American Public Opinion on Climate Change

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

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

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

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

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

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