A recent article from WRAL News, a North Carolina NBC affiliate, titled “Climate change takes a back seat in campaigns, but research suggests voters still care,” claims: climate change is making storms worse and life more expensive; that people want climate action; and suggests that green policy offers cost savings on energy bills. Each of these points is false. Climate change has not make extreme weather like hurricanes worse. Rather, green policies have caused rising energy bills, not climate change itself. Additionally, people may say that they want climate action, but repeated polls show they are not willing to pay or sacrifice much for it. Climate change ranks way down the list of concerns.
WRAL opines that affordability was a main area of discussion for Democrat candidates this year, rather than climate change, which they assert “remains a concern for many voters.”
They look at the North Carolina Senate race as an example of the “disconnect,” where Democrat Governor Roy Cooper seemed to have dropped or limited talking about climate change on the campaign trail, while he discussed it often during his governorship, including blaming Hurricane Helene on climate change.
Hurricane Helene was not caused or worsened by climate change, despite what biased attribution groups claimed at the time. We at Climate Realism covered that in depth here, here, and here. Later in the article, WRAL tries to connect climate change to rising insurance costs, but this is another red herring, which Climate Realism has addressed on numerous occasions. Extreme weather is not becoming more frequent, so it cannot be to blame for rising insurance costs, even if insurance companies try to shift that blame away from themselves.
Gov. Cooper focused this year’s campaign on affordability instead, which WRAL says is a shift in how politicians discuss energy policy. The implication is that this is a bad thing, that climate is taking a backseat in these discussions. WRAL and those they interview for this piece couldn’t be more wrong. If Democrats are serious about designing energy policy based on what is most affordable, then that is good, a positive shift in their policy focus, However, it’s doubtful that Democrats have genuinely shifted their priorities. Much more likely, climate change dropped from public campaigns because voters know that climate policy means higher costs.
WRAL cites polling research that found “messaging focused on cost savings can increase support for renewable energy across party lines, suggesting affordability and climate action do not have to be competing campaign priorities.”
Except, renewables are directly responsible for higher rates across the country. Recent studies have found that high penetration of renewables is directly correlated to the fastest rising energy costs in the country, like in places like California. If Democrats are claiming otherwise, they are misleading their voters, possibly outright knowingly lying.
The reason they lie about this, is because while polling shows if you ask people if they are concerned about climate change, they say “yes,” it also shows that the associated increased cost of living that comes with various policies proposed to fight climate change are very unpopular, and not just in the United States either.
For instance, a YouGov poll from 2023 found that while Europeans said they were worried about climate change, most were unwilling to make the kinds of lifestyle changes that green activists and politicians say are necessary to stop global warming. Those would be changes such as giving up or even limiting meat consumption, limiting the number of children they have, or paying extra fuel taxes.
The Yale study that WRAL cites is unsurprising. It found that a majority of people claim that they are “worried” about global warming, and that they want candidates who will “support action to address” it. But this support means little if voters don’t want the policies that will supposedly address it. A poll from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (UC/AP) in 2023 also found that the majority of people are unwilling to do something as simple as pay a single dollar per month to fight climate change.
Climate policy is meant to limit the use of products like gasoline and affordable energy like natural gas, necessitating that those things become much more expensive. Proponents of net zero and climate action are aware of this fact.
Another survey WRAL looked at said that “that roughly two-thirds of registered voters believe global warming is contributing to higher utility bills. That finding measures voters’ perceptions, and does not establish any factual connection between climate change and what individual energy users pay for transportation fuel and electricity.
Voters have been misled to believe that global warming is causing higher bills, when it is actually climate policy itself. This is one of the most deceitful narratives promoted by politicians and the mainstream media. Renewables like wind and solar raise utility bills and reduce the reliability of the grid itself, especially when the policy is paired with reliable coal plants being prematurely shuttered — even some natural gas plants have been closed before their official retirement.
Again, people might claim they want to tackle climate change, but it ranks extremely low (and lower every year) on their concerns list, and they are unwilling to pay more to do so. Democrats like Cooper, and media like WRAL, are misleading voters by claiming falsely that renewables are less expensive. Democrats ran on affordability. If the past is any guide, the policies they promote to fix it will only make the problem worse.
