Issue: Environmental/Climate Justice

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including polling on the American Jobs Plan, taxes for infrastructure, the Keystone XL cancellation, and climate impacts.

This report looks at this process of power building for just transition in four states: California, Kentucky, Louisiana, and New York. We combine an analysis of the pillars of just transition – strong governmental support, dedicated funding streams, diverse coalitions, and economic diversification – with an analysis of how to change power at a state level that focuses on the conditions that impact possibilities, the community-level capabilities that facilitate effective voice, and the arenas in which power is contested.

In this 60 minute training, we will dive into the root causes of the climate crisis. We will be particularly focusing on a race, class and gender analysis. Next, we will be talking through why it is important to have these analyses when organizing, launching campaigns and working in coalition spaces. Lastly, we will walk participants through how to develop their own narrative power around the story of self, story of us and story of now.

This week’s Insight recaps our Research + Experimentation 9 convening last week, highlighting some of the top research and movement strategies from the field in the past year. We’ve also got a climate equity survey, upcoming trainings, and job listings.

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.

A broad majority young Americans understand anthropogenic climate change, but many are struggling to identify individual practices they can take to improve global sustainability, according to a survey of 15-25 year olds on climate change, environmental justice, and related public policy initiatives.

38% call climate change a crisis, 31% say it’s a problem, 12% a concern, 9% a non-issue, and 8% label it fiction.
While 44% of young Americans are either “very” (21%) or “somewhat” (23%) optimistic the world will successfully address climate change, 47% are either “somewhat” (12%) or “very” (25%) pessimistic
Respodents expressed a strong desire to do their part in mitigating climate change, but many were unsure how:
27% of respondents say they have reduced their usage of single-use plastics, 14% take alternate transportation, and 12% have curtailed electrical use. Another 14% have participated in a march or protest, and 10% have volunteered to create change. 67% have shared climate information on social media. (89% report they get the majority of their news from social media.)
67% of respondents report they do not believe U.S. residents are equally protected against exposure to pollution and other ecological hazards and 37% characterize environmental justice in the U.S. as “extremely inequitable.”
The survey also found significant support for many of President Biden’s environmental actions.