Politics & Global Warming, April 2022
4.1. About half of registered voters think policies that promote clean energy will improve economic growth and create jobs.
About half of registered voters (52%) think policies that promote clean energy will improve economic growth and create jobs, while three in ten (30%) think it will have the opposite effect, reducing growth and costing jobs, and 17% think it will have no impact either way.1
Opinion is sharply divided along political lines; large majorities of liberal Democrats (87%) and moderate/conservative Democrats (65%) think clean energy policies will have a positive impact on the economy and jobs, while liberal/moderate Republicans are about evenly split (41% think such policies will have a positive impact and 39% think they will have a negative impact), and two in three conservative Republicans (67%) think the policies will have a negative impact.
4.2. Most registered voters think the clean energy industry will create more good jobs than the fossil fuel industry.
More than half of registered voters (57%) think increasing production of clean energy in the U.S. will produce more new jobs than will increasing fossil fuel production, while 42% think the opposite (that increasing fossil fuel production will create more jobs than increasing clean energy production).2Large majorities of liberal Democrats (91%) and moderate/conservative Democrats (72%) think clean energy production will produce more good jobs. In contrast, 55% of liberal/moderate Republicans and a large majority of conservative Republicans (79%) think increasing fossil fuel production will create more good U.S. jobs.
Table of Contents
1. Global Warming as a Voting Issue
2. Global Warming and Clean Energy as Government Priorities
3. Support for Policies to Reduce the Pollution that Causes Global Warming
4. Energy Production as an Economic Issue
5. Who is Responsible for Action on Global Warming?
6. State and Local Government Action on Global Warming
7. Political Actions to Limit Global Warming
Citation
Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Rosenthal, S., Kotcher, J., Carman, J., Neyens, L., Myers, T., Goldberg, M., Campbell, E., Lacroix, K., & Marlon, J. (2022). Politics & Global Warming, April 2022. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.