Above, good overview and pep talk from Jigar Shah, who knows whereof he speaks on clean energy, and what we need going forward. Despite the MAGA blowback, renewables are still the vast majority of new energy, riding a wave of popular support, and beating fossil fuels on Wall Street.
Most Americans now connect the worsening climate crisis with their cost of living pressures, with clear majorities also disagreeing with moves by the Trump administration to gut climate research and halt windfarms, new polling has found.
About 65% of registered voters in the US think that global heating is affecting the cost of living, according to the polling by Yale University.
Extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves, exacerbated by the climate crisis, are taking a toll on food production, with recent spikes in the cost of coffee and chocolate blamed by experts, at least in part, on global heating.
Meanwhile, many Americans have faced rising home electricity costs and steep increases in home insurance premiums, with both of these areas also influenced by the climate crisis and the Trump administration’s decision to choke off solar and wind power, often the cheapest source of energy.
There has also been a broad backlash in many communities against new datacenters, which have been championed by the administration and the tech industry for advancing artificial intelligence but attacked by critics for causing planet-heating emissions and raising power bills.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said that despite focus on the climate crisis drifting away among many politicians and activists, many Americans are grasping the connection between rising temperatures and rising bills.
“I find it stunning that even some people in the climate community say that we should stop talking about the climate because there’s a cost-of-living crisis going on,” he said.
“It’s a fundamental error to treat these issues as mutually exclusive – climate solutions are also cost-of-living solutions. Most of the elite discourse is very bad at estimating or understanding levels of public concern, and this is a good example of this.”
In an era where concerns about immigration, crime and inflation appear to dominate, Leiserowitz said that the climate crisis can still motivate voters if handled correctly.
“If your kid has asthma, you should care about climate change. If you want to make money, you should care about climate change. If you like chocolate, you should care about climate change,” he said. “If we are stuck talking about this from just a scientific or political standpoint, that’s an incredibly narrow set of stories to tell, when this is the biggest story on the planet.”
Since taking office, the Trump administration has set about dismantling key environmental rules, firing federal scientists, removing public information on the climate crisis and explicitly backing the fossil fuel industry over cleaner forms of energy. The president has said that renewables are a “con job” and a “scam” and has attempted to ban certain solar and wind farms.
This agenda is deeply unpopular with a clear majority of Americans, the Yale polling suggests, with nearly eight in 10 registered voters opposing restrictions on climate information and research, while the same proportion of voters reject Trump’s demand that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) be eliminated. A further 65% of voters disagree with Trump’s move to block new offshore windfarms.
“This sort of thing keeps happening – the EPA’s website has been scrubbed of climate information and the administration wants to kill off one of the world’s most pre-eminent climate research organizations for ideological reasons,” said Leiserowitz.
“The majority of people think this doesn’t make sense. The last election clearly wasn’t a referendum on climate change – there was very little discussion on it – and yet the administration is treating it as though it was. There was no mandate to do all of this. This is why all the polls show Trump is deeply underwater on all of these issues.”
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication:
Global Warming as a Voting Issue
● 59% of registered voters would prefer to vote for a candidate for public office who supports action on global warming.
● 41% say they would like to hear from political candidates about efforts to reduce global warming more often.
● 28% say they will only vote for a congressional candidate who supports increasing the use of renewable energy and 26% say they will only vote for a candidate who supports decreasing the use of fossil fuels.
● 35% say global warming will be a “very important” issue to them in deciding who they will vote for in the 2026 congressional election.
Eliminating Programs Related to Global Warming
● 79% of registered voters oppose eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
● 77% oppose ordering all federal agencies to stop providing information about global warming to thepublic.
● 77% oppose ordering all federal agencies to stop doing research on global warming.
● 65% oppose prohibiting construction of new offshore wind farms.
The Paris Climate Agreement
● 77% of registered voters support U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Agreement.
● 64% oppose President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement.Energy Production and Global Warming as Economic Issues
● 49% of registered voters think policies that promote clean energy will improve economic growth and provide new jobs, while 27% think such policies will reduce economic growth and cost jobs.
● 65% think global warming is affecting the cost of living in the United States