More and more Americans believe climate change harms our health

Today 39 percent of Americans believe that global warming is harming our health “a great deal” or “a moderate amount,” up from 31 percent in 2014. 

In addition, 37 percent of Americans can identify at least one specific climate-related danger— including respiratory problems, extreme heat, pollution and extreme weather events. 

And a growing share of Americans believe that harms like heat stroke, asthma and lung disease, bodily harm from extreme weather and hunger will be more common in their community over the next 10 years if nothing is done to address global warming.

These findings are from a survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s (GMU) Center for Climate Change Communication. Surveyors quizzed more than 1,000 adults in December and released their findings February 28. Keerti Gopal wrote about the survey for Inside Climate News.

Respondents increasingly trust physicians, climate scientists, federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), local public health departments and the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide information about the health harms of global warming.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax,” has proposed deep cuts in EPA’s and CDC’s budgets, removed climate and health information from government websites, and withdrawn the U.S. from WHO.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.

The public’s growing awareness of the link between climate change and people’s health could bolster efforts to combat global warming, according to Edward Maibach, director of GMU’s Center for Climate Change Communication and one of the survey’s principal investigators.

Globally, the World Health Organization has estimated that climate change will cause an extra 250,000 annual deaths from 2030 to 2050 from heat stress, malnutrition, malaria and diarrhea alone. 

Inside Climate News reported that the survey reflected increased understanding of well-researched threats to human health: 65 percent of Americans believe that coal harms people’s health, and 38 percent believe natural gas does, a nine-point increase since 2018. 

But the survey also found that 15 percent of Americans believe wind energy harms health and 12 percent believe the same about solar power, both increases since 2014. Claims that wind energy or solar power are harmful to human health are unproven and many have been debunked, Gopal wrote, but they’re still being made by some government officials, fossil fuel industry groups and media outlets.

Who should help protect the public from the health threats posed by climate change? According to the Yale-GMU survey, 39% of Americans think federal agencies such as CDC, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should do more on this front. Twenty-four percent think doctors, nurses, and other health professionals should do more.

Billionaires have been largely silent on climate change recently

Elon Musk once described himself as “super pro-climate” and, as founder of Tesla, he has been a giant in the move toward electric vehicles. In 2016, he called for a “popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry because the world was “unavoidably headed toward some level of harm and the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result.”

When President Donald Trump removed the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Musk quit a presidential advisory body in protest. “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

In his first appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast in 2018, Musk stressed how strong the scientific agreement on climate change is, saying, “The scientific consensus is overwhelming. I mean, I don’t know any serious scientists – zero, literally zero – who don’t think that we have quite a serious climate risk that we’re facing.”

But Musk “has had little to say,” The Guardian’s Oliver Milman noted, after Trump once again pulled the U.S. from the Paris deal and issued a flurry of orders to ramp up oil and gas drilling and stymie renewable energy production. In January, Musk said: “Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.”

Musk is one of a number of prominent billionaires who have spoken out in recent years about the threat posed by climate change. And he’s one of a number who have been largely silent as the president has moved aggressively to reverse the nation’s transition to clean energy. “The silence from this slice of the billionaire and technology world was in line with the deferential posture of much of the rest of corporate America,” The New York Times’ David Gelles wrote.

While Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has never made climate action his primary cause, in a speech to Harvard graduates in 2017, he did call on the class to join in “stopping climate change before we destroy the planet.” That same year, he wrote in a post on Facebook: “Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk.” 

One exception in this sea of recent silence is Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, Gelles reported, Bloomberg said his charity would step in to help fund the United Nations climate body following the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement.

“The American people remain determined to continue the fight against the devastating effects of climate change,” he said in a statement, lamenting what he called “a period of federal inaction.”

This would be an appropriate time for this billionaire class to rediscover its climate voice and explain to the president that climate change is not, as he has labeled it, “a giant hoax.” Globally, 2024 was the warmest year on record—more than two and half degrees hotter than the preindustrial average. In the U.S., there were 27 climate-related disasters that caused more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage. 

Elon Musk has set his sights on Mars. First, he–and his fellow billionaires–should focus on Earth.

