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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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Let's dive deep into the campaign against the so-called “high-risk” cables.
One of the biggest threats to American offshore wind is a handful of homeowners on the south Jersey shoreline spouting unproven theories about magnetic fields.
Within a year of forming, the activist group “Stop The High-Risk Cables” has galvanized local politicians against the transmission infrastructure being planned for wind turbines off the coast of New Jersey known as the Larrabee Pre-built Infrastructure. The transmission route, which will run a few miles from the beaches of Sea Girt, New Jersey, to a substation nearby, is expected to be a crucial landing zone for power from major offshore wind projects in south Jersey waters, including Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between EDF Renewables and Shell that received final permits from federal regulators last week.
The only problem: while state regulators have been busy planning the route for the transmission and selecting who will build it, opponents have managed to win the war of public opinion. Activists have clearly turned their neighbors against the plan, pushing the mayors of the four boroughs targeted for Pre-Built Infrastructure to come out against the project. And this weekend Jack Ciattarelli – who narrowly lost the race for the governor’s mansion last year and is running again in 2025 – joined activists rallying against the project and is now campaigning on ending the project and cable landings like it.
Since federal regulators control the waters, what this means is, unless Democrats hit the electoral jackpot over the next year, offshore wind in New Jersey could be screwed – even if Kamala Harris wins the White House.
What makes this more dire is, this isn’t any ol’ transmission. For other offshore wind projects like Empire Wind, states have forced developers to design and construct their own transmission landings, creating a somewhat disorganized situation resembling electrical spaghetti. New Jersey’s offshore wind transmission meanwhile has been studied for years and is supposed to minimize development on the shoreline. This means the combat over this cabling could decide the fates of multiple offshore wind projects – and the first major proactive plan to reduce beach-level environmental impacts that stymie offshore wind in the first place.
So I decided to dive deep into the campaign against the so-called “high-risk” cables. After a series of interviews with organizers and a mayor critical of the state’s processes, I’ve been left feeling this relatively small transmission project represents a true test for democracy’s role in climate action. Could a small band of organized individuals be all it takes to hold back decarbonization at the pace scientists say is necessary, no matter how many climate laws are passed?
Sea Girt resident Kimberly Paterson remembers when she first heard about the cables. Someone had left a postcard on her door about the project. Before that, the professional executive leadership trainer had devoted her activism to preserving maritime forests on the beach. Once made aware of the transmission cables though, she and her small coterie of environmentally-conscious neighbors got active.
Paterson said they also started getting looped in with an existing network of activists concerned about offshore wind infrastructure. Those activists included familiar characters to the fight over New Jersey offshore wind development.
People like Mike Dean of Save the East Coast and Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action, who’ve spread theories without evidence about a spate of whale deaths being tied to pile drivers for offshore wind. She says her group’s work is focused on the cables, not offshore wind, despite the close allyship with these other actors. As she simply put it, “There’s a circle of people that you meet.”
“We do like to work with others, and communicate with others, but we’re not officially tied to any of those other groups.”
The group also started canvassing, making signage for homeowners, and holding public events. As calls for action grew, so too did the political focus on the area, as state legislators and members of Congress took up the issue.
“We have created an absolute firestorm here,” Paterson told me. ‘It is unbelievable what we’ve accomplished.”
The group is focused on what they believe to be the health risks of simply being near high-voltage power lines.
To understand their fears, think of an electric current going through a wire. The more current goes through a wire, the higher likelihood of electrical waves emanating from the current’s pathway. That’s where “electro-magnetic fields” come into play. These fields are all around us and even Earth emits them. It’s the result of an excess of energy.
The World Health Organization classifies even low amounts of electromagnetic fields as a possible carcinogen, citing studies around exposure and childhood leukemia rates. But as many environmental and health experts note, studies to date have not really linked cancer occurrences to prolonged exposure to these fields. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says the electro-magnetic fields created by cables for offshore wind “are well below the
recommended threshold values for human exposure.” So like whales and wind, it’s something to watch out for, but there’s no evidence to date of a danger here.
Nonetheless, seeking to calm any resident’s fears of magnetic fields, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last week convened their first public hearing within the planned development area.
At the event, numerous officials came and spoke to the project’s safety, including the executive director of the Board. They even played a long explanatory video from a consultant they hired to review the electro-magnetic fields that would come from the cables. The full presentation laid out numerous examples of what they said were similar underground and underwater transmission lines with magnetic emissions that had no discernable impact on public health, including lines in the New Jersey-New York region.
One person moved by the presentation’s efforts on magnetic fields was Mike Mangan, mayor of Manasquan, one of the boroughs that may be selected to host some of the transmission infrastructure. Mangan told me he joined with other mayors to press the state for more transparency on the cables at the behest of concerned constituents. But he didn’t know what the state knew about the magnetic fields.
“I’ll just be candid — I was ignorant on a lot of that,” he acknowledged. Mangan said he still has “a few very serious concerns” but “I think they addressed some of the bigger concerns,” including the magnetic fields.
