Issue: Energy Policy

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including polling on infrastructure and climate policy and oil and gas company accountability.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including polling on infrastructure policy, conservative clean energy beliefs, and conservation as a bipartisan priority.

President Biden sped around in a new Ford F-150 Lightning earlier this week proclaiming, “This sucker’s quick!”
Of course, we’ve also seen a “quick” acceleration in the electric vehicle space over the past few months, with Biden calling for huge investments in EVs and charging infrastructure as part of the American Jobs Plan and numerous automakers announcing plans to phase out production of gas vehicles. The last time our team examined insights around transportation electrification*, the Trump administration was challenging California’s clean car standards. Today, that effort is dead and more than a dozen states have adopted the standards and are moving forward with policy implementation. Yay for progress!
However, even with momentum (and renewed concern about the price and availability of gas, with the recent Colonial Pipeline cyber-attack), fewer than 1% of U.S. cars are electric. Analysts project sales of gasoline-powered vehicles need to end by 2035 if we want a fully electric fleet by 2050, requiring a much more ambitious timeline than current policies dictate.
This week, we dig into insights from a slew of recent polling and messaging research that helps us understand how to structure campaigns that build the public and political will necessary for a just transition to clean cars – while also recognizing the importance of reducing vehicle miles traveled overall and ending our dependence on single-occupancy vehicles.