Trump Vows to Prevent Wind Energy from Moving Forward

What does the new occupant of the Oval Office think of wind farms? "They litter our country, they're littered all over our country like dropping paper, like dropping garbage in a field,” President Donald Trump said at a news conference before taking office a second time. “They're rusting, rotting, closed, falling down ... And they put new ones next to them because nobody wants to take them down, because why should they take them down? It's very expensive to take them down."

Wind is an energy source that “he has bashed ever since he unsuccessfully tried to stop an offshore wind farm from being built in view of one of his Scottish golf courses,” Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Trump insisted that wind farms ‘obviously’ kill whales, although scientists have said there is no evidence to support that…” Not only that, he has said, they “kill all the birds” and cause cancer.

“We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump declared.

One fervent ally is Republican Congressman Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who said he is working with Trump’s team to draft an executive order that would “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast. “This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a January 13 statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”

Wind provides about ten percent of the nation’s electricity, a portion that is growing. It accounted for 22 percent of new installed electricity capacity in 2022, and the wind energy industry employs more than 125,000 workers.

“The No. 1 state for wind energy is Texas, and it has been for two and a half decades, so this is a bipartisan energy source,” Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The New York Times. “The fact is that wind energy is cheap and clean American-made power.” 

How much authority does the president have to thwart wind energy? Trump would not be able to control what is built on private land, Friedman and Plumer noted. He would have influence, but not absolute authority, over whether wind power can be produced on federal lands and waters. If the government has already issued leases for wind farms, then legally, companies must be issued permits if they choose to move forward with projects.

Trump has a better chance of thwarting offshore projects than onshore. Coastal wind is a younger industry and requires an array of federal approvals, while land-based wind is a big industry in red states. Largely through delays in permitting, the first Trump administration hobbled what was a fledgling offshore wind industry.

The wind industry is working overtime to fend off the threats from the White House. Instead of touting projects as “clean and affordable,” renewables firms are highlighting their projects’ ability to “meet energy needs,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Some executives say they are pinning their hopes on Trump’s interior secretary, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. North Dakota is a coal and oil state, but under Burgum it also has welcomed wind energy, which provided 36 percent of its power generation in 2023.

The industry hopes that the president will back away from his “no wind” vow because of the nation’s growing appetite for electricity. “It’s all about demand right now,” said Jim Murphy, president and co-founder of Invenergy, a developer of renewables, transmission and natural-gas power. “If you look at the forecasts, we’re going to need everything as fast as we can get it.”

Signs of possible bipartisan progress on carbon pricing

No one would say that bipartisanship is having its moment in Washington. Yet there is at least a sign of it in legislation dealing with climate and trade. 

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana “is making his hardest sell yet on conservative legislation linking climate action with trade policy,” Emma Dumain wrote December 12 in E&E Daily. Along with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Cassidy recently unveiled a slimmed-down, 20-page “discussion draft” of their year-old Foreign Pollution Fee Act. 

GOP leaders are talking about putting together two budget reconciliation packages, and Cassidy believes his bill could be a prime candidate for inclusion. “It’s consistent with what the Trump administration wants to do,” Cassidy told reporters. “It could actually raise revenue for a reconciliation bill, and so therefore we want to get it more into the discussion now.” The legislation’s goal is to leverage data showing that the U.S. produces certain materials “cleaner” than other nations — namely China — and impose a fee on certain imports.

“The fee,” Dumain reported. “would still only affect foreign products, continuing to ignore the argument from many Democrats and advocates that a domestic price on carbon is necessary for any new trade policy to meet compliance with the World Trade Organization.”

The original bill included energy imports like oil, natural gas, hydrogen, minerals, solar panels and wind turbines. So-called “covered products” in the new bill would include only aluminum, cement, glass, iron, fertilizer and steel.

A Cassidy spokesperson said the senator and his team suggested the final list of products was the result of a yearlong listening tour with different industries “to better understand their trade profile and their challenges in countering unfair competition from China.”

Shuting Pomerleau, director of energy and environmental policy at the center-right group American Action Forum, said she noticed a major bright spot in the two-page summary sheet of the measure that Cassidy’s office released: The “polluters’ fee” would be designed to “correlate to the environmental performance of U.S. production and U.S. imports to qualify for the WTO’s environmental policy exceptions.”

“It shows me they are trying to make this a climate bill,” she said. “They are trying to find WTO compliance without a domestic carbon price.”

