Americans Like Solar & Natural Gas. Big Wind? Not So Much.

A new survey by AEI’s Roger Pielke Jr. and Ruy Teixeira shows voters still like solar, but gas came in second place. Meanwhile, wind energy barely edged out coal!

Gotta love that blue flame. Credit: Wikimedia/George Shulkin.

“The more people know about the wind energy business, the less they like it.”

That was the lede for an article on Big Wind that I published in National Review back in 2011. That article focused on work done by Justin Rolfe-Redding, who was then a doctoral student from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. After studying polling data on alt-energy, he found that “after reading arguments for and against wind, wind lost support.” In a webinar sponsored by the American Council on Renewable Energy, Rolfe-Redding explained that concerns about wind energy’s cost and its effect on property values “crowded out climate change” among those surveyed.

“The things people are educated about are a real deficit for us,” he said. After briefings on the pros and cons of wind, “Enthusiasm decreased for wind. That’s a troubling finding.”

Remember, that analysis was done 14 years ago.

I bring up that study because it’s germane to a remarkable report on energy and climate that was published yesterday by the American Enterprise Institute’s Roger Pielke Jr. and Ruy Teixeira. The report, “The Science vs. the Narrative vs. the Voters,” analyzes the findings of an October 2024 survey conducted for AEI by YouGov of 3,093 registered voters.

The survey has some predictable results, and one finding that is both surprising and heartening. Among the predictable findings: liberals are idiots about energy.

The survey found that 53% of voters who identify as liberal believe we should “phase out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely, relying instead on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power only.”

Among all voters, self-identified liberals were the only group that had a majority believing we should eliminate the use of hydrocarbons and rely solely on wind and solar energy.

For comparison, as seen above, only 29% of all voters agreed with that statement, and just 26% of non-college-educated voters want to ban hydrocarbons.

Yesterday, I talked to Pielke about the survey. When I asked him what he found most surprising, he pointed first to the finding that 53% of liberals think we should run the US economy solely on wind and solar. “It indicates how far out of step liberals are with the rest of the voting public,” he told me. Pielke also noted that 46% of voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 want to get rid of hydrocarbons.

Two other findings in the report were also predictable. The first is that most voters don’t see climate change as a priority. In a list of 18 issues, “dealing with climate change” came in at number 15. Just 40% of respondents said climate should be a priority. The top five priorities were, in order: strengthening the economy, fighting inflation, preventing terrorism, protecting social security, and reducing health care costs.

Second, the survey found that most voters are unwilling to pay money for action on climate change. As I explained last year, in “Who Really Cares About Climate Change?” a 2023 survey by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that just 38% of Americans were willing to pay $1 per month to pay for climate change policies and only 21% were will to pay $100 per month. I quoted the survey directly:

Americans are less willing to pay for a carbon fee than they were just a year ago. In fact, nearly two-thirds of Americans are unwilling to pay any amount of money to combat climate change. Those willing to pay a $1 carbon fee decreased by 14 percentage points in two years. Their support for the fee decreases as the impact on their energy bill grows. (Emphasis added.)

In mid-2024, the Energy Policy Institute repeated the survey and found the same result: “More than half of Americans are unwilling to pay any amount of money to combat climate change.”

Detail from the AEI report.

As seen above, the AEI/YouGov survey produced a similar finding, with just 47% of all voters saying that they would pay an extra $1 per month to combat climate change. When the proposed fee was increased to $20 per month, 60% of voters were opposed. At $40 per month, 69% were opposed. Tellingly, there was a significant difference in the support for a climate fee among college-educated and non-college-educated voters. Among non-college-educated voters, only 42% said they would be willing to pay an extra $1 per month. Pielke called this finding the “Iron Law” figure. “When it comes to favoring action on climate change,” he told me, “the limit of people’s willingness to pay is pretty much $1 per month. Anything above that, the intensity of opposition is enormous.”

Now for the surprise in the survey. When asked to list their preferred energy sources, solar, predictably, came in first among all voters. That’s to be expected. Solar energy has long worn a halo in the minds of the American public. Also, as expected, coal came in last in the survey. (It always does.)

What’s surprising is how many respondents preferred natural gas. Among all voters, 26% listed gas as their first preference, behind solar at 38%, but far ahead of nuclear, wind, and coal.

Pielke told me that the overall results of the survey show that the public clearly favors an all-of-the-above energy strategy, not one that caters to the extremes. All-of-the-above, he said, is “how a politician should frame the energy discussion if they want to appeal to the large proportion and diversity of voters.”

What explains Big Wind’s drop in popularity and surge in natural gas in the eyes of voters? I believe the public is starting to see Big Wind for the grift that it has always been. As I explained above, the more people know about Big Wind, the less they like it. All across the US, and all over the world, rural communities are telling Big Wind to take their giant noise-polluting, bird-and-bat-killing, landscape-obliterating, property-value-destroying turbines and put them somewhere the wind doesn’t blow.

Meanwhile, the surging popularity of gas may be due to the backlash against the failed efforts by dark-money groups like Rewiring America and the Rocky Mountain Institute, with a big push from the Sierra Club, to implement bans on the use of gas stoves and water heaters in our homes and businesses. Americans like cooking with gas. (Hello, Stacey Abrams!)

Natural gas is familiar. It’s a tangible, visible fuel in voters’ daily lives. They like using it in their kitchens and homes, and they like how cheap it is.

In their report, Pielke and Teixeira say that voters’ energy preferences and views on climate are at odds with the climate NGOs and activists who cling to a narrative of “catastrophism around climate change” along with their “blanket opposition to fossil fuels. A rapid transition to clean energy, especially renewables, remains an article of faith.” About the popularity of natural gas, Pielke and Teixeira explain:

Despite how the narrative demonizes natural gas as just another fossil fuel, the realities of energy use and electricity generation indicate its continued centrality to the energy system. Voters surveyed were able to see this even if advocacy groups pushing the narrative could not.

I’ll end with the conclusion to their report, which agrees with my view on energy and climate issues.

Energy must continue to be cheap, reliable, and abundant. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix. Climate policy will be much more effective if it works in the direction of public opinion, rather than against it. (Emphasis added.)

I love that first part: Energy must continue to be cheap. Amen. Amen. And again I say, amen.

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