Americans have heard little about the Biden administration’s climate efforts, but the administration’s climate and environmental policies are popular when people learn about them. Seven in ten Americans (70%) support the U.S. “taking steps to try to slow or stop the rate of climate change,” including nine in ten Democrats (91%), two-thirds of independents (68%), and around half of Republicans (48%). 53% of Americans support policies that would encourage the production of more electric or hybrid vehicles and fewer gas-powered vehicles in the U.S.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls - including new polling on extreme weather, climate change, and plastic pollution.

HEADLINES

Americans who report experiences with extreme weather are more likely to support pro-climate policies. 62% of Americans support tax credits for families who install rooftop solar or battery storage in their homes. 62% of Americans support increasing investment in energy-efficient forms of public transportation. 60% of Americans support grants to communities to protect them from the impacts of climate change, including drought, heat, and extreme weather. 57% of Americans support forgivable loans for rural communities to improve their energy efficiency.

This resource includes very comprehensive visual descriptions of climate science and clean energy. Nat Bullard’s annual presentation covers the state of decarbonization told with climate, capital markets, technology, and sector data. A coherent view of the future begins with the clearest possible view of the present. This webpage includes 2024 and 2023 presentations.

Americans are widely concerned about aging and unreliable electric grid infrastructure. Grid reliability, along with health and jobs, is a key argument in favor of transitioning to clean energy.

This platform offers interactive maps, science, historical context, and stories to help us all envision a range of climate futures. This is an effort to enable and encourage people to have practical conversations and make informed decisions about the future in a changing climate. We seek to build bridges between cultures, organizations, technology, design, and science. This freely accessible platform was created so that everyone, everywhere in the world, can do the same.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released on Tuesday by the Biden administration, is unique for its focus on the present. Like previous versions, it looks at how rising temperatures will change the United States in decades to come, but it also makes clear that the rising seas, major hurricanes, and other disastrous consequences of climate change predicted in prior reports have begun to arrive. The effects are felt in every region. The report outlines steps every level of government can take to combat the climate crisis. And it takes stock of progress that has been made over the past four years. Despite this progress, climate impacts — oppressive heat domes in the Southeast that linger for weeks on end, record-breaking drought in the Southwest, bigger and more damaging hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, wildfires of unusual duration and intensity along the West Coast — are accelerating. The Grist staff, located all over the country, reviewed the assessment to provide you with the most important takeaways for your region.

Indigenous self-determination is a key climate solution — if the federal government can get behind it. The latest National Climate Assessment cites a 2021 study that concluded that Indigenous peoples in the United States lost 99 percent of their territories through colonization, and that the lands that they were forced to move to face higher wildfire risk and worse drought than their traditional homelands. According to the authors, Indigenous peoples across the continental U.S. and its island holdings hail from more than 700 tribes and communities, and while each community has a different relationship with the federal government, all share similar experiences of colonization through stolen land, cultural assimilation, and persistent marginalization. The report also detailed problems with the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal insurance program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helps homeowners insure against the risk of flooding, something that many insurance companies won’t cover. The program is supposed to help communities mitigate flood risk, but the report found that its implementation in Native communities has been flawed and ineffective.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls - including new polling about fossil fuel accountability, publicly owned utilities, and frontline communities’ vulnerability to extreme weather.

Terms like “climate emergency” or “climate and ecological crisis” are increasing in usage, particularly among scientists. As recently as 2015, only 32 papers in the Web of Science research database included the term “climate emergency.” In 2022, 862 papers contained the phrase.