time with introductions about ESI. Our panel is really great. They will have lots of interesting things to say, and you may all have questions. For folks in the room, we'll have a Q&A period after our fourth panelist, and for people in our online audience, if you have a question, you can share it with us by sending us an email, and the email address to use is ask at ASK at EESI.org. You can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online, and we'll do our best to incorporate those questions into our Q&A. Our first panelist today is Anthony Leiserwitz. Anthony is the founder and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a senior research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. He's an expert on public climate change and environmental beliefs, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, and the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape them. He's conducted the first global study on public values, attitudes, and behaviors regarding sustainable development, and has published more than 200 scientific articles, chapters, and reports. He served as a contributing author, panel member, advisor, or consultant to diverse organizations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, National Academy of Sciences, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Harvard Kennedy School, United Nations Development Program, Gallup Ripple, and World Economic Forum. Anthony, welcome to our briefing today. I'll turn it over to you, and I'll leave the clicker up here for you. Thank you. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much to EESI for inviting me to come and be here today. It's really a pleasure looking forward to engaging with all of you and hearing some of your questions. As described, I direct the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and please see us as a resource. All of our studies are available on our website, and so I'm just going to do a leaping from iceberg to iceberg here. But I think the combination of the four of us is really an exciting combination. I'm going to take the big picture view of some big trends in American public opinion overall, as well as looking at some of the spatial differences, and then we'll hear more about the politics, about socio-demographics, and then, in particular, the health issue in particular. So this is a program that we've been running for over 15 years called Climate Change in the American Mind. We've been doing two nationally-represented surveys every year, so every spring, every fall, every spring, every fall for now, the past 15 years. And so I'm going to use this to give you just an understanding of recent trends. So let's start with the fundamentals. Do Americans understand that global warming is happening? So you can see on the far left there, when we first started this time series, back in the fall of 2008, we were at kind of a high water mark. 71% of Americans understood that global warming was happening. We then saw a huge drop, 14 percentage point drop. And by the way, this is seen in everybody else's data as well, including pews, bottoming out in about 2010. And since then, it's been slowly, slowly, slowly working its way back up until our most recent study just over a month ago, we measured it at about 70%. But you still have about 16% of Americans who think, no, it's not happening. Do people understand the causes? Well, here too, we saw that big drop back in the early part of this record, 2008 to 2010. But as of most recently, just about a month ago, 58% of Americans said that they thought global warming was mostly human cause. Now I will just say that this remains a fundamental misconception, especially among those, the 27% who think it's natural. That's a consequential misunderstanding, because if global warming is just naturally caused, then many of them conclude, even if they think it's a problem, it's not anything we had anything to do with. Therefore, nothing we can do anything about. So they may not understand why a lot of the policies that are being discussed are important, especially the urgency why we need to take action immediately. So this, I would say, is still an important misunderstanding that many Americans continue to have. One area of, I think, some real interesting shifts and change over the past number of years is perceptions of the scientific consensus. So we've done a lot of work about the importance of people understanding that experts themselves have reached this consensus. And it's decades old that climate change is real, and it's human cause, and it's a serious problem. And yet, many Americans have not understood that the experts themselves had reached that conclusion. But we've seen a real shift upwards in recent years where Americans at least increasingly understand that, though I will say it's still only 58% as of our most recent study. And you still have 20% who think there's a lot of disagreement. And then you've got a small hardcore that's at about 3% who think that actually most I just do not think it's happening. Just to put that in some international perspective, this number would be much higher pretty much everywhere else in the world. So the United States is exceptional in a sense. This stands in for a whole lot of other variables looking at how people perceive the risks, so the likelihood and severity of different types of impacts. But all of these are very, very tightly correlated with people's worry about climate change. And we've seen growing worry overall among the American public where now it's almost 2 thirds who say that they are at least somewhat worried about climate change. And in particular, there's been a growth over the years of those saying that they're very worried. But still it's only about 27% as of our most recent study. And one broad theme that we've seen over and over again through all the years that we've been studying is that for many Americans, they still think of climate change as a distant problem. Distant in time, that the impacts won't be felt for a generation or more, or distant in space. This is about polar bears or developing countries, but not the United States, not my state, not my community, not my friends, not my family, and not me. And as a result, it becomes psychologically distant. It becomes one of a dozen other issues that's out there. And maybe I kind of wish somebody would do something, but they may not yet understand why this is so important and urgent that we take action. So it's just to say that this is another major communication challenge that we have to resolve in this country. However, one of the things that we have been seeing is that that sense of distance is and has been changing in recent years. So you can see here, the trend line is that Americans are increasingly convinced that global warming is in fact harming people right here in the United States now, okay? Now, substantial increase over the years, but let's just note that as of the most recent study, it was at 49%. So that's only half of Americans. And you will also notice that big spike in the fall of 2021, which we're pretty sure is an indication of the brutal year of extreme weather that we experienced in 2021. So that's actually a point I'll come back to in a second. Right here in that Americans are also increasingly thinking that they have personally experienced these kinds of impacts, okay? And I would just say that these extreme weather events, I mean, those of us who study this issue know that you can actually see the impact, the fingerprint of climate change in events all over the country, all around the world. And it's, unfortunately, it's speeding up and intensifying, but just to say that there are still many people who don't yet really get that. And so each of those events are important teachable moments where you can help your audience or your constituents begin to connect the dots between this abstraction for many of them, global climate change, and these very specific and real harms that people are experiencing today. Next thing I wanna quickly introduce you to is a tool that we built now about 10 years ago. We kept getting, I would do a presentation and people would come up afterwards and say, hey, this is great. Thank you so much for doing this work, but I work and live in Wichita, Kansas. What can you tell me about Wichita? And the answer was I can't tell you anything about Wichita, because nobody's paid me to do studies in every part of the country. Though if anyone's got millions of dollars to do that, please give me a call. So what we instead is we help pioneer this new technique where we take all this national data and we're able to build a statistical model that allows us to very accurately estimate the level of public engagement for all 50 states, all 435 congressional districts, the largest thousand cities, 3,000 plus counties across the country. And I won't show the results here, but we've even been able to get it down to the census tract level. So basically neighborhood scale. This is unlocking all kinds of really cool stuff and here's where I get to be a nerdy scientist and geek out for a second because it helps us see things that we couldn't see before. So here's an example, Americans worry level about climate change. This is the data I was showing you before, 65% are worried nationally. Okay, that's great. But again, if you're representing a particular location, what does that mean for you? Well, let's look at what that looks like at the county level and you can immediately see darker red is more worried, a higher proportion of the population is worried. Darker blue is a smaller proportion, less than 50% of the population is worried. And you can see immediately, there's actually a lot of variation around the country. And this is like a biologist been given a microscope for the first time. It's like suddenly we could, like we thought there were creatures swimming around in the water, but we couldn't see them. Now for the first time, we're able to really dig in and see some of the differences in the variation and even the change over time that's happening at these sub-national levels. And let me just point to one example, that's one of my favorites and that's the state of Texas, okay? You know, Texas in many people's view is like the last place you could have a constructive conversation about climate change. It's an oil rich state. It's long been led by, you know, conservative and climate denying governors. Like seems like a really difficult place to even have a conversation about climate change. Turns out it's not true. If you look at those counties right there along the Mexican border, they are more worried about climate change than most of the counties in liberal California. Huh? Okay? Well, why? So this actually dovetails with other research that I'm not gonna share here, which has also punctured a longstanding common wisdom that it's only white, well-educated, upper income, latte-sipping liberals that care about climate change. Turns out that's not true either, okay? One of the groups that cares the most about climate