American Climate Perspectives: Few Support Trump Plan to Kneecap EPA Climate Action

Americans who voted for Donald Trump expect him to “Make America Great Again,” but they don’t think gutting the EPA and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord is the way to do it.

Americans who voted for Donald Trump expect him to “Make America Great Again,” but they don’t think gutting the EPA and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord is the way to do it. According to ecoAmerica’s February survey, only nine percent of Americans think Trump should limit EPA actions on climate change. Similarly, only 19% of Americans think Trump should withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. And at this early mark in his administration, only 31 percent think Trump is doing a good job.

This survey was conducted during the first week of February 2017, two weeks after Trump’s inauguration. In this short time, Trump had already put gag orders in place on the EPA and removed climate change information from the White House website.

Key Findings:

1. Only nine percent of Americans think Trump should limit EPA action on climate change. Respondents were able to select all items. Those few people were predominately male (58%), between the ages of 45 and 64 years old (40%), with incomes of $25,000 – $49,999 (50%) – a similar profile of those who voted for Trump after feeling neglected over the past eight years.

What should be President Trump’s top priorities?
1,055 answer(s) from 620 respondent(s)


Key demographics of the 9% of Americans who selected “Stop EPA action on climate change” as a priority:

2. Only 31% of Americans think Trump is doing a great job in his first two weeks as President; 37% think he is doing a poor job.

How do you think President Trump is doing in his first two weeks?
678 respondent(s)

3. Nearly twice as many Americans think we should maintain the Paris Climate Agreement vs. withdraw from it. Only 19% agree or strongly agree with withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, and 34% disagree or strongly disagree, including 25% who strongly disagree with withdrawing.

Do you think Trump should withdraw America from the Paris Climate Agreement?
656 respondent(s)

Methodology
ecoAmerica designed and fielded this survey. It was conducted online from February 1-2, 2017 using Google Surveys. The nationally representative sample of 800 adults was drawn from an online panel and respondents were screened to be over the age of 18 residing in the United States. The margin of error for the sample is +/-3.5%. In interpreting survey results, all sample surveys are subject to possible sampling error; that is, the results of a survey may differ from those, which would be obtained if the entire population were interviewed. The size of the sampling error depends upon both the total number of respondents in the survey and the percentage distribution of responses to a particular question. For example, if 50% of respondents in a sample of 900 respondents answered, “Yes” to a particular question, we can be 95% confident that the true percentage will fall within 3.5 points, or from 46.5% to 53.5%.Google Surveys makes use of the inferred demographic and location information to employ stratified sampling by distributing the surveys based on the targeted audience to our publisher network and/or android smartphone users. We infer demographics through respondents’ browsing history (DoubleClick cookies for age & gender and IP address for geography), then we match them against existing government statistical data. Google Surveys uses post-stratification weighting to compensate for sample deficiencies to remove bias among the survey sample. This gives a more accurate result with lower root mean square error (RMSE) which also makes the results better represent the Current Population Survey.

Suggested Citation
Speiser, M., and Krygsman, K. (2017). ecoAmerica American Climate Perspectives: February 2017. ecoAmerica. Washington, D.C.

For more information contact Meighen Speiser, ecoAmerica Chief Engagement Officer at meighen@ecoAmerica.org

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *