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American fathers love EVs, support clean energy, and are trying to eat more plants.
Picture a stereotypical American father.
He’s tending to his grill on a hot summer day, grinning as he flips a burger, stabs at a hot dog sizzling on the rack. He’s a bit doughy from decades of drinking beer (he’s a Coors man, like his dad) and of sitting at a desk, comfortably trapped in middle management. He tells a joke, and you feign a laugh, realizing that it probably seemed funnier, and more acceptable, to him back when he was young. He’d voted for Obama in 2008 — simpler times, he shrugs — but now leans conservative. It’s 10 degrees warmer in his mosquito-filled backyard than it should be at this time of year, but he doesn’t want to hear about climate change. In fact, he rolls his eyes when he mentions the couple down the street — the ones with the Ioniq and the panels on their roof.
This cartoon of an American dad who scoffs about climate change is easy to conjure, abetted by a Republican campaign to make environmentalism seem the province of liberal elites. “People when they start talking about things like global warming,” Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and likely presidential candidate, said in December, “they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things.” Things, of course, that would be anathema to such Coors-drinking, meat-stabbing Weber dads.
Yet the results of the inaugural Heatmap Climate Poll, conducted in late February by Benenson Strategy Group, contradict such facile assumptions. Although recent surveys have shown that men across all ideological lines are less concerned about climate change than women, having children seems to sharpen their focus. I spoke with Peter Olivier, the head of new markets for the carbon-removal company UNDO — and a self-proclaimed “climate dad” — about the phenomenon. “You have a young kid, you look at them, you think, oh my God, this kid’s gonna grow up and ask me what I did [about climate change] or what I didn’t do,” he said. “And I’m going to have to answer them.”
On a number of critical issues, those answers may indeed be coming from America’s dads. From EV adoption to beef consumption, fathers are helping lead the country towards a more sustainable future — or a least they say they are. Their answers were so strikingly climate-friendly that one wonders if they were trying to make the moms, and everybody else, look bad in comparison. (Knowing dads, it wouldn't be the first time.)
When it comes to vehicles, America’s fathers are on the forefront of decarbonization. Twenty-one percent of dads say they currently drive an electric vehicle, and 48% would like to in the future; those numbers dip to 12% and 43% for all men, 8% and 44% for moms, and to 8% and 39% for all respondents. They’re also more likely to say they currently or would like to ride an e-bike, ride a regular bicycle, or take public transportation. Everyone was about equally likely to say they currently walk instead of drive, but dads were more eager to do it in the future.
As to their homes, the trends were similar, albeit in a somewhat baffling way. Twenty-six percent of fathers, compared with 22% of all men, 17% of mothers, and 19% of all respondents, say they use heat pumps to warm and cool their houses. Thirty-seven percent of dads hope to switch to heat pumps in the future, 14 points higher than all men. Twenty-six percent of fathers say they currently power their homes with solar panels — compared to 19% of all men, 13% of all respondents, and, bizarrely, just 8% of moms — and compost at greater rates than the other demographics. Dads were also more willing than the other demographics to say they’d be willing to downsize their home.
While some of these results could be influenced by economic factors — it’s not cheap to install solar panels or buy an electric car, and there is a wide gender gap in American pay — the same cannot be said for the matter of diet. Sixteen percent of fathers say they currently do not eat meat (compared to 10% of all men, 8% of mothers, and 10% of all respondents), and 29% of dads want to do so in the future (that number drops by about 10 percentage points for the other demographics).
While fathers lag mothers and all respondents in currently limiting their beef intake, 34% of dads want to eat less red meat in the future — compared to 23% of all men, 17% of moms, and 21% of all respondents. Fathers were also more likely than all men, mothers and all respondents to say they limit their consumption of all animal products, by a slim margin in the present (25% to 21%, 23%, and 21%) and a wider one in the future (33% to 23%, 26%, and 22%).
And when it comes to cooking that meat — or its plant protein-based facsimile — 29% of dads would like to use an electric stove instead of gas, compared to 25% of all men, 18% of moms, and 20% of all respondents; the four groups currently eschew gas in roughly equal numbers.
Fathers were also far more supportive of wind, nuclear, and geothermal energy than the other demographics (though the four groups were broadly in favor of solar panels). Eighty-one percent of fathers said they’d welcome wind turbines in their communities, compared to 70% of all men, 72% of all respondents, and 73% of mothers. Forty-six percent of dads would be similarly welcoming to nuclear power; that number dropped to 42% of all men, 32% of all respondents, and just 16% of moms. A whopping 83% of fathers would also welcome a geothermal station, far more than the 59% of all men, 62% of all respondents, and 47% of moms who said the same.
Fathers were also about twice as likely as the other demographics to say that renewable energy should be rolled out as quickly as possible, even if comes at the expense of natural land. They were also more likely than the other groups to be supportive of spraying chemicals in the atmosphere to counter the effects of climate change.
Some results did track more closely to what one might expect from American fathers — compared to mothers, they worry less about the effects of climate change on their homes (71% to 85%), their children (67% to 82%), and their own lives (59% to 80%). Elon Musk has made dads more, not less, likely to want to drive a Tesla, and they want to have fewer, or no, children in the future — ostensibly to combat climate change, but possibly also to be able to go fishing more often with their friends.
Despite the latter results, the broader picture makes it clear that American fathers are more engaged with battling climate change than the stereotype allows. “Dads are funny and strange and less ideological and pedantic and all these regular dad things too,” says Olivier. “And they don’t stop being that way when they get focused on climate. So they do funny stuff like talk obsessively about heat pumps and try to calculate their solar gains … just all kind of normal dad stuff.” In other words, fathers are beginning to shift their essential dad-ness to the crisis at hand, in their lovably corny way.
So the next time you’re in that sweltering, mosquito-filled backyard, take a good look at what that fictional father is cooking on his grill — those might just be Impossible Burgers he’s tending to.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group via online panels 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 results here.
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And more on the week’s most important battles around renewable energy.
1. Indianapolis, Indiana – The Sooner state’s top energy official suggested energy developers should sue towns and county regulators over anti-renewable moratoria and restrictive ordinances, according to audio posted online by local politics blog Indy Politics.
2. Laramie County, Wyoming – It’s getting harder to win a permit for a wind project in Wyoming, despite it being home to some of the largest such projects in the country.
3. Ada County, Idaho – Like Wyoming, Idaho is seeing its most populated county locking up land from being available for renewables development.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio – Activists are plotting another appeal to overturn the Ohio Power Siting Board’s decision on a solar farm.
5. Franklin County, Virginia – Constitution Solar is struggling to assuage local residents’ complaints about a proposed project in this county despite doing, well, it appears anything to make them happy.
6. Sumter County, South Carolina – One solar developer is trying for a Hail Mary with South Carolina regulators to circumvent a painful local rejection.
A conversation with Barbara Kates-Garnick, former undersecretary of energy for the state of Massachusetts
This week’s conversation is with Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor of practice at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, who before academia served as undersecretary of energy for the state of Massachusetts. I reached out to Kates-Garnick after I reported on the circumstances surrounding a major solar project cancellation in the Western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury, which I believe was indicative of the weakening hand developers have in conflicts with activists on the ground. I sought to best understand how folks enmeshed in the state’s decarbonization goals felt about what was happening to local renewables development in light of the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credit.
Of course, like anyone in Massachusetts, Kates-Garnick was blunt about the situation: it’s quite bad.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So to start, how do you feel about the state’s odds of meeting its climate goals?
My own assumption is that it was going to be tough before all of the federal changes to meet those goals. They were highly ambitious and I really support the ambition, but now it’s going to be really, really difficult to meet the clean energy goals. It’s not that we shouldn't work hard to meet them but we have to understand that in this current state of affairs, the obstacles are going to be much greater. But when you take offshore wind off the table, the challenge becomes even more enormous.
Why is offshore wind necessary to meet the state’s climate targets?
It’s because it is a large resource that would be coming into the grid over a period of time. The significance is in the megawatts, the size and scale. It was particularly important and we’re land constrained in New England. And all of the sudden you’re taking such a large opportunity in generation off the table.
We can do energy efficiency and we can do solar but as you know from the Shutesbury situation, land is at a premium. Location – you can’t site onshore wind here. We tried really hard under former Governor Deval Patrick and that hit a lot of obstacles. So offshore wind is critical to meeting those goals.
Help me understand the conflicts over this land constraint – is Shutesbury an aberration or a bit of a tale of the tape of the problems here?
The Shutesbury situation reflects how we’re not a large geographical area. We’re not Texas. We can put solar on roofs but you need larger solar installations. We’ve encouraged the solar industry as much as possible. But the area is limited. Wind off the coast provided an alternative that was realistic and not a science experiment.
How much of this problem is state permitting? It feels like there is some land in a space like Massachusetts but people don’t want to use it for this.
Any time you try to put energy infrastructure into New England – whether it's a gas pipeline or a solar installation – there’s a lot of local environmental and permitting regulations that can really hold up a project. One of the good things Massachusetts has done is we made energy permitting easier and went through a permitting reform. We have an Energy Facility Siting Council.
There’s still ways local interests can hold up projects. I think that’s just a fact of life in New England.
So that’s why offshore wind is so important to New England.
It becomes more challenging. From a resource perspective, we are at the end of the fossil fuel pipeline. The middle Atlantic has more gas pipelines coming into it than we do in New England. Offshore wind represented a great opportunity for us.
With respect to the state permitting, it is possible to now overcome some local regulations in state permitting in ways that weren’t possible before. We did address permitting reform in Massachusetts. The Energy Facility Siting Council has played a great, important role in having that happen and [towns] can be overruled to a certain extent.
Well, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that the conflicts will still exist because land is at a premium?
Yeah. And local control will always play a role in that.
The Commonwealth signed permitting reform into law in 2024 and in that there were comprehensive reforms to the process for clean energy infrastructure. This has improved siting. But again that doesn’t always ensure a project will be permitted and you can easily find ways to hold them up.