I’ll admit, I felt the same. So far in The Fight, we’ve chronicled examples where there are at least somewhat reasonable concerns about renewable energy development – stuff like batteries sited in wildfire risk areas and solar farms in imperiled tortoise habitat. But in this case, I watched the entire presentation online and left thinking this was essentially a non-issue.
Yet Paterson says she was unconvinced by the presentation. The projects they’re citing aren’t comparable, she claims. And then she has a laundry list of other complaints about the potential cables.
Hearing her talk about the transmission, you’d think she just doesn’t want this built under any circumstances. So I asked her if, given her allies, the goal is to stop offshore wind. An avid wildlife painter, she says no, and that she’s “very strongly in support of alternative energy.”
Well, okay. Maybe it’s political or partisan then? I asked her who she’s voting for in this year’s presidential election. “I don’t like anyone in the election to be quite honest,” she confessed, self-identifying simply as a “libertarian.” She then added: “I love the idea of Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.] revolutionizing our health-care system. That makes me very excited.”
Last week, Heatmap published a risk index of the top 10 renewable energy projects worth watching for potential cancellation or major blowback to the energy transition.
We listed Atlantic Shores in the top five, primarily citing the project’s current role as a focal point for opponents to offshore wind up and down the Atlantic coastline. Hours after the risk index was published, Atlantic Shores received its final approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Despite that win, we’re leaving the project on the index because the cables have to be built too – and that stands to be a more stressful fight.
It wasn’t supposed to be hard. In 2021, New Jersey passed a law granting the Board of Public Utilities the authority to supersede local governments opposing easements and other permits for offshore wind transmission cables. But that law’s permissibility under the state constitution hasn’t been tested yet, thanks to the cancellation of Orsted’s Ocean Wind project, which was set to be the likeliest battleground over cables before Atlantic Shores.
State officials are expected in the coming weeks to lay out who will actually build the transmission infrastructure and the route it’ll take from Sea Girt to the Larrabee substation. Between the day of that announcement and the completion of construction, a lot can go awry. Donald Trump could win the presidency and, as opponents of offshore wind expect, revisit permitting decisions for projects like Atlantic Shores. Or a Republican like Jack Ciattarelli could win the governor’s mansion, and that person could take any number of steps to undermine the cables like leaving the local control law undefended in state court if it’s challenged.
All this risk to the energy transition, started by a handful of actors with unfounded claims about magnetic fields.
I asked Atlantic Shores for comment on the opposition movement. They did not get back to me.
However, I did hear from the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, a consortium of developers trying to build offshore wind off the state coast. “While we are advocates of civil discourse and engagement from communities, we urge residents to be mindful of prevalent misinformation,” said Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the alliance, in a statement sent to me Tuesday evening.
“By following best practices in environmental science and engineering, such as proper siting, minimizing disruption during construction, and adherence to all state and federal regulations, this infrastructure can be safely and responsibly integrated into our communities and local and regional power grids to provide resilient and reliable power to New Jersey homes,” O’Connor continued.
I also heard from Anjuli Patel, executive director of Sierra Club’s New Jersey chapter, who contacted me last night after Atlantic Shores and the offshore wind alliance brought my reporting to their attention.
“Let us be clear, the microwave in your kitchen emits more electromagnetic currents than cables buried deep underground covered by insulation and concrete,” Patel said in a statement. “This technology is vetted, goes through rigorous permitting standards, and is safe and responsible for both the environment and local communities.”
Candidly, I’m holding my breath on whether Sierra Club’s words will win over these concerned shore residents.
With consequences that are extremely real.
Maybe Sharpiegate wasn’t so funny after all.
You’ll recall the micro-controversy from 2019, when then-President Donald Trump said that Hurricane Dorian was headed toward Alabama (which it wasn’t), and officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were pressured to back up Trump’s mistake. It culminated in Trump presenting a map in the Oval Office on which someone drew a bubble atop the projected path of the storm so it would stretch into Alabama, apparently with a Sharpie.
At the time it was troubling but comical, a representation of how the cult-like adoration Trump demanded would distort the work of government in idiotic ways. Five years later, with a storm surge of misinformation pouring over the country in response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, it looks more like a harbinger of things to come.
In any crisis, some measure of confusion is inevitable. Rumors spread and misunderstandings proliferate, fed by fear and desperation. The most extravagant varieties of misinformation are often either short-lived or confined to a minority of the population. That has not been true, however, when it comes to Helene, and it looks like Milton will repeat the same pattern. This time, the misinformation is more explicitly partisan than ever before, and it portends a disturbing future in which every natural disaster could become not just a challenging task of rescue and cleanup but a simultaneous fight against falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
It’s not that disasters have never been political; presidents are often judged by how they react (anyone over 40 knows what the phrase “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” refers to), with politicians discredited or elevated by how they performed and the opposition taking the opportunity to criticize the administration’s competence. But Trump has given that familiar criticism a particularly venomous cast, claiming not just that the disaster response is falling short but that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are intentionally ignoring the victims because of who they are.
Trump has focused in particular on three falsehoods: First, that the federal government is abandoning hurricane victims in areas where there are lots of Republican voters; second, that funds for recovery are unavailable because the Biden administration gave them to undocumented immigrants (“they stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”); and third, that the $750 distributed immediately to survivors to enable them to obtain food and other basics, known as Serious Needs Assistance, is all the aid anyone will get.
It was like a bat-signal: As soon as Trump set the terms, conservative media and influencers swung into action, repeating Trump’s bogus claims to their audiences. And then things took a strange turn.
To bring a conspiracy theory into the mainstream, you need individuals and outlets who serve as disinformation linkages, connecting the crazier people and ideas to those with legitimacy. In this case, Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, Republican of Georgia, played a key role, and she had a message: The weather is being manipulated by a shadowy conspiracy with powerful technologies at its disposal. “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X to her 3.7 million followers. “Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you.”
As evidence, Green and her allies offer the fact that many people have proposed geoengineering as a solution to a warming planet, which in their eyes means it must already be taking place, and that’s why these hurricanes came to the Southeast. And who is “They”? It might be the government, but to many, it’s obviously the Jews.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories around the hurricanes are swirling on the fetid sewer of right-wing hate and misinformation controlled by the world’s richest individual. As the Washington Postreported, “The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X.”
The tide of misinformation can be partly explained by the calendar. “What’s different about this natural disaster is the timing,” says Danielle Lee Tomson of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. “We’ve never had such an incredible, devastating natural disaster within weeks of a presidential election that has impacted two swing states,” North Carolina and Georgia. That gives purchase to the claims that there are conspiracies afoot to change the outcome of the election.
In 2024, it may have been inevitable that a disaster would be tied, however implausibly, to the “one narrative to rule them all this election cycle, which is that of non-citizen voting,” Tomson notes.
Disaster makes people search for answers that give order to chaos and suffering. Even answers that describe a world of sinister forces can be weirdly comforting, by assuring their adherents that they are among a select group who understand the reality most people miss. Amidst the chaos, you can grasp onto whatever bizarre belief you choose.
In the future, we might expect that any climate-linked disaster — hurricanes, floods, heat waves, droughts — will become fodder for this kind of misinformation, not just passed around from person to person but driven from the top of the political food chain.
In effect, this is the inverse of the kind of climate misinformation we’re more used to, which goes under the heading of “denial”: denying that temperatures are increasing, or that carbon pollution is a problem, or that human activity drives climate change. Since the occurrence of a hurricane or fire or other observably extreme event can’t be denied, this new kind of misinformation actually posits not just that the effects of climate change are real, but that they’re worse than you realize. It isn’t just that people have lost their lives or their homes due to a disaster, but that the disaster was engineered by sinister forces (including but not limited to the government) to accomplish a nefarious political goal.
So yesterday’s climate denier could become tomorrow’s climate obsessive, seeing in every disaster the hidden hand of the same global conspiracy that is creating all the world’s problems. “Climate change is the new covid,” said Congresswoman Green; “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.” It’s not fake, it’s a plot, one getting worse with each upward tick in global temperatures.
Of course, misinformation comes in a variety of forms — some downplayed Milton as a way of arguing that the elites are trying to frighten you — and even debunkings can be a path to elevated social media clout when so much focus is on these events.
It may be, as Tomson argues, that it takes something like an impending election to turn conspiracy theorizing around disasters up to 11. “We’ve never seen such an opportune moment to repackage disaster for political gain,” she told me. But the effects of climate change will only grow more intense and dramatic, and there will be political actors looking to turn them against their opponents — and frightened people ready to believe the worst.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – A new group – Keep Nantucket Wild – is mobilizing opposition to the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project, seeking to capitalize on the recent blade breakage to sever the town of Nantucket’s good neighbor agreement with project developer Avangrid.
2. East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana – One lowkey local election this fall may decide the future of Louisiana’s renewables: the swing seat on the state’s Public Service Commission, which is being vacated this year by a retiring moderate Republican.
3. Logan County, Ohio – Invenergy’s Fountain Point solar project cleared a hurdle with the Ohio Power Siting Board last month. But the 280 megawatt proposal may face a lengthy appeals process, according to Mike Yoder, a county commissioner who had recently served as an ad hoc member of the OPSB.
4. Riverside County, California – The federal government is now taking public comment on a 100+ megawatt solar farm proposed in the California desert in an area demarcated as a priority for energy development.
Here’s some more fights we’re watching closely…
In Maryland, commissioners in eastern Berlin County have rejected a TurningPoint Energy utility-scale solar farm.
In New Jersey, the group Save Long Beach Island filed a notice of intent to sue against the Atlantic Shores offshore wind approvals last week.
In New York, the town of Oyster Bay has extended its battery storage moratorium for six months to block a project proposed by Jupiter Power Company.
In North Dakota, regulators told staff to put together a final order on the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline, though no date or decision has been discussed.
In Oregon, grassroots opposition is mobilizing against a Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing project.