Six Americas of Global Warming

I wish more people knew about the study by Yale: Six Americas of Global Warming.

I think it’s easy to think of climate is this polarizing thing where half of people see it one way and half of people are totally opposed.

In reality, about a third of Americans are alarmed about it and another quarter are concerned. These segments are kind of losing sleep over the topic.

Another quarter are a little more disengaged or apathetic. 10% have their doubts but only 9% are the outright dismissive sorts who will shout hoax at anything presented at them.

I really appreciate that one time John Oliver tried to have a climate debate with a more representative sample of panelists.

In order to get meaningful climate action, we don’t need to convince that really small segment, as much as we need to equip the rest of the spectrum.

When we confuse how loud some of these voices are for how few of them there actually are, the climate conversation gets hung up on the question of: is it real? Rather than the more interesting and important: what should we do?