Resource Type: Research & Articles

This new series at The Forge will engage organizers with a deceptively simple question: what’s your power analysis? Powerful actors and institutions are creating and purposefully maintaining unjust political and economic systems for their own benefit. This article series aims for sharper and more shared approaches and language across our movements for describing, measuring, and analyzing power. In this series, this author will talk to organizers and movement leaders — including Doran Schrantz of Faith in Minnesota, Andrea Mercado of Florida Rising, leaders at the New Georgia Project Action Fund, and others from across the progressive movement — about the power analysis that guides their work and their organizations, the power they’re trying to build and exercise, how it’s going, and how they know.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including new polling on oil and gas companies’ price gouging; clean energy investment as part of potential new economic legislation in Washington; the links between climate change and public health, pollution, and extreme weather; and Americans’ emotional responses to climate change.

This article discusses seven key sources of opposition to renewable projects and recommendations for a path forward.

Accountability, gas, and electric vehicles were the climate-related issues that gained most social media traction in April and May 2022. These short reports from 4 regions of the US (Midwest, Southeast, Northeast, West) show some top-performing social media posts per category from April-May. The reports also describe how three issue areas did not get as much traction as expected: transportation, offshore wind, and renewables. These trends were true across all 4 regions. These reports conclude with a way to “put it all together” when constructing social media messaging, including these sample messages: “Jobs: clean energy jobs are real,” “Health: clean energy is safe; fossil fuels threaten your health,” “Action: climate policies are an investment worth making now,” “Fairness: climate change hurts the most vulnerable the hardest,” “Impacts: climate change is directly impacting you,” and “Lies: fossil fuel interests are lying to you; they want to protect their profits—not you.”