Why Saying ‘Climate Crisis’ Falls Flat

We have a fascinating new project to share with you today. It gets to the heart of the question: Is there anything that can make Americans care about climate change right now?

Starting last year, Heatmap commissioned Embold Research to study what U.S. voters currently think about climate change — what messages are connecting with Americans today and which ones are falling flat.

It’s out now. I wasn’t directly involved in this research — other members of our team led it — but I think the results are interesting, useful, and worth your attention. (Embold Research is a frequent research partner of ours, too: They conduct our data center polling.)

The report divvied the electorate into three buckets — registered voters who are already persuaded about climate change, those who are persuadable, and skeptics who are less likely to be convinced — and examines what they believe about politics, energy, and the environment.

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In the study’s first phase, for instance, we asked more than 3,200 Americans to rank 11 different issues in their relative importance. Just over 50% of Americans think climate change is “very” or “extremely important” — and while that may sound encouraging, it actually means that climate change ranked last among the 11 issues we tested.

“The environment” ranks much higher among the three cohorts, with 70% of Americans considering it at least “very” important. The economy, jobs, inflation, and the cost of living dominate voter concerns.

What’s interesting, though, is that these questions of issue importance reverse among the group of “persuaded” Americans. This group believes climate change to be among the most dire problems facing the United States. They’re concerned about the economy too, to be clear — but they also rank healthcare costs, the environment, and threats to democracy more highly than other groups. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, this group identifies overwhelmingly as Democrats.)

My colleague Jeva Lange has more on another finding from the research: why voters don’t believe politicians when they say clean energy is the cheapest form of energy available. You should read her story — but before we go, I want to highlight one more finding from the study.

In the study’s second phase, Embold Research called back 15 of the respondents from the first poll and held in-depth interviews with them about their beliefs on climate, politics, and what messages they responded well to (and which ones turned them off). Then it surveyed a new sample of more than 2,100 Americans, using lessons from the interviews to inform their questions.

One lesson from those phases: Calling climate change a “crisis” or “catastrophe” fell flat among voters — but for different reasons among each cohort.

For voters who are already persuaded about climate change’s dangers, the framing is demotivating. Those people are already worried about climate change, and so hearing that more informed advocates are worried about a climate “crisis” or “catastrophe” just makes them more numb and depressed.

Skeptics, meanwhile, think the language is meant to manipulate them. And for voters who could be persuaded about climate change, talk of a “crisis” conflicts with their observation of gradual change and punctuated equilibrium.

That message sits at odds with how Democratic politicians and issue advocates talked about climate change in the first few years of this decade, obviously. And it points to another interesting finding: Even when American voters are skeptical of climate change as an issue area, they still generally care about the environment.

This new report is the first in a series of Heatmap reports on how American voters view climate, clean energy, and sustainability issues. If you'd like to receive our latest updates, downloadable reports, and invitations for special briefings, please fill out this form.