When the New Orleans City Council discussed a proposal for a $210 million gas-fired power plant in 2017, something felt off about the public meetings in City Hall. At one hearing, dozens of people in orange shirts clapped as a speaker spoke against wind and solar power and gave speeches in support of the power plant. After the City Council approved the project the following year, the local news office The lens discovered that many of the audience members were paid actors, hired by a public relations firm for the utility Entergy to create an illusion of popular support for the project and convince lawmakers. “I think it had a phenomenal impact on public opinion,” one city councilor said at the time.
It illustrates how far companies will go to influence elected officials. Politicians have elections to worry about, which gives them a common motivation to avoid moves that would be unpopular. In fact, one survey found that congressional representatives termed “staying in touch with constituents” as the most important aspect of their work. But behind the scenes, there is a very meta battle to sway what politicians consider popular opinion.
“What really matters, in some ways, is not objectively what the public thinks, but what decision makers do think the public thinks,” said Matto Mildenberger, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In general, politicians tend to think that climate action is much less popular than it really is. The latest example comes from a new study, published in the journal Nature Energy earlier this month found that local elected officials in Pennsylvania underestimated support among their constituents for large solar projects. Based on survey responses from nearly 900 residents and more than 200 policymakers, researchers found that Pennsylvanians like solar projects 7 percentage points more than natural gas. However, local officials misconstrued that preference and thought of natural gas, which is primarily composed of the powerful greenhouse gas methanewould be more popular.
Since local officials has a lot of sway over which energy projects are approvedthis misperception could translate into fewer clean energy projects being built, slowing the transition away from fossil fuels. Pennsylvania has been identified as the state with the fifth most solar capacity by 2050, according to Princeton’s model work for how the country can achieve net zero emissions. “In the vast majority of the US, the real ‘Is this project going to get built or not?’ is decided at the local level,” said Holly Caggiano, co-author of the study and professor of climate justice and environmental planning at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Understanding what Americans believe about climate change can also delay climate action at the national level. A 2019 study co-authored by Mildenberger showed this congressional staffers underestimated the popularity of limits on carbon emissions in their local districts. The same bias was true of elected officials at the state level, according to his research. “We absolutely must believe that these perceptions limit the ambition of climate and energy policy,” Mildenberger said. “This is one factor among many that makes solving the climate crisis more difficult.”
It’s not just politicians who hold a distorted view: People systematically underestimate public support for climate policy. A 2022 study found that Americans imagined that only a minority of their fellow citizens supported a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, when it was actually an overwhelming majority – meaning that actual support for climate policy was almost double what they thought.
Part of the problem is that people who support renewable energy or climate policy usually don’t talk about it muchwhich gives everyone else a distorted impression of how popular, or unpopular, those beliefs really are. “Often opponents to projects are very, very loud,” Caggiano said. In addition, media coverage may give unpopular opinions excessive weight to present “both sides” of an issue. While that practice has faded in climate science coverage, it is still common in articles about climate policy debates, Mildenberger said.
Some politicians have a more skewed view than others. Those who oppose climate action tend to be even further off in their estimates of what the public wants, due to a psychological bias that assumes most of their constituents share their views. But the information lawmakers are exposed to also affects the size of that perception gap — it widened when officials got more campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests, and when they reported having more contact with conservative interest groups, Mildenberger’s 2019 study shows. For example, those groups can push polls that make a climate policy seem unpopular, Mildenberger said.
“There’s this enormous effort by the industry to shape what politicians think the public wants,” Mildenberger said.
Pro-fossil fuel interests may also engage in “astroturfing,” a PR strategy that fakes grassroots support for a cause, like Entergy’s natural gas-fired power plant in New Orleans. The tactic has also been used in national debates. In 2009, when Congress considered the Waxman-Markey bill that would establish a federal cap-and-trade program, a lobbying group for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity was forged more than a dozen letters opposed, presumably from local community groups concerned about rising energy prices, and sent it to members of Congress. The bill passed the House by a narrow margin, but was never brought up for a vote in the Senate.
There are accurate sources of information that show what Americans think about climate change, such as nonpartisan polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which found that nearly three quarters of Americans wants to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Learning that the position they hold is unpopular with voters may even lead politicians to change their position on an issue, at least according to one study from Belgium.
More than a decade after the Waxman-Markey debacle, in 2022, Congress finally passed major climate legislation: The Inflation Reduction Act invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy, heat pumps and other low-carbon technologies. Since there hasn’t been significant public backlash to the law, this is one data point that can help correct politicians’ misperceptions of public opinion, Mildenberger said. But he warns that fossil fuel interests are still very active in blocking climate-friendly policies. “We should have every reason to expect that they will continue to bring more distorted information into the political arena to try to tilt that arena in their favor.”