change are Latinos. They're more convinced it's happening, human cause, they're more worried about it, they're more supportive of action. They're more willing to get personally engaged and that's the signal that you're seeing right there. And in fact, we see that showing up among groups of people of color across the country. So what does that mean for you? Okay, so here and I, big caution, because I know many of you are representing congressional districts, these are the old maps. Because the census hasn't released the geographies of the new congressional districts. So please bear that in mind. If you represent a district where the boundaries changed, it's about a third. Take this with a grain of salt and maybe look at the, these are all available online by the way, so just come visit, maybe look at the county level to better understand your area. So with that caveat, here's a question of, do you think Congress should be doing more to address global warming? And what we see is that in most congressional districts, it's actually a majority of the public that says yes. And I know that's a surprise to many members of Congress. And I will say one of my former students did a study of members of Congress and staffers and found that they consistently dramatically underestimated the level of their own constituent support for climate action. So it's just to say that's the real value of doing this kind of work is that it can inform you in a much more effective way of here's what your people are actually already supporting and to some extent to what extent they're willing to even demand more. So anyway, should Congress do more? This is an item that is still out there. There's bipartisan discussions about putting a price on carbon, especially if it's a revenue neutral tax, that in other words, you're lowering other taxes to compensate for money that you'd bring in by putting a price on carbon. And it's just to say that we see majority public support for that concept. And yes, we use the word tax in every congressional district in the country. Okay, not to say there's not a lot of politics and hard work that would have to be done to actually do any of this, not underselling any of that. But it's just to say that there's already a majority public support for that. And because we're gonna get into political differences which are real and Kerry's gonna do that next. But I also wanna emphasize that there are a few things where there is actually strong consensus in this country despite all the division. And one of those is around public support for more investments in clean energy. There's a large majority in every single part of the country including the oil patches, including the coal patches for investing in a transition to clean energy. So yes, we are divided. Yes, there are lots of very different views about some of these things. But that doesn't mean there aren't a number of areas where there's actually great agreement at least among the public. So just to end, Americans are increasingly convinced that global warming is happening, human cause and a serious problem. They increasingly understand that the impacts are here and now, not far away in time and space. So there's still more to be done there to help people understand that. And then if you are at all interested in playing with those interactive maps, they're really cool, you can zoom in and really see an area that you're interested in. Please come visit and you will see that we have lots and lots of other information freely available to you there. So with that, thank you very much. That was an awesome presentation. And while the slides with the climate maps look awesome, it's just not the same. You have to really go and manipulate them and tinker. It's amazing. It's a tremendous resource. So thanks to Anthony and everyone who contributed to making those resources available. If you'd like to go back though and revisit Anthony's slides or any of our speaker slides, just as a reminder, it'll all be available at www.esi.org along with the webcast and then also in a couple of weeks, summary notes of the entire session. Our second panelist is Carrie Funk. Carrie is Director of Science and Society Research at Pew Research Center where she leads the center's efforts to understand the implications of science for society. The center studies look at the social, ethical and policy implications of scientific developments in areas such as climate and energy, emerging issues in genetic engineering and food and space science. She's authored or co-authored a number of reports focused on public trust in science, scientific experts, science news and information. Carrie has broad expertise in public opinion research and has specialized in public understanding of science topics for almost two decades. Prior to joining Pew Research Center, she directed the Virginia Commonwealth University's Life Sciences surveys, national surveys on science and biotechnology. She began her career at CBS News in New York working on pre-election polling and analysis of exit polling. Carrie, welcome to the lectern. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. There's a thingy, okay. All right, well, good afternoon everyone. I'm delighted to be here. I think, as some of you probably know, Pew Research Center does quite a bit of polling and we really focus on the changing landscape of public opinion around climate issues. I think you'll find that our data is often consistent with the findings that you've seen from Tony and others here at the table, but each organization brings a little different lens to that portrait and that's part of why we think we'll all benefit today from having that kind of full picture. Pew Research Center has a mission to really bring high quality data to civic discourse on the issues and trends shaping societies and we're explicitly non-partisan, non-advocacy and we work really hard to make our data really speak to all points of view. So to that end, I am gonna focus on kind of how the policy landscape is changing around climate and in particular kind of address some of the ongoing challenges to policy agreement. All right, gotta do two things at once. And one of our primary challenges for bipartisan agreement has to do with the kind of gaping differences between Republicans and Democrats over policy priorities. This data actually just came out this week. It's asking people about a number of different issues and they talk about their level of priority for it for the president in Congress to address. Among Republicans and independents who lean to the GOP, climate policy is a top priority for just 13%, right? So about half of Republicans say instead that there should be no policy action on climate or that it's just not important. Instead, Republicans are much more concerned about the economy and the deficit. Among Democrats, which is the bottom row there, it's a different story, 59% of Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party call dealing with climate change a top priority. But it's one of many issues that Democrats care about and this has been the case the past several years that the challenge among Democrats is whether or not this is kind of rising to the top of a mix of issues. And in this survey, we saw that reducing healthcare costs as well as funding for Medicare kind of outranked dealing with climate change, among others. When we look at a lot of different ideas around climate policy proposals and when you do this by political party, of course there are wide differences, but you can still find areas of bipartisan agreement. A lot of times those will line up with let's say proposals that the GOP leadership put forth. So the top two rows there align in that space. Again, each row on most of these slides is gonna be a separate question. So you see the idea of planting a trillion trees to absorb carbon emissions is popular almost universally. And the second row, the idea of providing incentives for carbon capture technology also garners a majority of both Democrats and Republicans support. I would point out the obvious. This data is from May of 2022. And of course these policy proposals change over time, views change over time. And one thing we've noticed, let's say in particular around the carbon capture technology proposal is kind of a little bit of a downward trend among Republicans support. It's still seven and 10 as of this data, but that was down eight percentage points from 2020. So we do have our eye as well on kind of what's shifting there among Republicans in particular where we're seeing more change. Now I also wanna kind of underscore, I think one of the things our panel will do is underscore that these are very broad party coalitions and people are not monolithic. So one thing we wanna think about is also major differences, especially among Republicans by age or generation. We don't talk as much about that among Democrats because younger and older Democrats tend to be very closely aligned on climate policy issues. So it just doesn't percolate up. But among the GOP, we often see older Republicans offering especially strong support of things like increasing offshore oil and gas drilling, increasing coal mining. And in this data you see that as well. Republicans under age 30 in particular showing a higher level of support for pretty much all of these policy proposals. The top one there, 58% of younger Republicans saying they would support incentives for hybrid and electric vehicles. One thing we like to point out is also just compare on the right. We're not saying 58% is the same as 84%. There's still a pretty big difference between younger Republicans and Democrats, but you do see this pattern pretty often. So we have our eye on how that is shaping things as well. One of the other, I think principles behind our bipartisan challenge is it really comes from the idea that people have different things they care about as they're evaluating these climate policies. So this actually comes from our 2021 survey, but we were asking people about each of these rows and concepts and asking them to rate how important it was to them personally when they're thinking about climate policies. And the findings I think speak to some, again to the kind of the source of some of the differences between the party groups. Among Republicans, the top thing was the economy. So 65% of Republicans saying that job and economic growth was something that was very important to them as they thought about climate policies. Similar share saying that keeping consumer costs low was very important to them. And among Democrats, you see a little bit more of a mix. Around eight and 10 Democrats saying that the idea of protecting the environment for future generations is very important to them. You also see a majority around six and 10 saying helping lower income communities is very important to them as they think about climate policy proposals. And close to the bottom there, around half saying getting to net zero as quickly as possible is important. That kind of idea is especially important among liberal Democrats, a