In the past few months, there has been a lot of talk about the science of climate change, with challenges coming from inside the Trump Administration. In fact, the EPA Administrator has made his intentions to review the science very clear. As a result, it is unclear how an administrative push to challenge the science is related to the perspective of the US climate policy network (or the policy actors who make the decisions about energy and climate policy in the United States).
As part of our Post-Election wave of the Climate Constituencies Project, we once again surveyed the top policy actors involved in climate and energy issues at the federal level and in four swing states: Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio. In each, the ‘top policy actors’ were identified using a methodology adapted from our previous work, which has been published in Nature Climate Change, and Contexts. This post-election survey began after the Trump Administration's first 100 days and closed at the end of June. As part of it, we once again asked the top policy actors their attitudes about the science of climate change. Responses were scored on a scale of 1-5 ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, mean scores from the pre-election wave in 2016 and the post-election wave in 2017 are reported in the table above.
The results show that, although federal attitudes have gone down slightly, there continues to be an overwhelming level of consensus around the science of climate change among policy actors at the Federal level and in these four swing states. As with our pre-election wave, there are no statistically significant differences in opinions on these questions across the four states and at the federal level.
- Dana R. Fisher (drfisher@umd.edu)
As part of our Post-Election wave of the Climate Constituencies Project, we once again surveyed the top policy actors involved in climate and energy issues at the federal level and in four swing states: Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio. In each, the ‘top policy actors’ were identified using a methodology adapted from our previous work, which has been published in Nature Climate Change, and Contexts. This post-election survey began after the Trump Administration's first 100 days and closed at the end of June. As part of it, we once again asked the top policy actors their attitudes about the science of climate change. Responses were scored on a scale of 1-5 ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, mean scores from the pre-election wave in 2016 and the post-election wave in 2017 are reported in the table above.
The results show that, although federal attitudes have gone down slightly, there continues to be an overwhelming level of consensus around the science of climate change among policy actors at the Federal level and in these four swing states. As with our pre-election wave, there are no statistically significant differences in opinions on these questions across the four states and at the federal level.
- Dana R. Fisher (drfisher@umd.edu)
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