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Why climate might be a more powerful election issue than it seems.
Climate change either is or isn’t the biggest issue of our time. It all depends on who you ask — and, especially, how.
In March, as it has since 1939, Gallup asked Americans what they thought was the most important problem facing the country. Just 2% of respondents said “environment/pollution/climate change” — fewer than those who said “poor leadership” or “unifying the country” (although more than those who said “the media.”) Pew, meanwhile, asked Americans in January what the top priority for the president and Congress ought to be for this year, and “dealing with climate change” ranked third-to-last out of 20 issues — well behind “defending against terrorism,” “reducing availability of illegal drugs,” and “improving the way the political system works.”
The Biden administration seems to be taking the apparent message to heart, softening parts of its climate agenda while Democrats in tight elections run interference with their economy-first constituents. Mention of the Inflation Reduction Act, the president’s landmark climate legislation, still mostly elicits blank stares from Americans, and the administration hasn’t done much to help its case. During his State of the Union address, Biden didn’t refer to the IRA by name even once.
And yet Americans clearly, obviously, patently are worried about the climate. More than half of the respondents to a Yale Program on Climate Change opinion poll last winter said “global warming should be a priority for the next president and Congress.” Around the same time, seven in 10 called climate change a “serious issue” and a third reported being “extremely concerned” about it in Heatmap’s own Climate Poll.
“You could also ask, ‘Is the survival of American democracy a defining issue in this campaign or not?,’ and the polls will sometimes mislead you into thinking it’s way down the list,” former Vice President Al Gore said at a recent leadership conference for his nonprofit Climate Reality Project in New York — and indeed the March Gallup poll from March had “elections/election reform/democracy” as the top issue facing the country for just 3% of people. “But when people get into the voting booth,” Gore continued, “and they think about the fact that democracy is at risk — as we saw in the last bye elections — that actually did matter. And I think climate is the same way.”
Gore wasn’t just relying on his own intuition. A widely circulated New York Times/Siena College poll conducted ahead of the 2022 midterms showed 71% of voters believed democracy was at risk, but only 7% identified it as the most important issue facing the country, leading many to start eulogizing American democracy. And yet candidates from the Democratic Party, which has positioned itself as a bulwark against the erosion of representative government, dominated the most contested elections.
When you start to ask more targeted questions, the research tends to concur. “If you say, ‘Is climate change an important priority?,’ you get about two-thirds of people who agree with that,” Matthew Burgess, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me. “If you say, ‘the single most important issue,’ then that’s where it falls off.”
Burgess’s work has examined a particularly odd discrepancy between the limited number of voters who list climate as the most urgent issue facing the country and the fact that climate change, on its own, can seemingly swing elections. In fact, Burgess and his co-authors argued in a paper they published earlier this year that climate voters might have secured Biden's 2020 victory. Using data from the nonpartisan Voter Study Group, Burgess and his co-authors found that “how important voters considered climate change to be as an issue was one of the strongest predictors of whom they voted for in 2020.” How strong a predictor? Strong enough to shift the national popular vote margin by 3% or more toward Biden, they concluded.
But when I asked Burgess what’s missing from a statistic like Gallup’s, which shows few voters prioritizing climate over other concerns, he admitted, “I don’t know.” He has plenty of theories, though. Recent election margins have been so tight that climate change would not actually have to have a significant effect on voting to swing the outcome, he told me. Or perhaps voters are beginning to connect the dots between climate change and issues they more openly profess to care about, such as the economy and national security. When I asked Justin McCarthy, an analyst at Gallup, about Burgess’ findings, he told me that “our question is not meant to measure issues affecting vote choice.”
It takes a lot of faith to buy any of those arguments, and Democrats in tight down-ballot races might not be willing to bet their limited resources on it. But we risk blowing past important context by writing off polling that shows Americans putting the economy over their concern about climate change, according to Emily Becker, the deputy director of communications on the climate and energy team at Third Way, a center-left think tank.
Becker has no problem advising frontline candidates “not to talk about climate and to talk about clean energy instead,” she told me. In her opinion, the two are separate issues — and the popular habit of using them as euphemisms is helping neither voters nor climate-conscious candidates.
“We tend to talk about clean energy as having one core purpose: emissions abatement. Then there are the positive externalities: job creation, clean air and water, money into your community, etc.,” Becker told me. But when it comes to Americans struggling to pay their bills, or who see minimal opportunities for good, well-paying jobs in their communities, “the positive externalities are no longer side effects,” she said. “They’re the main piece.”
By way of example, Becker said, it’s especially telling that investing in clean energy to address climate change appears to be popular in polls, but follow-up questions that ask how voters would feel about that investment if it raises their household costs see a “big drop.” “It’s kind of a luxury issue,” Becker said of climate change-first voting. Third Way’s own research shows that people who self-identify that way tend to be older, white, and more educated.
But young voters — traditionally thought of as the most climate-friendly demographic — are also facing some of the worst economic odds of any living generation. “The idea that you’re going to make decisions at the ballot box based on a faraway problem and not based on the problems right in front of you is a little bit delusional,” Becker told me.
Heather Hargreaves, the deputy executive director of campaigns at Climate Power, a strategic communications group with a robust research and polling operation, had a slightly different takeaway. “I don’t think any elected official who is seeing a national poll where climate change is getting a lower percentage than the economy should be like, ‘Oh, this means I shouldn’t talk about climate change,’” she told me. “That’s misguided.”
Climate Power’s polling has found that “clean energy and climate messaging” moved every demographic toward Biden, particularly — again — young voters, as well as independents, who were key in Burgess’ research. “If you look at the things people care about the most, gas prices and utility costs are always up there,” Hargreaves said. “And these are both related to how we address climate change.”
As even more evidence that climate is a winning message after all, Hargreaves pointed out that Republicans in red districts are “not shying away” from talking about how the IRA has brought money, improvements, and clean-energy investments to their districts. For example, Senator Tom Cotton bragged last summer that “Senator Boozman and I were able to secure the grants” for highway improvement projects funded by the infrastructure law — which the Arkansas pair had voted against. Likewise, Nancy Mace, a congresswoman from South Carolina, hosted a press conference touting a local transit hub with electric buses despite having once called electric mass transit “socialism.”
“They’re now trying to take credit for it — and that’s proof it’s politically a winner,” Hargreaves told me.
As an election-year message, it’s hard to argue that “climate change” — at least phrased as such — actually resonates with the majority of Americans. But “it must be a big tent issue if we’re going to actually solve it,” Burgess, the University of Colorado Boulder professor, told me. And opinions are still being shaped: Gallup has found that victims of extreme weather events are more likely to worry about climate change and view it as a threat. As Hargreaves stressed to me, polling trends tend to be more revealing than any individual battery questions, and they generally show growing levels of urgency.
Becker also offered a word of advice. “Be willing to be told that your issue does not matter as much as you want it to,” she said. “And figure out how you can make your priorities and the priorities of the electorate overlap.”
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And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.
What I’m hearing from developers and CEOs about the renewable energy industry after the Inflation Reduction Act
As the Senate deliberates gutting the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits, renewable energy developers and industry insiders are split about how bad things might get for the sector. But the consensus is that things will undoubtedly get worse.
Almost everyone I talked to insisted that solar and wind projects further along in construction would be insulated from an IRA repeal. Some even argued that spiking energy demand and other macro tailwinds might buffer the wind and solar industries from the demolition of the law.
But between the lines, and beneath the talking points and hopium, executives are fretting that lots of future investments are in jeopardy. And the most pessimistic take: almost all projects will have their balance sheets and time-tables impacted in some way that’ll at minimum increase their budget costs.
“It’s hard to imagine, if the legislation passes in its current form, that it wouldn’t impact all projects,” said Rob Collier, CEO of renewable energy transaction platform LevelTen.
Even industry analysts with the gloomiest views of the repeal say there’s plenty of projects that will keep chugging along and might even become more valuable to investors if they’re close enough to construction or operation. This aligns with recent analysis from BloombergNEF, which found the House bill would diminish our nation’s renewables build-out – but not entirely end its pace.
“The more useful way to break down which project may be hit the hardest is where the projects are going to fall in their development life-cycle,” Collier said. “Projects that have either started construction or have the ability to start construction … are going to very likely rise in terms of their appeal and attractiveness and those projects will be at a premium, if they’re able to skate through the legislative risk and qualify for tax credits.”
There is a more optimistic industry view that believes increased project costs will just be passed along to consumers via higher electricity prices. The American people will in essence have to pick up the tab where the federal tax code left it. Optimists also cite the increased use of power purchase agreements, or PPAs, between renewables developers and entities who need a lot of electricity, like big tech companies. By signing these PPAs, buyers are subsidizing the construction of projects but also insulating themselves from the risk of rising electricity prices.
The most bullish perspective I heard was from Nick Cohen, the CEO of Doral Renewables, who told me deals like these combined with rising premiums for quick energy on the grid may obviate lost credits in a “zero-incentive environment.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” Cohen told me. “If you’re in construction or you’re going to be in construction very soon, you’re fine.”
But Collier called Cohen’s prediction an “experiment” in customers’ willingness to pay for new energy: “If we’re talking about 40%, 50%, 60% of a project’s capital stack now being at risk because of tax credits, those are pretty large price increases.”
I spoke to multiple companies that have been inking massive deals as this legislation has progressed — although many were not nearly as sanguine about the industry’s future prospects as Doral. Like rPlus Energies, which disclosed last week that it closed a commitment for more than $500 million in tax equity investments for a solar and storage project in Utah. rPlus CEO Luigi Resta told me that the legislation “certainly has posed concern from our investors and from the organization” but the project was so far along that the tax equity investment market wasn’t phased by the bill.
“Many people in my company, myself included, have been doing this for more than 20 years. We’ve seen the starts and stops related to ITC and PTC in solar and wind, in multiple cycles, and this feels like another cycle,” Resta told me. “When the IRA passed, everybody was exuberant. And now the runway looks like it may have a cliff. But for us, our mantra since the beginning of the year has been ‘proceed with caution, preserve and protect.’”
However, crucially, it is important to focus on how that caution looks: Resta told me the company has completely paused new contracting while the company is completing the projects it is currently developing.
One government affairs representative for a large and prominent U.S. renewables developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships, told me that “whatever rollback occurs will just result in higher electricity prices over time.” In the near term, the only language that would truly gut projects in progress today would be “foreign entity of concern” restrictions that would broadly impact any component even remotely connected to Chinese industries. Similar language all but kneecapped the entire IRA electric vehicle consumer credit.
“It included definitions of what it means to be a foreign company that were really vague,” the government affairs representative said. “Anyone who does any business with China essentially can’t benefit from the credit. That was a really challenging outcome from the House that hopefully the Senate is going to fix.” If this definition became law, this source said, it would be the final straw that “freezes investment” in renewable energy projects.
Ultimately, after speaking to CEO after CEO this week, I’ve been left with an impression that business activity in renewables hasn’t really subsided after the House bill passed, and that it’ll be the Senate bill that undoubtedly defines the future of renewable energy for years to come.
Whether that chamber remains the “cooling saucer” it once was will be the decider.