little bit stronger than among moderate Democrats. So this idea of how quickly we go to full speed on getting to net zero is important. This data comes from about a year ago. Around seven and 10 Americans said they supported the idea of the US taking steps to become carbon neutral by the year 2050. But at the same time, a similar sized majority around two thirds saying that they oppose the idea of essentially doing away with fossil fuels completely and instead supported the idea of continuing on with a mix of fossil fuel and renewable energy sources. So yeah, so I'm kind of like the cynical pessimist to Tony's optimist, okay. So this is one of the challenges to moving forward here. One of the things we know here is that there are divisions among both party coalitions around these kinds of issues. And so on the left-hand panel, what you should see there is that it's a majority of moderate Republicans who are in favor of taking steps towards becoming carbon neutral over time. But at the same time, a majority of conservative Republicans, if I said that properly, are at odds with that saying that they oppose that idea, right? On the right-hand panel, you see a similar kind of tension. Moderate Democrats, much less supportive of the idea of phasing out fossil fuels completely, support instead using a mix of fossil fuel and renewable energy sources. And then among liberal Democrats, you see a majority in support of phasing out fossil fuels completely, right? And this data has taken a year ago, this is really before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this is before some of the tension and the global energy supply and so on. But we've asked about these issues a couple of years now and certainly have our eye on this going forward and this is what we know so far. The other thing we wanna point out in terms of this idea of really doing away with fossil fuel energy sources, that also tends to connect with age or generation. We see that among both party groups, older Americans less enthusiastic about that idea, younger Americans more supportive of the idea of really eliminating fossil fuels completely. So just wanted to underscore that as well. The other thing that I think is new on the landscape of climate policy is really an increased tension between the economic impact and kind of environmental or climate impacts. And so one of the things, there's a lot of different ways to show this, this is one way, this is a kind of value proposition, Pew Research Center has tracked over time. What's happened in the recent years, I would pay attention to the middle panel here, that there's been a significant shift among Republicans and independence who lean to the GOP. They're moving away from the idea that environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost, the language of the question, and instead a majority now saying that those environmental laws and regulations are costing too many jobs and hurt the economy. This used to be an area of bipartisan agreement and it's now become an area of divide. As we're sitting here in times of economic uncertainty and potentially worse, we're expecting this kind of tension to continue for a little while longer. As I said, we have a number of ways to kind of talk about that increased economic tension over economic impacts. And so this is another one, this one comes from a survey about a year ago. We asked people to rate different effects of what they thought would happen if we had that major shift away from fossil fuel energy towards renewables. And so they, again, each row is a rating you're seeing here, the findings among Democrats or Republicans. What you can see in the first row is Democrats, 81%. Most saying that they thought air and water quality would improve if we did this, if we moved towards renewables. And I would say some Democrats saw some potential costs for the economy. We saw it separately in open-ended responses about what they thought the potential downsides would be if we made this major energy transition. And you could hear in those responses, some awareness that there might be potential economic costs but a sense of greater priorities for the environmental benefits. Among Republicans, what you see is 63% saying that this major shift would increase consumer prices. And at the top, I would point out, unclear about whether you would garner the environmental benefit. So 40% of Republicans saying that it would help air and water quality but about half saying it would make no difference. So that's kind of, I think, summarizes I think some of the key fighting points in a nutshell that people have in terms of their beliefs about what would happen. And I'm gonna hand off here. I wanna just reemphasize that what I'm trying to do is really focus on what's shifting in terms of the dynamics of opinion on climate. And certainly one of those is the focus to a transition towards renewable energies. What we're seeing in recent years, in connection with the change in presidential administrations and the shifting policy environment is really an intensified partisan division. We also see tensions by age and ideology. I think we'll keep talking about that. Again, these party coalitions are not monolithic. So we wanna be aware of that and be thinking about people and their full differences. And then I think one of the other points here is just to pay attention to this increased tension between kind of economic costs and environmental benefits. I think we heard a little bit of that this week and we're gonna keep hearing about that as we move forward. So with that, let me turn it over and look forward to your questions. Thank you for that presentation. Our third panelist is Jonathan Schult. Jonathan is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. His research explores the social psychology of public opinion with a special focus on the domains of the environment, health and US politics. His research has appeared in peer reviewed journals, including proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Natural Nature Climate Change, and the Journal of Environmental Psychology. And his writings have appeared in national publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. Post, I don't know why I said that, sorry. Jonathan, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you and give you the clicker. Looking forward to your presentation. All right, thanks so much. It's a real pleasure and an honor to be here. Today, I appreciate the introduction. At the Roper Center, where I spend a lot of time these days, we have a mission to preserve and also disseminate public opinion data on a wide variety of topics, not just the environment and climate change, but Roper has such an extensive archive that we can look to data on climate change polling to get a broad sense of the trends where the American public is on the issue. Much of what we see there is gonna echo some of the points that you've already seen, the pleasures of going a third. But one of the things I'd like to point out is just some of the very long-term trends that we have in the Roper archive, just given how much data that we house there. So here I'm showing you two decades of survey results. And what Roper's trend builder tool does is it allows users to automatically see polling results from different organizations that are combined, in this case, because they use the same survey question over the years going back to 2001. And what you see here is the question of whether or not people think global warming poses a serious imminent threat to themselves and their way of life and their lifetime. And you see that back in 2001, it was around 31% in the Gallup poll and it's risen sort of more or less steadily over time to 45% in March of 2022. And that's data from Gallup, CBS News, New York Times and other organizations. Probably one of our longest trends that we have at Roper is this question. People have been asked in the Gallup survey whether they think when it comes to the news whether global warming is generally, the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, generally correct or is it generally underestimated? And going back to 1997, you can see 27% of folks then thought that global warming seriousness was generally underestimated. And that's where we see the biggest shift of any of the categories. And that figure rose to 40% in the March 2022 poll where it was the most common response. And so I highlight these just because I think it's a pretty cool tool and it allows us to situate polling findings in their long-term historic context. But of course, if we want to understand where the American public is today on the issue, we can instead look to the hundreds of survey questions in the Roper archive from just the last couple of years alone. And there we see the clear picture emerge and you've already heard some of this already. A majority of Americans see solid evidence of global warming. They think it's human cause. They say that effects have already begun. They view it as very serious. They report being worried about global warming. That's from the Alan George Mason surveys you've heard about. And they feel the government is doing too little to address the issue. And some of those data include Pew's data as well. But the other thing you've already heard our speakers point out is that the American public is not a monolith, right? It's really important to understand the variability that exists among groups in US society. And here, I think it's important to recognize the inequities that surround climate change. We now know there's good evidence to suggest that climate change disproportionately affects some groups more than others, specifically groups that are already disadvantaged by existing social and economic systems. And we see these climate change disparities not just between countries, but including within wealthy countries such as the US where communities of color, indigenous and other socially disadvantaged groups not only are at higher risk of all kinds of environmental hazards, air quality, pollution and the like climate impacts, but also because of marginalization they are less prepared for and equipped to deal with those risks when they encounter them. And so with my collaborators, we've been trying to think a lot over the last few years what implications these inequities might have for patterns we see in public opinion polling. So take, for example, race and ethnicity. So this figure comes from a paper led by Matthew Beleu at Yale and it summarizes a decade of data from the Ellen George Mason surveys. And this is essentially people's global warming risk perceptions broken out by race and ethnicity from 2009 to 2018. And what you see is on every one of these risk perception measures compared to non-Hispanic white respondents, non-Hispanic black and Hispanic and Latino respondents report higher levels of risk perceptions. They report being more worried about global warming. They're reporting that it's already harming the US not just the US, but will harm them personally and so on. And this is a pattern