Public Resource
Poll: Americans Are Well Aware Of Climate Change — But Not About The Government’s Efforts To Fight It
Kaleigh Rogers and Zoha Qamar. FiveThirtyEight

Americans are widely concerned about climate change and link it to extreme weather. Most say they’ve changed their personal behaviors due to environmental concerns. A majority of Americans — 71 percent — said their local community has endured at least one of five forms of extreme weather over the last year. And according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from earlier this month, a majority of Americans supported measures such as incentives to lower the cost of renewable energy and using government funds to promote oil and gas companies to reduce emissions. These policies are popular even among Republicans: 53 percent of Republicans supported the cost-lowering incentives and 50 percent supported funding to lower emissions from oil and gas companies. The federal government has already done both of those things — they were provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s the most aggressive climate-change law the country has ever enacted, yet many Americans appear unfamiliar with it: In that same Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted a few days before the bill passed the Senate, just 41 percent of Americans said they were familiar with the legislation.