Voters don't care much about climate change — they're right

Climate alarmism doesn't work. It's also wrong.

Despite decades of public campaigning, the mythical “climate voter” remains elusive. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Almost 20 years after An Inconvenient Truth, and after more than a decade of pipeline protests and public-relations campaigns, activists’ efforts to recruit a meaningful army of “climate voters” have failed.

And survey after survey confirmed what many of us have long warned: Voters simply don’t care much about stopping climate change.

Despite this, some advocates seem to think they’re just one stirring speech away from getting the public to be as obsessed about carbon emissions as they are: “It is Time for us all To Wake Up. And Fight [sic],” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse this July, in his 300th floor speech on climate change.

As Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told The Nation earlier this year, “I constantly make the point that only 29 percent are very worried, when it should be 100 percent.”

Advocates should consider taking the public’s climate passivity both seriously and literally. This is in part because climate hawks, like all issue advocates, need to navigate competing political priorities, but also because there is wisdom in crowds.

Public sentiment, along with temperature measurements and insurance claims, is itself an important metric of climate impacts. And on the costs and risks related to climate change, the public gets some crucial empirics right.

This is not climate denial. Voters broadly agree with mainstream climate science. But against a backdrop of rising incomes, food that is much cheaper than it was a generation or two ago, and declining natural disaster mortality, it’s not unreasonable that most voters today are not “very worried” about climate change. There are, in fact, more important things to be worried about.

What could be more important than climate change?

We care about climate change in large part because it can make the world worse for humans by worsening dangerous extreme weather, by reducing agricultural output and thereby raising food prices, and through other effects that slow economic growth. But while global temperatures are indeed rising, driven almost entirely by society’s carbon emissions, the meteorological, public health, and infrastructural evidence paints a more nuanced picture of climate impacts.