that's remained largely stable over the course of that decade. Interestingly, not only are some groups reporting higher levels of global warming risk perceptions, but their views on global warming are less tied to politics. And so what we're showing you here is six global warming opinion questions by race and ethnicity, but also layering on a political ideology. And so here the darkest bars represent conservative respondents and the gray bars represent liberal respondents. And so you see the familiar partisan gap or in this case the ideological gap, but note how it's attenuated in every case among Hispanics and Latino respondents and among black respondents in the survey data. So again, suggesting that certain groups might just view the issue of global warming through a fundamentally different lens. Do these sorts of group differences show up in other surveys and more recent surveys? So here I wanna highlight an interesting survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation. This is a survey of registered voters. So it's a registered voter sample asking about what people will prioritize in their upcoming midterm 2022 election vote and asking how important, if at all, climate change will be in their decision for who to vote for. And what you're seeing here is the overall, just over 60% of registered voters said that climate change will be somewhat or very important to their vote. But how does this break down by some of the demographics that we're talking about? And so here Roper Center users can use our crosstabs feature to easily navigate to these group breakdowns. So there's a list of demographic variables on the left. If you just toggle your mouse over and click on ethnicity, you can see here that Hispanic respondents are more likely to say climate change is somewhat or very important to their vote compared to non-Hispanic respondents. Let's go to income. The figures also higher among people who earn less, people who earn under $30,000 a year are reporting higher levels of climate change issue importance for their vote. And looking at race among black registered voters over 80%. And look at the figure for very important, right? 60% are reporting that climate change will be very important to their vote in the midterm elections. And these are data from February of 2022. So just to convince you that that figure wasn't just anomalous somehow, the Kaiser Family Foundation in August of 2022 in September. So just a couple of months before the midterm elections re-ran this question with a fully dedicated sample of black registered voters and found that once again, over 80% of black registered voters said climate change is somewhat or very important to their vote. Okay, so there seem to be these group differences that are reliably detected in recent polling. One question that we've asked in our research is does the American public perceive accurately that these differences exist? If you ask them who's most concerned about climate change do they sort of get it or do they misperceive these differences? This is something Tony alluded to. And we've published some work on this including in this paper and the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that encourage you to look at if you're interested. And what we did in that work is we asked a broad sample of the US public representative probability-based sample how concern they thought various groups in US society were about the environment and about climate change. That allowed us to compare these perceived concerns to the actual self-reported concerns of members of those groups. And what you see on this graph is this pronounced tendency to sort of underestimate environmental concerns but particularly of some of the groups who are most concerned about the environment including Hispanics and Latinos and lower income Americans. So this is a kind of strange paradoxical relationship that we find in the data. And I think it's important to ask like why do we see a pattern like this? I think there are a few possibilities. One possibility is that the American public assumes that certain groups have other environmental, sorry, other concerns that sort of dominate and just can't have the luxury of worrying about the environment. There I would say that I just don't think there's very good evidence that concerns are zero sum in that sort of way. I think people are perfectly capable of being concerned about say jobs and the environment at the same time. So it doesn't seem super likely to me. I think there's another possibility that people have in mind a different set of issues when you ask them if they're concerned about the environment. And we've written a little bit about that and other work where we find that racial and ethnic minority and lower income respondents, when you ask them, they tend to include a broader group of issues and consider those as environmental as compared to white and more affluent respondents. And so things like poverty and racism count as environmental to some groups and not others. But I think we should take from a polling perspective, even one further step back and ask a fundamental, a more fundamental question, which is, do Americans even recognize that climate change impacts some groups more than others in the United States? And here I would just point out that we don't have a lot of national polling that's looked at this question in a very direct way, but there's some data out there. And so this is one study from Axios and Ipsos from September of 2021, where they asked about disparities in environmental pollution. So here was the question, which statement comes closer to your view, even if neither is exactly right? Is it that poor communities and people of color in America are more likely to suffer the consequences of pollution and environmental contamination? Or is it that all Americans suffer these things equally? A majority of respondents chose the all Americans suffer equally response. And this of course is in stark contrast to the reality. The data show us that race and class are some of the strongest risk factors when it comes to exposure to environmental hazards. And I'll just also note that we've very recently asked a very similar version of this question focusing on climate change impacts specifically and we find much the same pattern. I think it's really important to think about why this is the case, why aren't people acknowledging the disparate impacts of climate change? So just to conclude very briefly, I think the Roper Center's archive can help us in other data you've seen here, see these long-term trends in climate change opinion in the United States where we look and we see rising concern about the issue. Recent polls show clearly that a majority of Americans are highly concerned and want more government action, but at the same time when we peel away the layers, we see that some groups are more concerned than others. For example, black, Hispanic and Latino and lower income Americans are among the groups that are most concerned about the environment and climate change and polling, and yet they're perceived to be among the least concerned of all groups and figuring out why that is, I think is important. And then finally, it seems like the American public has this blind spot where they think climate change affects all of us equally in the face of evidence that that's just not the case. And I think that last point has really important implications for policies that we're seeing now that are seeking to direct federal resources to some of these frontline communities that are hardest hit by climate change. So I'll leave it there. Thank you so much. That was a fascinating presentation. Thank you very much for that. I just wanted to do a couple of quick reminders before we move on to our fourth panelist. First is all the presentation materials from our panelists will be online. We also, for those in the room, if you didn't pick up them, we have printed copies at the front, sort of the sign-in desk. So if you want a paper copy, you're welcome to take one with you. But everything will be available online at www.esa.org. Also, we are already getting questions from our online audience. We will do our best to incorporate those into the conversation. If you are in our online audience and you have a question, you can send it to us by email and the email address to use is askask.esa.org. You can also follow us online on Twitter at EESI online. If you're in the room, we'll have a roving mic and we'll have plenty of time for Q&A. And so I'm looking forward to that portion of the discussion as well. The third reminder is there are two very generous piles of donuts in the back of the room. We don't want to show our fourth panelist disrespect, so stay seated now. But I will allow people to stand up maybe at the beginning of the Q&A if you're feeling like you need a little bit of a boost and whatever we don't, whatever you don't eat, just goes right to ESI staff and I can't let that happen. So please help yourself. Our fourth panelist is Nila Banerjee. Nila is NPR's deputy senior supervising climate editor and she's tasked with working across the newsroom to lead the network's broad climate coverage. Before starting at NPR in April, 2020, Nila spent five years as senior correspondent at Inside Climate News where she led the team that revealed how Exxon had conducted its own ambitious climate research as far back as the mid 1970s. The Exxon Project spurred public interest lawsuits when more than a dozen national journalism awards and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting. For ICN, Nila was the energy and environment reporter in the Los Angeles Times's Washington, D.C. Bureau. For that, she was a reporter for the New York Times and had beats as diverse as global energy, the Iraq War, and faith in America. Nila, thanks for being with us today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Hi, everyone, thank you. I'm the amateur of the bunch because I normally do not talk about polling. I can talk to you about a whole bunch of other things. So our colleagues or our sources, really, people who do polling provide us in the media with an invaluable service. And then I'm just gonna talk to you about what we do with this and the kind of polling that maybe we might be interested in as well. So a lot of the information that you saw here, we use for stories, but we had a chance on the NPR climate team to do our own polling and ask questions that we wanted to drill down into. And the reason polling is important to us is because, especially on climate, our reporters go out... Oh, you don't... Our reporters go out into the field when disasters occur. After disasters occur, they see the toll that climate change takes on people's lives, but they wanna understand the data behind it. You don't wanna look at somebody's experience and just go by that anecdotal experience. So what do the numbers say? We now have a climate desk at NPR, but before that we were on the science desk. And the science desk during COVID works a lot with Harvard