Climate Change in the American Mind: Beliefs & Attitudes.  Climate Communication.......Yale.edu by Anthony Leiserowitz, Edward Maibach, Seth Rosenthal, John Kotcher, Emily Goddard, Jennifer Carman, Matthew Ballew, Marija Verner, Jennifer Marlon, Sanguk Lee, Teresa Myers, Matthew Goldberg, Nicholas Badullovich and Kathryn Thier Fall 2023

1. Global Warming Beliefs

1.1. Most Americans think global warming is happening. Americans who think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it is not happening by a ratio of nearly 5 to 1. About seven in ten Americans (72%) think global warming is happening. By contrast, only 15% of Americans think global warming is not happening. Twelve percent say they don’t know if global warming is happening. 

1.2. When Americans who “don’t know” if global warming is happening are asked for their best guess, more say “yes” than “no.” Survey respondents who say they “don’t know” whether global warming is happening in response to the question in Section 1.1 (refer to data tables, p. 31) are then asked to provide their best guess as to whether or not global warming is happening. Over time, this follow-up question has produced a relatively stable pattern in which more of these Americans “lean” toward “yes” than “no” (refer to data tables, p. 32). When the “leaners,” as determined by this follow-up question, are added to the totals of those who responded “yes” or “no” to the question reported in Section 1.1, we find that a total of 80% of Americans think global warming is happening or lean toward that position, while 20% think global warming is not happening or lean toward that position.

1.3. About half of Americans are “extremely” or “very” sure global warming is happening. About half of Americans (49%) are either “extremely” or “very” sure global warming is happening. Far fewer (8%) are “extremely” or “very” sure global warming is not happening. 1.4. A majority of Americans think global warming is mostly human-caused. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment synthesis report, summarizing the work of thousands of climate experts worldwide, states: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming.”1 A majority of Americans (58%) understand that global warming is mostly human-caused. By contrast, 29% think it is caused mostly by natural changes in the environment.

1.5. About half of Americans understand that most scientists think global warming is happening. A review by Cook and colleagues2 found that six independent, peer-reviewed studies examining the scientific consensus about global warming have concluded that between 90% and 100% of climate scientists are convinced human-caused global warming is happening. A more recent study found that as many as 98% of climate scientists are convinced global warming is happening and human-caused.3 About half of Americans (53%) understand that most scientists think global warming is happening. By contrast, one in four (25%) think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening. Very few Americans (3%) believe most scientists think global warming is not happening......read on    https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-beliefs-attitudes-fall-2023/toc/3/

Democrats Assigned Themselves One Job — and Failed.  For nine years, Democrats abandoned all else to focus on one thing: keeping Donald Trump out of office. In the process, they sidelined working-class concerns, lost crucial voters, and still failed — not once, but twice — to accomplish their singular goal. Jacobin Ashley Bishop Spencer Snyder 20 Jan. 2025 For nine years, Democrats abandoned all else to focus on one thing: keeping Donald Trump out of office. In the process, they sidelined working-class concerns, lost crucial voters, and still failed — not once, but twice — to accomplish their singular goal. For the last three election cycles, the main project of the Democratic Party has been to keep Donald Trump out of office. Advancing policy to improve the lives of working people has been, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, a distraction. Every other aspect of politics has been deprioritized to favor this single goal, with “vote blue no matter who” emerging as the rallying cry.

But despite the elevation of beating Trump over important policy areas like health care, education, housing, worker protections, and so on, the strategy still failed — twice. Not only are working people now set to face the immense challenges of a second Trump term without any palpable progress that might have been achieved during the Joe Biden years, but the Democrats have also dramatically harmed their reputation and lost scores of working-class voters for nothing in the process. In 2016, Bernie Sanders, running on a slate of policies designed to uplift the working class, faced unique opposition from within his own party and was presented as an unacceptable political risk. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment, rather than learn from the surprising success of the Sanders campaign, blamed it for losing Clinton the general election. Sanders faced the same interparty acrimony in 2020, with party elites coordinating the dropout of several popular primary opponents to boost Joe Biden’s chances. In the end, when Biden stepped over Bernie into the White House, the best the Democrats could say about him was, “Hey, at least he’s not Trump!” In this most recent presidential election, Kamala Harris, especially toward the end of her campaign, succumbed to the fantasy that people were sufficiently afraid of Trump’s dictatorial potential and losing democracy that they would look past her party’s complete lack of major proposals to improve their material conditions. As even people close to the campaign have suggested, they were wrong.As has been thoroughly laid out during this post-election hangover, working people were encouraged to leave their material and moral concerns behind the ballot booth curtain and check off the blue boxes. Forget Gaza — this is Trump we’re talking about! Harris famously admonished Palestine solidarity protesters at a rally in Detroit: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.”                                                                                                                    

