Audience: Rural

Campaign wins don’t happen without broad-based, community organizing on the ground in the communities most impacted by the pipeline. Effective and successful climate campaigns require a combination of multiple strategies and actions, garnering as much organized influence on the local, state, national, and even international level. Welcome and support new leaders who’ve never been involved and respect them, even when their political and cultural views are different than your own. There is great need for building community and mutual support. A powerful key to victory was the collection and widespread dissemination of valid, reliable, and culturally responsive and competent research and use it wisely in the campaign alongside the power of committed and able people. This report documents organizing lessons learned from the experience of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in North Carolina.

Voters in rural-heavy counties in Georgia and Ohio tilt toward supporting wind and solar farms, but attitudes are quite malleable. Inoculation against character concerns is hard, so it may be better to focus proactive messaging on the benefits of wind and solar farms. A plurality of voters start out supporting wind and solar farms in their community but fewer than half of voters have intense attitudes either way and one-quarter are completely neutral. While voters intuitively get the pollution reduction benefits of these farms, they are more skeptical of the benefits to themselves and farmers – and they are concerned about their ROI. Encouragingly, our messaging is effective at increasing the belief that wind and solar farms will provide benefits to farmers and families – and that they create enough energy to be worth it. However, efforts to inoculate people against concerns about the impact on community character in this research were unsuccessful. Opposition attacks have a real impact, but simple pushback that ties this disinformation to Big Oil and Coal CEOs is quite successful in defusing these attacks. Positive messaging is effective at building support, especially with Democrats, less conservative Republicans, and women.

Support for clean energy is vulnerable to highly localized concerns. Rural residents hold favorable views of solar farms (55%) and wind farms (50%). When asked about wind/solar farms in their community, support drops to 37%. 61% of respondents have a favorable opinion of oil and gas companies while 59% have a favorable opinion of clean energy companies. Many believe that fossil fuel sources remain a critical part of our energy mix and don’t think clean energy will be ready to truly replace them any time soon. Advocates are more likely to win over rural hearts and minds by avoiding zero-sum thinking and leaning into the benefits of many energy sources. Early education can inoculate against mis/disinformation. Opposition messages are not that strong when a countervailing message is provided, especially when coming from trusted messengers. Overall, messages in opposition to clean energy were more than 10% less convincing in this research than messages in support.