and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to do a lot of polling around COVID. Then they turned to us and they were like, how would you like to ask questions about climate? And we were like, yes, we wanna ask questions on climate. And the great thing about this was that we got to come up with those questions. So in the fall of 2021, Harvard and RWJF approached us about doing a poll. And what we wanted to learn was not if people accepted if climate change was real. That's a question we'll get into, but it was a tertiary question. What we wanted to look at was the impact on Americans of extreme weather, the impact on their finances, their health, where they chose to live. And definitely their views on climate and on certain policies. So we worked on it for nine months and we honed the questions. And I wanted to share with you what we got and what's important for us as journalists and maybe for you too as policy makers. I don't know how well you can read this, but basically we asked Americans, I think more than 2,000 Americans or like yeah, more than 2,500 in English and in Spanish, they were a representative group. And what we found out was over the last five years, more than 75% of Americans said they had been affected by extreme weather. That includes the most, the events that most people had been affected by was extreme heat, 51%, severe cold, including winter storms, which we saw play out in Texas and still there are people without power this time around in Texas, 45%, drought and hurricanes and tropical storms. And the other thing that we found was that when people talked about extreme weather, they weren't just talking about headline events or that it's just hot outside. The polling showed real harms that we as journalists need to know about and report on. And those are the harms like we talked about health, finances and so on. And the US policy makers would benefit from knowing about as well. So first off, when people get hammered by an extreme event, they see it as a problem. They're more likely to see it as a problem. So you'll see here the percentage of people who reported thinking of extreme weather as a crisis or a major problem. If they had experienced it, they're much more willing to put their experiences in those categories as opposed to people who hadn't experienced it. And I think why this is telling is that, as climate change boosts extreme weather, there are gonna be more people who experience these events and who are going to see climate change and extreme weather as a crisis or problem. The other thing was that once, if you see it as an extreme event, how does that play out in your own life? And one of the things we discovered was that floods, wildfires and hurricanes empty people's bank accounts. The survey showed us how financially devastating extreme weather events can be for families. And you see, this is the possibility that you see on a screen, and this is the kind of thing that grabs headlines. But we also talked about things that, and people talked about things that didn't grab headlines. One thing I will say about the study that was very useful to us as journalists is that at the end of the poll, we asked people if they wanted to be interviewed by NPR journalists and they said yes, and those people appeared in our stories about this. That's because there can be even relatively common weather like a severe thunderstorm or high tide flooding that can be extremely expensive. I mean, if you've ever had a roof damaged or your basement flooded, it can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to fix or replace. So in most cases, what we found out was that insurance and government assistance are inadequate. About 17% of those affected by extreme weather said they'd experience serious financial problems. So think about that. That's like one in five people who've experienced extreme weather and that could represent tens of millions of households in the country, tens of millions of people that your offices represent. And most families end up paying for the cost of disasters themselves, the survey shows. Among those who experienced serious property damage or financial problems after a disaster, more than 70% said they were either uninsured or underinsured. So that means the money they got from their insurance company didn't cover most of their major repair costs. And this is like one of those weird things where the reporter who worked on this has been working a lot on how much aid people get from disasters and she's like, she doesn't live in a flood zone, but she's like, I just bought flood insurance. And so I am now looking at flood insurance and also my, seriously, like you learn these things because you're a reporter on them and you hope that other people learn it too. But one of the things is that people are terribly uninsured because they're not expecting climate disasters to hit them. And it could be really that terrible thunderstorm that all of a sudden floods your basement, right? So there's just things to think about. And what we also saw getting back to issues of equity and resources as the people who statistically have the fewest resources in our country are getting hit the hardest. The polls showed that Native Americans who experience extreme weather are much more likely to have long lasting financial problems as a result compared to other racial and ethnic groups. Among the people we polled, almost half of them who were Native American and were affected by extreme weather said their household faced serious financial problems as a consequence. That's four times the rate of white people. Black people who experience extreme weather experienced financial hardship at three times the rate of white people. And Latinos at more than twice the rate of white people. So just to underscore what other people are saying, it doesn't hit people equally. The other really compelling thing that the poll showed us was the impact extreme weather has on the health of Americans. And we carved this out as health but when you think about the way our healthcare systems is set up, it's also a financial problem, right? One of four respondents said that they suffered serious health issues. We did not ask for how long. But when you think about it, there's mold from flooding or hurricanes, wildfire smoke, stress, interruptions in care for illnesses like kidney disease or cancer if you've been displaced from your home. And certainly the stress of facing financial hardship could be a health issue as well. The biggest single health impact, of course, is heat. And it's not just that it makes you miserable but that it can cause lasting damage to your body like your kidneys, for example, even if it doesn't kill you. That terrible heat dome that we had in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago, climate scientists have shown that it was much more likely because of climate change. So this story about, this is actually a story that was about air conditioning and how air conditioning is a health issue because you're getting heat waves in parts of the country and parts of the world that aren't used to heat waves. So people don't have air conditioning in their homes. And so given the hazards and the risks and really the pain that people are facing from extreme weather, it led us to ask, like everybody else, do people want the government to act to change this? And if so, how? So people who experience extreme weather are much more willing than those who haven't yet to support policies that both help communities adapt to climate change and cut the emissions driving climate change. So this slide is about adapting to extreme weather. People have been through it and they know what needs to be done, like making the electricity grid stronger, sort of protecting your community through adaptation processes, but they also support all sorts of steps to reduce emissions. Maybe if you've been hit hard by extreme weather, you start paying more attention to what climate change is about, to what can be done about it. So I think what I wanted to kind of conclude with was, what does this mean for the people in this room? For journalists, for policy makers? And we asked people about voting as well and it showed that at least for the midterms that, again, this was before the war in Ukraine that people considered this a major issue now, is it a major issue compared to the economy or other things, it's unclear. But as more Americans endure the harshness of extreme weather, they seem to be looking for solutions and protections bigger than what they can do on their own and that has consequences for people in elected office. And I will conclude with that and I guess we can move on to questions, thank you. All right, got some questions. Okay, great, okay. So yes, let's move into the questions and thank you very much to our panelists for teeing up, I think what will be a really interesting discussion. Neela just mentioned extreme heat, we actually did a briefing about extreme heat last year and so if you wanna go back and watch that, we had some really incredible experts talking about how extreme heat affects people and it's pretty nasty stuff actually, it's not just a hot day, it's much, much worse than that. So encourage everyone to do that if you'd like. Let's move into questions. One of my colleagues has a roving microphone. That person is Tyler, hello Tyler, Tyler's our policy intern, hello Tyler. Tyler, we've got a question right up here in the front so why don't we come up and we'll do this first and then I have a couple in my back pocket too that we can ask. Hi, so my name is Leo, I work for a congressional congressman and one of the questions I had is that I see, you've talked about the clear takeaway I have is that people care about climate a lot more than we think and I was curious, I got that part. No, what I was really curious about is that I was curious, a lot of people are saying it's very important to them and I was curious if you've done any research into really how much is it specifically driving someone's vote because one of the groups that you said it was the most important too was Latinos and one of the, particularly at the southern border and I noticed it's one of those areas that's actually shifted back from Democrats to Republicans a bit and so I was hoping somebody could delve a little bit deeper into that. Well, I'll take a first step at that. So one of the things that we've been tracking over the years is how important is it as a voting issue and I would say that here's where politics or political party becomes really important. So basically we see that as a voting priority it is sort among Democrats and in particular among liberal Democrats so essentially if I can call it that the base of the Democratic Party which because of the makeup and the structure of American politics so winner take all system with primaries being critical that's actually had huge consequences in that one of our two major political parties through the primary process because it's become so important to those primary voters that it has had cascading