What gives you hope for the future? Where’s the light at the end of the tunnel for you?
I think that by facilitating permitting reform and also participation – local participation – as early as possible in the stages of projects… I think this is where the key lies. You can pass regulations but a lot of it has to do with doing the work ahead of time on your project and satisfying the local community so you don’t have a bigger fight on your hands.
Here come Chip Roy and Lee Zeldin.
National Republican political leaders are beginning to intervene in local battles over battery storage, taking the side of activists against developers. It’s a worrisome trend for an industry that, until recently, was escaping the culture clashes once reserved only for solar and wind energy.
In late July, Texas Congressman Chip Roy sent a letter to energy storage developer Peregrine Energy voicing concerns about a 145 megawatt battery project proposed in rural Gillespie County, an area one hour north of San Antonio that sits in his district. Roy, an influential conservative firebrand running to be state attorney general, asked the company more than a dozen questions about the project, from its fire preparation plans to whether it may have ties to Chinese material suppliers, and stated that his office heard “frustrations and concerns” about the project from “hundreds of constituents – including state and local elected officials.”
“Gillespie County is subject to extreme drought, wildfires, and flash flooding events,” Roy wrote. “Naturally, residents are concerned about the environmental risks a battery storage facility poses to one of [the] most vulnerable areas in Texas, among other things.”
Peregrine told me in an email that the company then sought to assuage the congressman’s concerns, speaking with his staff over the phone. But Roy remained unmoved, now fully backing the local opposition to the project. “My office has met with representatives from Peregrine Energy, and while we appreciate the dialogue, we believe that this project warrants scrutiny,” Roy said in a statement provided by his staff when reached for comment. “We look forward to remaining engaged with Peregrine Energy and continuing to represent the people of Harper who feel strongly that this battery facility poses more harm than good.”
Republican interventions like these may feel out of the ordinary to many in the energy sector. Historically, conservative politicians like Roy often vote against writing new regulations governing the environment and public safety, and Texas has often been a bastion for that kind of policymaking. Not to mention Texas is a major hub for battery storage development, second only to California in total capacity installed onto the grid. The Lone Star state’s strained grid means there is no shortage of demand for excess back-up power.
Unfortunately for battery storage developers, national Republicans are now increasingly open to attacking individual battery storage projects in the same way they’ve sometimes fought solar and wind farms, especially when activists on the ground feel they’ve lost the fight with municipal and state regulators.
Last year, we launched The Fight with a story about the unincorporated town of Acton, California, where a battery project was approved by county officials in an area with high risk of experiencing wildfire. Local opponents of the facility, feeling that county and state courts would not fairly adjudicate their concerns, lobbied their elected representative in Congress – then-Rep. Mike Garcia – to do something, anything in response to the situation. And while Garcia was stymied from halting that individual battery project, he then tried to block the Energy Department from streamlining federal permits for the entire battery storage system sector. (The rulemaking was completed before the start of the Trump 2.0 administration. Garcia lost re-election last year.)
At the time, this was the first full-fledged example I could find of a Republican in Congress really picking up the mantle of the “BESS bomb” panic around large-scale battery facilities potentially posing an unacceptable risk to surrounding host communities. Sure, there’d been scares around lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes, for example. But battery storage in general? The sector has enjoyed bipartisan support at the national level, and definitely still does to some extent given that GOP lawmakers declined to pare back the industry’s Inflation Reduction Act credits in their recently-passed tax megabill.
But now there’s a very clear battery fire “butterfly effect” occurring in which local rage fails to get the attention of government officials focused on energy capacity so activists will just go to whatever ears are most sympathetic to them. This is resulting in percolating Republican ire against battery storage, point blank.
Indeed, Heatmap Pro’s August poll of 3,741 registered voters found that there are now three times as many strong opponents of battery storage facilities among Republicans than strong supporters.
Less than a month after Roy’s letter to Peregrine, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin personally visited his native Long Island, New York, to voice his support for those campaigning against a Key Capture Energy battery project in Hauppauge, a hamlet within the town of Islip. The EPA has no role in whether the project is built or not. But the endorsement – coupled with a New York Post op-ed declaring “battery sites are too risky for New York” – came right before a 12-month battery moratorium Islip had enacted was set to expire.
This week Islip extended the moratorium, indefinitely stopping the battery project. Next week, the New York City Council’s committee on fire and emergency management will be holding a public hearing to specifically address the local fears about storage projects.
As for Roy and Peregrine Energy, it’s unclear how the Texas Republican could stop the facility on his own. It has the permits necessary to build and Texas doesn’t have the kind of stringent environmental regulation that creates opportunities to stall construction.
But the lawmaker’s existing political clout in Washington and motivation to win the Republican primary nomination in a heated statewide contest make him a dangerous enemy for any company to have, especially energy developers linked in some way to the transition. As Garcia showed a year ago and Zeldin demonstrated over the summer, someone with a national platform and a megaphone could do a lot of damage to a single project, or worse. We’ve yet to truly see what will come from the flapping of this butterfly’s wings.