Some green-oriented groups are somewhat clear-eyed about what Cassidy is hoping to accomplish. Zach Friedman, senior director for federal policy at Ceres, said the bill was always going to be a “trade and competition bill with environmental benefits” rather than strictly a climate measure.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat who has championed the effort on Capitol Hill to combat climate change, commended his Republican colleagues. “I give [Cassidy and Graham] a lot of credit for what they’ve done,” he said during a forum at Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. “Obviously, there’s a lot of fossil fuel blowback against them, but they’ve stuck to their guns so good on them.”

Whitehouse added that while bipartisan negotiations on carbon pricing are positive developments and the American public is widely supportive of placing the cost of pollution on polluters themselves, “we have to fight through enormous fossil fuel intervention,” including billions in dark money, in order to enact effective climate reform and enforce it.

The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)—a tariff that mainly will affect imported goods from the cement, electricity, fertilizer, some metals, and hydrogen sectors from countries outside the EU—will take effect in 2026. That should create added momentum for Congress to price carbon, noted Catherine Wolfram, a professor of energy economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a former official at the U.S. Treasury. “The economic logic behind product pricing is so potent and so persuasive, I think that the U.S. will come to this realization,” Wolfram said.

Senator Whitehouse agreed but also pointed to obstacles that hinder carbon pricing legislation. Several bills proposing a federal carbon tax have been floated and failed in recent years, but, Whitehouse said, a new wave of them holds some promise.

Whether the U.S. will adopt meaningful carbon pricing legislation depends on whether politicians can understand that “there are now no remaining known scenarios for a pathway to climate safety that don’t include carbon pricing,” Whitehouse said. “…There can be no more quarrel on that.”

Climate Policy May Be About to Make a U-Turn

Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office is likely to mean a U-turn on Biden-era climate and energy policies that are incomplete or under court challenge, Axios reported the day after his victory.  He has vowed to rescind funds under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provides unprecedented support for low-carbon energy and which he has derided as “the green new scam.”

Much of the act’s grant and loan funding remains unspent. However, since 80 percent of the funds so far have flowed to Red districts, creating many jobs, some congressional Republicans will resist wholesale cutbacks in the IRA.

While trying to undo efforts to promote renewable energy sources, the 47th president will also be taking steps to implement his “drill, baby, drill” agenda. In particular, offshore leasing in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to accelerate rapidly.

Unfortunately, an oil-championing American president is likely to embolden other petrostates to take up his “drill baby drill” mantra and weaken environmental protections elsewhere, particularly in developing economies, Somini Sengupta reported in The New York Times. “This may derail focus on renewable-energy projects in emerging markets, incentivizing Nigeria and other oil and gas producers to continue to prioritize oil and gas for short-term economic gain,” said Gbenga Oyebode, a lawyer in Nigeria who follows the energy industry.

Meantime, Trump is widely expected to follow through on his vow to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement, as he did during his first term.

Such a reversal of policy comes at a perilous time. Climate change-worsened disasters have killed hundreds of Americans during the past few months alone and, as ABC reported, recent flooding in Spain has claimed 219 lives so far, with 93 people still missing. Climate scientists are warning that the planet is on track to blow past targets established by the Paris accord. The European climate agency Copernicus announced that 2024 is assured to be the first calendar year where the global temperature rise has averaged 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The president-elect’s plans warm the hearts of some Americans. “Our long national nightmare with the Green New Deal is finally over because energy was on the ballot in 2024, and energy won,” said Daniel Turner, the executive director for Power the Future, a fossil fuel advocacy group.

Of course, those who consider a u-turn on climate a dangerous mistake will not be sitting on their hands. States are now likely to become a bulwark against federal efforts to undo climate policy, wrote The New York Times’ Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman. “The locus of climate action is going to shift to the states,” said Martin Lockman, a fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. 

“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back,” said Gina McCarthy, President Biden’s former climate adviser who now helps lead America Is All In, a coalition of elected leaders, community groups and businesses promoting climate policies. She called any attempt to overturn the IRA “a fool’s errand.”

Many policymakers are expressing optimism that cheap, renewable technologies would be able to displace fossil fuels simply on economic grounds, according to The Washington Post.

Ironically, Trump’s efforts to hobble the transition to clean energy would hand a geopolitical win to our country’s main rival, China, which has spent a decade building up a powerful clean-energy industry and is now increasingly exporting it worldwide.