effects on candidates and I'll just take 2020 presidential election all 357 people who ran for the Democratic nomination it wasn't really that many but it felt like it all of them had climate plans which you did not see in prior national elections not among Democrats and also I will point out the president well now president Biden then as candidate Biden does something very unusual when he wins the nomination. His climate plan gets stronger from being a primary candidate to being a general candidate the usual strategy is that you run to your base in the primaries and then you run to the center to try to pick up the three people who are still undecided voters in the general he does the opposite now I have no inside knowledge but that's because I believe is because increasingly these elections are also about mobilizing your own voters to show up at the polls and what we know is that people that he really needed to show up were young people, people of color and women in the suburbs all of them happened to care about climate change so I suspect that that was at least part of the motivation so it's just to say that when you really start to break it down by electoral politics is that I think that fact that this issue has taken off especially within the base of the Democratic Party is having national political consequences which I think the IRA is one outcome but I'm sure panelists have other thoughts yeah, feel free to speak up if anyone has a response to add to Anthony's please. We don't want to take all our time on this one but I would say politics has also changed the nature of these party coalitions has changed part of it because of our 20 years of polarization which got wider and wider over all sorts of issues so how you maneuver within these parties is a little different than it used to be you don't need to move to the center because you are, we are more divided right the typical Republican is further apart from the typical Democrat now and certainly the Biden administration has gotten a lot of pressure on the left are you doing enough, right? I would just underscore our data definitely is supportive of this idea that Latinos Hispanics are a little different a little more likely to say that they care about climate issues they just stand out a little bit so no matter kind of how you push on it that seems to be real and it's important to keep in mind. Thank you. That was a good question. Tyler we've got a couple of questions up here in the middle sort of Anna's left. Can you hear me? Yeah, okay. Thank you all so much. I think in three of the presentations there was a dramatic drop and I believe it was believe in global warming or climate change in 2010 so I'm just curious if you have narrative or data on what the heck was going on in 2010 that drove that big drop. So what happened in 2010 was that there was a leak of emails from climate scientists that were taken out of context and stolen and they were and nobody to this day knows where it came from and they were packaged by people who were against the mainstream science of climate change as a climate gate because everything is some kind of gate and basically it was right when the Copenhagen climate accords were occurring. So a lot of the attention of the world was and the media was on climate change and climate discussions. So the stolen emails that were leaked were well timed and there were excerpts that if you take out of context and put it in a certain narrative mean certain things that basically the scientists cooked the data. There has been review after review after review of the actual data and the emails to show that nothing untoward happened that all of this was peer reviewed research but people got the top line. As a lot of you know, the lie spreads more quickly than the correction and that's what happened and now the people are feeling climate on their own skins literally on their own skins. That's what I think is starting to change. A lot of people have forgotten it. Like you didn't know it, right? And so that's why. I would just add an extra context to that is remember Obama was president and it's also important to remember that in that 2008 election the candidate of the Republican Party was Senator John McCain for years one of the primary champions of climate action in the United States. And as part of his platform and the Republican national platform was that climate change was real, it was human caused, it was a serious problem and we were gonna solve it with our conservative principles. That's where we were in 2000. It was in fact, there was so much basic agreement between Obama and McCain that they didn't even argue about it over during the campaign because they basically had the same view. And Obama comes to office. He decides to promote a Republican idea as a policy called cap and trade. It was a Republican idea. Born in the Reagan administration implemented by George Bush Sr. to great effect to dealing with acid rain. I said, okay, we wanna be a bipartisan, let's use a Republican idea not I think expecting that expect the Republican Party decided at that moment to basically demonize one of their own best ideas. And so you see this incredible rightward shift within the Republican Party at that time which goes from saying in 18 months that climate change is a serious problem that we're gonna address. So literally 18 months later, it's a very common talking point to say climate change is a hoax. And that, we call that political elite cues when political, with a fancy way of saying that when leaders lead followers follow. So when political leaders start saying climate change is a hoax then many lay Republicans heard that message and were like, oh, well then I think this is a problem. So that's a big part of why that drop happens in that time period. Thank you. Nila, did you have anything you wanted to add? Okay, great, thanks. And I think you had a question as well. Yeah, hi, my name is Craig Schiller. I'm the executive director of a nonprofit that works with climate change and health. And so I'm gonna go a little bit of tangent but the theme of the question will be what else can we do in the NGO space? But Kira, you just said that it's a different political climate and I know in this context we're trying to solve how this works but you all just spent a lot of time talking about this is increasingly wearing the public's mind, a top issue in many parts of the country in more parts of the country than we assumed. So we haven't solved that. So I'm just curious from like another big issue and we're going back to like big tobacco. There's a lot of similarities, right? Big tobacco, big oil, change the perception that we've had in this country. We took away some freedoms but we did it collectively. We added taxes to a product. We banned it in certain areas. We changed the narrative of how we view tobacco. There's a lot of parallels there which I think we could or should be doing today. So my first question is like, we just passed that point in time. The political climate's changed. We'll never have that collective action again. And if that's true, well then what can we do as the nonprofit space or in the private sector to help, to help maybe communicate this more or to help take action when the politics can't? Sorry, that was a lot, but please go ahead. I'm gonna get you started. Well, I don't know if this is gonna be popular or not but can we just mention that we went through a coronavirus outbreak because we spent a lot of time worrying over does that suck all the energy out of action around climate and it didn't really take away from people's expression that it was important but certainly among government workers legislators, it took a little of the urgency out, I think. And so we are just recovering from that. I think there are opportunities going forward as we come to a different space in that. I think, look, this is not easy, okay? Because of these fundamental changes that she's talking about. I mean, it's just, it's not easy. I would say that one area though that we just need to get to is to ultimately try as much as we can to depoliticize. And fundamentally, I'll just state this, the climate system doesn't care whether you're a Democrat or Republican. It's not like the droughts are only harming Democratic farmers and ranchers and not Republican ones. It's not like the hurricanes only take out the homes of liberals and not conservatives. Like the climate system does not care, okay? But we should because ultimately we have to respond. We can't do this as individuals. We have to do this as communities, as cities, as states, as the nation and ultimately as the world. So I would just say that there are a number of areas that don't have to inherently be politicized. Extreme weather is real world experience. Like you get hit upside the head with a two by four a couple times and you start going, oh, I've seen that coming before. And I don't wanna do that again, okay? And I think Nila in that research and ours also shows the exact same thing. These are opportunities to help people understand this in a different way. I think health is actually one of the other ones. And we've seen this for 15 years since we first started doing this, is that when you frame the issue about the health consequences, not just of the impacts of climate change, but of the burning of the fossil fuels in the first place, that people get that. Like I know I'm breaking news here, but Republicans kids have asthma too, okay? So I'm just saying that there are ways that we can talk about this that are not already preloaded with I hate you just because you're part of the other, the blue team and the red team, okay? So we just, we have to get there. I'm not saying it's easy and I have no simple solution, but I do think that there are opportunities to change the conversation. So I have like news and bad news on that front from what we've seen. I mean, I think, you know, after having like led the Exxon project, people like that, people like to compare to tobacco a lot. And you know, I was like, I know in grade school when that happened. So I don't really have any say about that. But to me, the big difference between tobacco and fossil fuels is like, you can choose not to smoke. And you know, it's like no fun if you're a smoker, but it's not gonna really like change anything, right? I mean, it'll make your health better. But like, but using a particular fuel, you know, if you don't already own a hybrid vehicle or an electric vehicle, you can't, you can't go out and make your own car that runs on something that is not a fossil fuel. So it is a systemic change that I think really freaks people out. I think you're right. The political, you know, the, there's such an enormous political divide and the misinformation that has made this a touchstone issue that has made climate denial a touchstone issue for a lot of people I don't think existed to this extent during the era of examining big tobacco. You know, it's a mixed bag when extreme weather hits people whose political identity is tied to denying mainstream science on