President Obama is failing to persuade voters to move climate change up from the absolute bottom of their list of concerns.
He has tried a myriad of ways to raise anxiety over climate change, linking warming temperatures to national security, the economy and most recently on Tuesday, public health.
Still, most people rank climate change among their lowest priorities, even as Obama stakes his legacy on aggressive unilateral moves to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Obama’s primary challenge has been convincing Americans global warming is an immediate threat and that the United States will face devastating consequences unless consumers make dramatic changes in energy use and accept greater government restrictions on fossil fuel sources, such as coal-burning power plants.
Some environmentalists say Obama is at least partially to blame for the sense of complacency surrounding global warming, despite the president expending both public money and political capital to promoting alternative energy sources.
“I’m sorry it didn’t start earlier — it’s more of a second-term thing,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of the nonpartisan Clean Air Watch, of Obama’s climate messaging. “We’ve lost some time in the process. It’s a work in progress, for sure. It shows how hard it is to engage people on an issue that seems elusive.”
But public sentiment indicates Americans might like the president to spend even less time dealing with global warming.
When the Pew Research Center in January asked Americans to rank their top priorities, global warming came in 22nd out of 23 options, placing ahead only of global trade. Thirty-eight percent of respondents rated the issue a “top priority for Obama and Congress,” with nearly twice as many Americans saying the same of terrorism and the economy.
Those findings are hardly isolated.
A poll taken this month in Massachusetts, a liberal bastion that is generally more supportive of government efforts to address climate change, showed that just 41 percent of respondents said global warming should be a high priority for state officials, according to the MassINC poll.
For a president devoted to making his climate push a national priority — White House press secretary Josh Earnest Tuesday called Obama the “greenest president we’ve ever had” — such a trend is particularly troubling.
Obama is pledging to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025, part of an international climate treaty the administration hopes to finalize in December. The president’s blueprint for limiting carbon emissions from power plants is also set to face its first federal court challenge in coming days.
Those efforts, unanimously opposed by Republican lawmakers, would benefit from a stronger level of public backing. Conservatives see little political incentive to go along with the White House as long as the public, particularly Republicans, see climate change as a secondary issue.
However, Obama is waging his climate push not out of a position of political strength but one of moral imperative.
He unveiled his latest pitch Tuesday, arguing that climate change is bad for those with asthma, worsens allergies and has led to an uptick of insect-borne diseases.
“We’ve got to do better in protecting vulnerable Americans. Ultimately, though, all of our families are going to be vulnerable,” Obama said at a roundtable discussion in Washington on how global warming affects public health. You can’t cordon yourself off from air or from climate.”
More encouraging for the White House is that a greater share of Americans now view climate change as a real problem, even if they still rank it well behind issues such as jobs and combating terrorism.
But if polling during his White House tenure is any indication, Obama might have to settle for incremental shifts in perceptions on global warming rather than the type of massive public awakening he predicted in his second inaugural address.
“Americans are inherently suspicious of doomsday scenarios and people trying to scare you into a major lifestyle change,” explained Kenneth Green, senior director of natural resource studies at the Fraser Institute. “There are a lot of people who believe that climate change is real, but think the risk is moderate. Obama is not by himself going to move the needle for the average person.”
