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.”
A White House spokesperson did not answer questions as to the unpopularity of the administration’s environmental policies, instead claiming that Trump had “restored common sense to America’s energy and sustainability policies”.
“Once again, America is leading an era of energy abundance and countries are lining up to partner with the US for deals to import US energy,” she said.
“President Trump has set a strong example for the rest of the world by reversing course on Joe Biden’s green energy scam and is unleashing our natural resources to strengthen our grid stability and lower energy costs for American families and businesses.”
The US, unlike most other industrialized countries, remains highly polarized in its consideration of the climate crisis. While the Yale poll found that 59% of voters would prefer to back a candidate who supports action on climate, this number is skewed by the overwhelming majority of Democrats who want this.
Just 21% of conservative Republicans, by contrast, want to support a climate hawk candidate, with 37% wanting the complete opposite.
“Looking at the long-term trajectory, there’s been a huge increase in the proportion of Americans who think climate change should be a priority for the president and Congress,” said Leiserowitz. “But with Republicans, this number has basically been flat the whole time. It hasn’t changed much.”