climate change, because we've been out in the field, like it was interesting. We, you know, when I was an inside climate, we went out to Paradise, California after the campfire, went to the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael. And then when we were in the Florida Panhandle and I guess it was like February of 2019, that enormous sort of flooding occurred in Nebraska and South Dakota and IOMs or that just like, you know, just ripped everything apart. So we actually ended up in very red parts of the country. And again, this is anecdotal, but we talked to, you know, a lot of people like in these three places all told we probably talked about 75 people. And one of the interesting things is that it's very, like it's become such a part of some people's identities, it's very hard to kind of to separate, for them to say that I'm a conservative, I'm a Republican, but climate change is real because I just went through it. They definitely see that something terrible has happened, but they feel like it's part of the natural process. So, and I think a lot of that is on us in the media, right? Like, you know, like we, other media in New York times, places like that, routinely we ask whether something has the fingerprints of climate change on it. Now, part of the problem is the way science operates, like, you know, you have like some kind of, you know, terrible rainstorm or like the arctic blast we had. And it's like, you know, people are like, what's the role of climate change place? We're like, wait for the scientists, you know, that'll come in a few months and people want to know at that moment. There are other things that are better known, right? So, there's that lag, but at least some of us try, a lot of other media, including television, frankly, like they don't make those connections. So I think a lot of it is that people are suffering, but they don't understand where that's suffered. Like, why is it happening so often, right? Like, why is my livestock dying? Why is it so hard for me to work outside? Like, why can't I get landscapers to work in my business in Colorado, you know? And I think that that's really on us. And we haven't, you know, as a profession, we're better than maybe we were 10 years ago, but we're not nowhere near where we need to be just to make that connection routinely so that people understand it. Yeah, and just to add to that briefly is that it's not enough to experience an extreme event that has to be interpreted, okay? Most people are not sitting at home going, oh my God, the heat wave happened. I bet that has something to do with climate change. I mean, that's not something that people normally do. And so that's why it is so important for leaders, media leaders, business leaders, political leaders, leaders to help people connect the dots, okay? That's all it is, it's connecting the dots. Like, climate change is in a cardboard box in the upper back corner of the attic. And then these extreme events happen and there's nothing automatic that says people say, oh, I gotta go to the climate change box to understand what's going on here. So, but that's changing, that is changing. The last thing just to point out though is that the media is a misnomer too. The media is not a single entity by any stretch of the imagination. And we all know how fragmented it is and how political the media itself is. And so what we see very clearly in our work is that you will see dramatically different reactions and interpretations event depending on which channel you happen to pay attention to. So that's part of the landscape. Yeah, I mean, media, the word itself is plural. So, I see you back there and I promise we will get to you but I got a good question from our online audience that I think follows. So I'm gonna ask this one and then we'll get right to you. And this question is how important is it to incorporate or tell stories of optimism or solutions in climate coverage? And Anthony you were just speaking a little bit about framing and I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts about sort of the balance that whether it's in how a question is framed or how a story is covered. This question also asks about sort of the anxiety element of it which I think came up in one or two questions that were highlighted on the slides and then it ends with a question about whether or not sort of fear is an actual motivator. But, Neela, I'm making most direct eye contact with you. So if you would like to start and then we can go down the line if anyone would like to comment. It is my job. So NPR with, you know, now that we have a climate desk we have hired a climate solutions reporter and what we wanna do is bring a kind of sophisticated understanding of climate solutions. We don't wanna be Pollyanna. We don't wanna give people false hope but we also want people to understand that there are ways to cope and then there are also things that like when people write about problems, for example, a lot of our reporters write about a problem but they also write about a solution that's part of the problem. So we have a reporter who's done excellent work about how much money FEMA gives out after disasters and the fact that if you're a person of color, if you're poor, the data show that you're gonna get less money, you're gonna get less help than if you are well to do and that's just the way FEMA was set up 65 years ago. And so what she talks about are changes that could occur, right? And so there's like a blueprint in many problems and it's a matter and especially for folks who are policymakers, it's a matter of political will, right? And political action around it to get things done. And the good thing is like because of journalism, journalists coverage of things like inequities in FEMA help, for example, there is action in FEMA right now. And so that's good to see. One of the things though is I as a journalist did not know this until recently but the notion of our personal carbon footprints is actually something that was invented by the fossil fuel industry so that it takes the responsibility off the people who contribute the most pollution to climate change and puts it on us. At the same time, we all wanna feel like, if you accept that climate change is real, you wanna play your part, you wanna be like a responsible resident of planet earth. So we try to balance those two. Like we did a story about climate solutions where if you wanted to do things, there are things that you could do in your own life but like our reporter said, but also like go to meetings of your local public utilities council if you want to, you can do it online and you can demand that they have more renewables or you can hold people to account, you can elect people to office regardless of your party who are gonna do things on climate change. So, what we are trying to do is not to make people feel like stop eating meat or whatever and everything will be okay, that's not the way it works. And it's not all on you but there are approaches that can be taken and also if you're talking about a problem, often talk about the solutions and why those steps have not been taken. Yeah, Jonathan, Carrie, Anthony, please feel free to go ahead. Yeah, let me add to that. Yeah, from a communication perspective, often we're asked what are the sort of magic words that you would say to suddenly get people to motivate, get them to take climate action and people are sometimes disappointed when I honestly tell them like, I don't think we have those magic words. Like if we did, certainly the planet would be- Except please. Yeah. And except please. But I think there's sort of decade of communication theory and research that suggests that when it comes to using sort of emotions to communicate on environmental issues, such as climate change, that it's really important whether it's fear or increasingly there's attention paid to hope, that it's super important not to forget that solutions part. It's important to tell people what they can do in their own lives with that hope or fear that they might be experiencing either from your communication, your message or that they just are feeling in the moment because I would just point out that hope also has to be thought of in a complex way, right? I mean, it's possible you could make people feel really hopeful and they would walk away feeling that, okay, they're all good. They don't have to do anything, right? And that's not really what people end up. So I think it's important to always be clear about what people can do in their lives to make a difference. Kerry, do you have a comment? Please go ahead. Sure, I mean, it's a great question and I just agree with everyone's comments here. You know, we have registered anxiety among at least a segment of the population and so you need to have a path forward. We didn't get into pessimism today but there is also a lot of pessimism that we can't do anything about this and that is of course not gonna be a motivator for change. So that's why we need these kind of, you gotta see a path forward in ways to make it happen, to help motivate that. Yeah, I think everything that my colleagues here have said I would just say that one of the other ways you can build that sense of what's called efficacy. It's not enough to know that there's a problem but you wanna know what can we do about it is through storytelling, through role modeling, through pointing to and lifting up the voices of people who are actually taking action or the new solar farm that's being built in this district or this person who just got a job that they didn't have before or this family who've just cut their energy bills by 80% because they no longer are relying on this other, this former system. Those stories are hugely important because they allow people to then hear from people who look like them, dress like them, sound like them, share the same values, come from their communities and suddenly they go, oh, I could do that too. So it's just to say that I would say for leaders, for those of you who have members, it's not just what the leader says and I know that's what all members of Congress wanna do is to be able to go and put the attention on themselves and say, hey, I brought you all this stuff. I think actually some of the most powerful things that they can do is actually go to the community and put a spotlight and amplify the stories of the people who are taking the actions that we all need to take. And that's not just the individual household behavior, as important as that is, it's also the actions to change our systems. Neela, what you said reminded me, I got asked in an interview last year about reducing my carbon footprint from flying and what I can do. And I'm like, well, I don't build the plane, fuel the plane or fly the plane. So not a whole lot. It's not really up to me and it's true, right? It's definitely that tendency. I promised our friend that we would definitely get to his question. So please feel free to ask it. Hello, my name is Ian. I am an intern with Senator Cortez Masto and I'm looking at Dr. Funk's slide right now of the