The Harris campaign got off to a late but hopeful start, addressing (at least in rhetoric) economic inequality and bringing Tim Walz onto the ticket in an appeal to some segments of the working class. But the campaign’s policy prescriptions never measured up to those early, coconut-pilled days. All in all, the Harris campaign sidelined universal health care (Harris no longer supports Medicare for All, despite its remarkable popularity), affordable housing (as Mathilde Lind Gustavussen wrote in Jacobin, the Harris-Walz housing proposal “doubles down on the existing paradigm: more public subsidies, more tax incentives, and more empty hopes that developers will solve the housing crisis”), labor reforms like passing the PRO Act (an unlikely outcome without filibuster reform and enduring lack of political will), and a minimum wage increase (Harris finally professed support for $15 an hour later in her campaign, but even that doesn’t measure up to current costs of living), among other policies that could improve working people’s flagging conditions. Reproductive rights were the only exception, and Harris only seemed keen to prioritize them for horse-race reasons, attempting to win over college-educated white women. The Democrats have not only failed to realize their own hollow project, but any lasting legacy of the Biden administration may soon be rendered null......read on            https://jacobin.com/2025/01/democrats-biden-trump-workers-sanders?utm_source=roundup&utm_medium=email+&utm_campaign=r-01-21&mc_cid=0ced4cf2ee&mc_eid=a30effdb64

“Let’s not mince words here – for too long, the needs of the American people have taken a backseat to the needs of corporations that dump unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns,” said Congressman McGovern. “From gun violence to healthcare costs to climate change, the issues Americans care about have been held hostage by wealthy special interests. No more. We have got to solve this, and we have to overturn the disastrous Citizens United decision to restore the power of the ballot box and get big money out of politics.”
“In Citizens United, five Supreme Court Justices overturned two centuries of jurisprudence to determine that private corporations enjoy the political free speech rights of the people," Congressman Raskin said. "As hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money are spent by CEOs in the name of their unwitting shareholders, we are seeing what Court-ordered plutocracy looks like. But democracy is stirring. As the exciting 116th Congress convenes, it’s time we remind America of what popular government looks like—that’s why I’m proud to support this bipartisan Amendment to rebuild the wall of separation between massive private corporations and the people’s public elections.” https://www.citizen.org/news/twelve-years-since-citizens-united-big-money-

A year ago, a Trump victory was far from inconceivable—the grimly anti-incumbent mood of the American electorate, and the former President’s almost comically easy dispatch of a host of G.O.P. primary challengers who were, for the most part, afraid to criticize him, suggested that it was not only a possible outcome but even a likely one. Yet it is also true that, as 2024 began, Trump’s win was far from inevitable—an alternate reality that, like the half of the country that could not countenance his return to office, has been erased from the Trumpian narrative about his “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” In the weeks since Election Day, it’s been as if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all the polite technocratic debates of their polite, technocratic Administration have vanished into the mists of time—were the past four years in Washington all some strange dream sequence, like that entire season of “Dallas” back in the nineteen-eighties? Radical revisionism—by Trump and on his behalf—is a strong contender for the theme of this disruptive year, in which some unique property of political alchemy managed to transform a defeated and disgraced ex-President facing four criminal indictments into a perfectly electable Republican candidate with a quirky communications style, a host of more or less legitimate grievances, and a plan to Make America Great Again by empowering his billionaire sidekicks and rolling back laws, regulations, geopolitical trends, and social norms that he and his voters don’t like. Rewriting history, relitigating old fights, plain old revanchism—these worked for Trump in 2024, and it’s a safe bet that, along with revenge and retribution, they will be the themes of the new Trump Administration that takes office on January 20th.Whether it’s peremptory attacks on a 1977 Panama Canal treaty whose terms he now wants to reject or the resurrection of nineteenth-century economic protectionism or the fantastical reimagining of the January 6th rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol as innocent martyrs, Trump is a conservative in an entirely different sense than the one we have come to know: he is not a Republican who sticks to the status quo but instead a would-be strongman whose attachment to a past of his own imagining will now, once again, become the country’s governing ideology.

Every year since 2018, I have written a version of this year-end Letter from Washington. What’s striking reading back through them now, on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House, is not so much his continued dominance of our politics as it is the consistency of how he has accomplished it—the manic governing by social-media pronouncement, the bizarro news cycles, and the normalizing of what would have previously been considered the politically un-normalizable. Even his targets are remarkably similar year in and year out—the Radical Left Lunatics, windmills, Justin Trudeau. In Trump’s 2023 Christmas social-media post, he wished the nation a happy holiday while praying that his enemies “ROT IN HELL.” What we have managed to forget about Trump in these past few years would fill entire books about other Presidents. This year-end exercise has been a small effort in trying to remember......read on        https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2024-in-review/the-weird-new-normal-of-donald-trump-in-2024