Resource Type: Experiments

If we focus on women, we can persuade twice as many people for the same resources. Time and again, women just appear to be significantly more persuadable to become climate advocates than men. In other words, when men and women are shown the same messages, we see significantly higher increases in “support for government action on climate change” with women. Fossil fuel industry messaging works on men, but not much on women. In a test about job creation versus job loss, which pitted a pro-climate message against an ad from the oil-and-gas industry, women were two times more likely to be persuaded to strongly support climate action. Even after viewing the fossil fuel industry’s ad, they remained strong supporters for climate action. In contrast, viewing a fossil fuel industry ad tended to decrease support for action among men; viewing a pro-climate message, which would otherwise increase support among men on its own, did not counteract the fossil fuel industry’s job loss message.

This post includes a roundup of climate + environment headlines from this week’s public polls, good data points to highlight, and a full roundup with key takeaways from each poll – including lots of timely new polling on the Build Back Better plan.
HEADLINES

Yahoo + YouGov – Americans support Biden’s “$3.5 trillion infrastructure plan” by double digits, and a plurality support using the budget reconciliation process to overcome a Republican filibuster (Topline, Crosstabs)
POLITICO + Morning Consult – Voters widely support tax breaks for renewable energy in the reconciliation bill, even when it’s framed as a Democratic proposal (Topline, Crosstabs)
Data for Progress + Invest in America – Voters support the Build Back Better plan by a two-to-one margin after reading an explanation of its components; grid modernization continues to be one of the plan’s most popular provisions (Release, Topline)
LCV + Climate Power – Majorities of voters across Democratic-held U.S. Senate battleground states (AZ, CO, GA, NH + NV) support the Build Back Better plan after a brief description, and majorities also reject the idea of trimming the bill down; top messages focus on jobs, pollution/health, and lowering utility bills (Deck, Memo, AZ Topline, CO Topline, GA Topline, NH Topline, NV Topline)
Navigator – Climate is rising as a national priority; two in five voters say that weather in their community this summer has been different from past years, and most who have experienced unusual weather cite climate change as the reason (Release, Deck, Topline)
Data for Progress – “Green jobs” are a confusing concept for voters (Memo)
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication – Moderates have similar reactions to “climate change” and “extreme weather” as the rationale for emergency preparedness actions and policies, but there are benefits to using “extreme weather” with conservative audiences (Article)

The Climate Reality Project and Citizens’ Climate Lobby were interested in knowing whether informing people about existing bipartisan governmental bodies (e.g., the Climate Solutions Caucus in the US House of Representatives) would make the public, in particular moderates and conservatives, both think and act differently about climate. Their hypothesis was that signaling bipartisanship and governmental provenance in an organization could increase enthusiasm about climate action by showing people that powerful interests could unite to tackle the issue.
They find that messaging about government initiatives (as opposed to business and NGO efforts) significantly increases peoples’ sense of efficacy for climate action, which then translates to increased support for personal action-taking. Among conservative men, emphasizing bipartisan government action increases their support for personal action by 30% compared to the bipartisan NGO condition due to raising their second-order beliefs. In other words, telling conservative men that bipartisan governmental groups exist to work on climate change reduces their propensity to say that the average Republican opposes climate action by the government. The researchers do not find any evidence that emphasizing bipartisan government action increases respondents’ optimism about the climate crisis.

Sending personal emails to elected officials seems more effective than sending bulk form emails. Further, given the low level of constituent messaging to politicians (at least in Canada) on climate change, there may be an opportunity to increase the volume of personal messages to increase the attention paid by politicians to the issue. This field experiment found that sending campaign emails to the Members of the Canadian Parliament asking them to make their own Twitter posts about climate change didn’t have much of an effect (neither when employing different issue frames such as public health nor standard environmental). However, follow-up interviews with parliament office staffers revealed that they’re more likely to pass along information to the politician they work for if there are enough (more than a couple) messages that are personalized by the sender—not bulk emails sent in the same way. Staffers also revealed that they generally don’t receive communication very often about climate change.

Prompts to help you think through developing a research project, from big-picture strategy to the specifics of a hypothesis.

Individual studies come out all the time (and the Lab loves to let you know about all of them when they do), but it can be difficult to piece together the big picture from all the data points. Occasionally we get to do that when researchers comprehensively review and synthesize a whole body of others’ work (in what’s known as a “meta-analysis”). It’s smart to pay more attention to such meta-analyses than the back and forth of individual studies: just like IPCC reports are more authoritative than any one climate research paper. Today we discuss surprising results and important guidance for anyone planning climate persuasion programs from such a review, published earlier this year.
And the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall is Sunday, so check out the solidarity toolkit as #WeRemember.
I’ll also add that with the reconciliation outline just having passed the US House, you may wish to revisit our earlier newsletters on infrastructure legislation organizing and best practices for policymaker contact.