Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

Protecting Nature Is More Important Than ‘Quickly’ Building Renewables, Most Americans Say

Nearly 80% of U.S. adults believe conservation is more important than a speedy renewable energy rollout, our poll finds. That spells trouble for Biden’s climate agenda.

Birds and wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

In Virginia, environmentalists fought a utility-scale solar farm that would rank among the largest on the East Coast.

In New Jersey, an ocean-conservation group is battling an offshore wind farm that could power half a million homes.

In Utah, Nevada, and even the San Francisco Bay area, green groups are threatening renewable projects that officials say are crucial to meeting local zero-carbon goals.

Around the country, self-described environmentalists are trying to stop some of the same solar and wind projects that experts say are crucial to solving climate change. They are sometimes dismissed as NIMBYs or accused of being stooges for the fossil-fuel industry, and some groups literally are funded by oil interests.

But a new poll shows that their views — at least at the surface level — resonate with nearly four out of every five Americans.

An overwhelming majority of Americans say that conserving local land and wildlife is more important than building new sources of renewable electricity, even if that slows down the world’s response to climate change, according to the inaugural Heatmap Climate Poll, a scientific survey conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group last month.

The poll finds that even though Americans love renewables in the abstract — with 94% endorsing the benefits of rooftop solar and 88% embracing large-scale solar farms — they are skittish about their potential trade-offs. Some 79% of Americans said that new renewable energy should be rolled out “slowly” rather than “quickly” and that the conservation of land and wild animals should be prioritized above rapid greenhouse-gas reductions

In contrast, only 21% of Americans agreed with the statement that “we should roll out renewable energy quickly to lower emissions as fast as possible, even if it means harming natural land or wild animals.”

In other words, you don’t necessarily need recourse to astroturfing schemes or secret fossil-fuel connections to explain why so many Americans oppose new renewable projects. The Heatmap poll surveyed 1,000 adult Americans in all 50 states during a five-day period in February.

The results offer a warning to the Biden administration — and for that matter, anyone who seeks to decarbonize the American economy before the world sails past the 1.5-degree mark. In order for the United States to meet its goal of eliminating carbon pollution from the power system by 2035, the country’s physical infrastructure must transform at a pace and scale that has no peacetime precedent. Solar and wind capacity must quadruple nationwide, according to one estimate from the National Renewable Electricity Laboratory; up to 10,100 miles of new power lines might be required to hook those renewables into the grid. That build-out will be extremely difficult if Americans are susceptible to arguments that renewables are harming local flora and fauna.

“When you think about renewables you’re talking about an impact on the landscape that is beyond the scale of anything this country has ever seen before,” Larry Selzer, the president and chief executive of the Conservation Fund, one of the country’s largest buyers of conserved land, told me. “The IRA explicitly contemplates up to a million miles of new transmission lines and 65,000 miles of new pipelines.”

In contrast, the country’s last major infrastructure project — the Interstate Highway System — is about 48,000 miles long, he said. And much of it was built half a century ago.

“People intuitively understand the scale of investment [in the Inflation Reduction Act], even though it’s going to help save them and their communities” and ultimately protect wildlife, he said. “For most Americans, the idea of climate change is relatively amorphous and distant from their lives, yet they feel the loss of wildlife in a proximate way.”

Although the Inflation Reduction Act contains at least $25 billion to support conservation programs on agricultural and forestry land, this has not attracted as much attention as its clean-energy programs.

For climate advocates, the most upbeat finding in the poll might be that most Americans would be happy to add renewable energy near where they live, even if they want those facilities to have few trade-offs. More than 70% of Americans said that they would welcome the construction of wind turbines or large-scale solar farms in their community; more than 60% expressed comfort with a local geothermal power plant.

The only energy technology that most Americans did not want to live near is, ironically, the same technology that virtually guarantees local conservation. About one-third of respondents said that they would not welcome a new nuclear plant in their community, the poll found. Many nuclear facilities — such as the Calvert Cliffs power plant in Maryland — are surrounded by acres of protected parkland in order to ease local concerns. They also need far less space than other clean energy sources, like solar panels or wind turbines, to generate the same amount of power.

But perhaps that’s not so surprising: Americans’ view of the clean-energy future differs significantly from experts in several areas. Recent reports from a Princeton University team and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have projected that the IRA will reduce the cost of producing electricity nationwide. Yet nearly half of Americans said that they expect the move to renewables will raise their costs. Only about a third expect lower costs in the future.

This story was updated at 2:36 p.m. ET on Thursday.

The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Q&A

You, Too, Can Protect Solar Panels Against Hail

A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.

This week's interview subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Hotspots

The Pro-Renewables Crowd Gets Riled Up

And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.

  • Activists came together on Earth Day to protest the Trump administration’s decision to issue a stop work order on Equinor’s Empire Wind project. It’s the most notable rally for offshore wind I’ve seen since September, when wind advocates protested offshore opponents at the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island.
  • Esther Rosario, executive director of Climate Jobs New York, told me the rally was intended to focus on the jobs that will be impacted by halting construction and that about a hundred people were at the rally – “a good half of them” union members or representing their unions.
  • “I think it’s important that the elected officials that are in both the area and at the federal level understand the humans behind what it means to issue a stop-work order,” she said.

2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Spotlight

How a Carbon Pipeline Is Turning Iowa Against Wind

Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.

Iowa.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.

Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow