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In terms of public opinion, energy issues enjoy the least partisan divide while environmental issues, such as climate change, are the most partisan. Over the past year, there has been an increase in the number of Americans who say human-caused pollution contributes to climate change—from 79% to 82%—and say their lives have been impacted by climate change—from 39% to 53%. 46% say “energy issues, like the cost of energy and energy reliability” are extremely important—including 46% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans. 41% overall say “environmental issues, like clean air, clean water, climate change, and clean energy” are extremely important—including 60% of Democrats and just 20% of Republicans. Voters say they are generally more likely to support candidates who are pro-clean energy. Republican and independent voters generally favor natural gas. Just 16% of voters think the U.S. is energy independent.

Does “evaluation” sound judgy, “research” feel like a luxury, “testing” pointless, or “data” too technical?
Then we welcome you to explore with us how developing a culture of testing, evaluation and learning is crucial to multiracial, cross-class organizing in the climate movement. Evaluation and learning allow you to get real-time feedback about what is working (or not), and the space to grow from your experience and make shifts to your work. So it’s crucial to understanding the areas we are successfully building power and where we need to experiment and iterate. If we can’t track and improve, how do we know if we are on the way to winning?

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including a new messaging experiment to determine the most persuasive ways to talk about clean energy costs, findings from Yale’s latest mapping of climate change attitudes across the country, new polling on corporate accountability, and a new poll on Texas voters’ attitudes about climate and clean energy a year after the Texas Freeze.

The heart of today’s Insight is a guest column from Deb Lavoy at Reality Team. Billing themselves as “reality’s marketing team”, they take on the challenge of combatting disinformation of all sorts by competing directly for the attention of those people most likely to consume and believe it. Deb outlines the team’s program design of 10-second ad son Instagram, the successes, and how they measured its impact. It’s a compelling read. Hear from her yourself by registering for the Lab’s webinar on fighting disinformation.
Before we dive in, here’s one last plug for the Lab’s Spring Training for Impact Cohort. Applications close on Monday, February 28th. We have 25 spots and we’d like you to force us into hard decisions about who gets them. Pass the word on or apply yourself!