different priorities that Republicans and Democrats have. And I think it's interesting that the only two points where Republicans are, a larger number than Democrats, are increasing job and economic growth and keeping consumer costs low. And it seems that for any project that is going to push economic prosperity, it always comes to the detriment of another group, whether that's people, land, wildlife. Just a few days ago, a federal court in Nevada allowed this Lithium project to go forward to the detriment of an indigenous community in Nevada. And so my question is, do you think that these concepts of environmental justice and economic prosperity can ever coexist or is it always going to be either one or the other and these two groups seemingly fighting against one another? Thanks so much. Again, I'll get it started. I mean, yes, I mean, I think it's possible, right? When we try to use polling to get people to capture people's sense of these injustices is actually kind of tricky. And so it's perhaps, it's where you do need to talk to people on the ground or you need to do this kind of more systematic analysis of what's happening across communities. That's helpful. I think the way in which people use these words maybe is a little bit different. When people talk about the importance of the economy or consumer costs, they're just thinking about my pocketbook or the average American, they're not thinking about these other kind of implications for groups in society or let's say someone's land or whatever it is. So it's a little bit tricky. We see it the most in terms of the ways in which we're sorted into neighborhoods and those neighborhoods, right? Some of which have kind of a whole series of environmental challenges and poor air and water quality and all sorts of other problems, right? So that is a way you can get at it in terms of kind of thinking about what's the impact on communities. See who else wants to talk. So we've been thinking about this a lot at NPR and I think a lot of media have been thinking about this too. There's been a lot of excellent coverage. I think the New York Times did a series last year about the race for critical minerals to build technology that's part of decarbonization, batteries and stuff like that. And they made a really fair point that are we gonna extract these minerals and repeat the same patterns of environmental degradation and exploitation of local and indigenous populations that say coal and fossil fuel extraction did. And I think these are the good thing about this is that people are discussing this like it is at the forefront and people are thinking about this, right? The other good thing about this too, I mean, when you think about it like a lot of this technology has been bubbling along but it's only been recently that there's like a huge push to on battery technology being part of people's lives, cars, distributed generation, all of that. And because these problems, sorry because these problems are coming up, we get inundated with peer-reviewed research all the time. And we know that there are people who are trying to find, for example, battery technology that does not rely on critical minerals, right? So you don't have to mine somebody's land. So I think, I don't think that it needs to be either or the question is how does it, how do we get out of that particular paradigm? And I do wanna say one thing. I feel like it's been entirely problematic for a lot of years that there's this dichotomy that's been put out there that it's a choice between economic opportunity and climate change. That is not the choice. And that is some kind of like false dichotomy that we are buying into, including in the media, right? We, you know, NOAA comes out every year to talk about the billions of dollars of economic activity of people's homes that are lost to extreme weather events, right? And somehow like nobody talks about that as some kind of economic loss or economic harm from ignoring climate change. So it's not like, well, if we ignore climate change, our economy will be peachy. That's not the case. If we ignore climate change, it's hammering all sorts of parts of the country. The question is, who is suffering, right? And it's your family and your neighbors and your communities that are suffering and who's not, like where are the externalities? So that narrative of like economic opportunity, like we have to somehow give up economic opportunity if we address climate change, I would flip that and say that, you know, what the data show is that economic harm occurs when we ignore climate change. And not just in this country, like, you know, we have a reporter who covers climate corporations. I mean, did you guys notice that like rivers were drying up in, you know, China in Germany over the summer. So like if you're trying to move goods down those rivers, you can't. So it doesn't need to be like a warehouse getting destroyed by a wildfire. All of these things are happening to the economy because of climate change. But we still talk in these ways where it's like a choice between either economic goods or addressing climate change. When in fact, addressing climate change means protecting vast parts of our economy from like small business, regular people to major corporations. And just to add to that, so this is one of the oldest polling questions. Which do you prefer, protecting the environment even if it harms the economy and jobs? Please stop asking that question. I'm getting there. Or do you want to grow the economy even if it harms the environment? I've always hated this question because it's a false choice. It's an either or. It's a zero sum thinking. So we've changed the question for years now and asked, do you think taking action on the environment or climate change or clean it? We've asked in multiple ways. Let's take climate change. Do you think taking action to address climate change will harm the economy and cost jobs, have no effect on the economy or jobs, or actually grow the economy and improve jobs? And what we find is that an overwhelming majority of Americans say it will either have no impact or for the plurality, the biggest single answer is that it's actually going to grow the economy and improve jobs. So it's not just the costs that we're often ignoring. It's the benefits. This is going to be the biggest economic opportunity the world has ever seen. It's going to put this and the computer, this is tiny compared to the transition, okay? There are trillions of dollars at stake over who's going to win this clean energy transition. And believe me, other countries are building out and getting ready to try to win that. So that's ultimately one of the major questions as well. Who's going to make that money, okay? So yes, all these costs that we're not paying attention to, but also where's the money going to get made? And where's the US in that? That was a good question. Thank you. We've blown past time. So what's another couple of minutes? Tyler, we had a question up here. We're going to do one more. Barry Politely caught my attention. I was at an event this morning and there was an EPA official and she cited a statistic since the Clean Air Act was enacted. The affected pollutants have been reduced by 80% and the US economy has grown by 216 times. That's pretty tremendous by Steve. Please go ahead and then we'll wrap up. Yeah, my question is pretty short. I'm Amy from the embassy of Japan, nuclear. So my general understanding is that the Americans are okay about nuclear, pretty much non-issue. That's my understanding. But is there any insight? How do they perceive nuclear, coming up next generation nuclear technology? Is there any insights or data point that you can share with us? So yeah, we've been studying that for a long time. It's changing. So actually, Americans have been very anti-nuclear for quite a while. For everything from Three Mile Island to Chernobyl to most recently Fukushima. Like they see these events and they're just like that is not a safe technology. They still see nuclear as a particularly dangerous and dirty, if I can use that word, technology. I think that is beginning to change. One, because these events, these big tentpole events are more distant in the rearview mirror and so people don't have the same visceral reaction as they used to. The other is I think is some really interesting things that is done within the environmental community. I mean, it used to be that pretty much all of our mentalists were anti-nuclear. Then when climate change came on the stage, a lot of environmentalists were like, oh, well, I need to rethink this because it's like it's a major source of relatively carbon-free energy. So I would say that there's been a huge shift certainly within the environmental community in the past 10 years on the issue. And we're seeing growing support, which does not mean though that there's like strong, like Americans are like, gung-ho, let's go nuclear. And I will also say it's the one energy source that we see the biggest discrepancy of NIMBYism, not in my backyard, which is that Americans roughly half say, yes, we ought to have more nuclear in the United States, but much fewer say, I want one in my backyard. Yeah, great. Thank you, I think that was well worth it. So thanks for the question. Anthony interjected a little earlier and said there's a magic word and said please. I would also say that there are two more, thank and you. So please thank our tremendous panelists for their amazing presentations today. This is a really great discussion. My colleague, Dan O, is gonna plug in the thing that has some important stuff. While he's doing that, I'd also like to remind everybody about the donuts. I'd like to once again thank Representative Tonko and Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, especially David for all of his help today securing this room. Thank you so much for your sponsorship. I'd like to thank Dan O, like to thank Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, Savannah, Molly, as well as Tyler, our roving microphone wrangler, and Madeline and Lindley, who are interns. Also like to thank Curtis in the back of the room for helping us bring this briefing today to our online audience. This was really, really an interesting discussion. This on the screen here is a link to a survey. We read every response if you have two minutes to share with us. Your thoughts about today, if you had any technical problems, if there are any audio problems, if you have ideas, things like that, we'd really appreciate you taking a moment to share those with us. We will be back here in two weeks for non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, not at same bat time, but not same bat channel. We'll be in a different room, so make sure that you check our website and RSVP for that. And then we'll be two weeks after that back up here to talk about implementing the IIJA and IRA. And with that, thanks everybody for letting us go about seven minutes over, but I think it was worth it and I hope everyone has a great rest of your Thursday. Thank you. Thank you.