Survey shows Americans aren't buying into climate hype, but the media don't seem to notice

In March, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal stating unequivocally that the EPA was ending the “Green New Deal.” 

“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” Zeldin wrote. 

The op-ed is one of 30 items that Podcaster Tom Nelson compiled in a Substack article that he says shows the “climate scam” is collapsing. “I've been around looking at the news on this stuff since 2006 or something. And people were not talking like that at all back then,” Nelson said on the “Energy Realities” podcast this week. 

Climate advocacy groups have been spending billions promoting a message that climate change poses an existential risk to people and rapidly eliminating fossil fuels is the cure. Yet, Nelson’s list notes billionaire activist Bill Gates slashing his support for climate initiatives, banks distancing themselves from climate commitments, and Google ceasing to claim that it’s carbon-neutral. 

All that is on top of the actions the Trump administration is taking to reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s climate policies, which solicited very little in the way of organized protest. Now, a new survey confirms that when it comes to energy and climate issues, the American public isn’t buying the climate hype. 

Legacy media are the last to notice

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. and Ruy Teixeira, senior fellows at the center-right think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), engaged YouGov to conduct a survey of Americans' attitudes toward energy and climate issues. 

Among other things, the survey finds that the public broadly supports an “all of the above” energy policy, doesn’t support the rapid elimination of fossil fuels and supports increased domestic production of fossil fuels. The survey also found that the public prioritizes energy affordability and reliability, and most Americans are unwilling to sacrifice much financially to address climate change. 

Jeff Reynolds, senior editor for Restoration News, told Just the News that the legacy media don’t seem to grasp this about the American audience. He points to a recent segment in which CNN’s senior data reporter, Harry Enten, appears shocked by the results of a Gallup poll showing that the percentage of Americans who are “greatly concerned” about climate change dropped to its lowest level since 2000; specifically, a drop of six percent from five years ago.

“It's almost counterintuitive that the media is the last to notice that people just don't care,” Reynolds said. 

Most Americans want ‘all of the above’ energy 

The Gallup survey was based on an online sample of 3,093 voters between Sept. 20 through Sept. 26, with a margin of error of +/- 1.9%. 

According to the survey, 53% of liberal voters support phasing out the use of fossil fuels to rely only on intermittent wind and solar power. However, only 29% of all respondents supported such a policy. The rest of them supported a mix of energy sources, including oil, coal and natural gas alongside renewable energy sources. Conservatives leaned heavily towards the varied-source approach, weighing in at 92%. 

The survey also found that 56% of those surveyed strongly or somewhat favor increased domestic production of fossil fuels, while 10% weren’t sure. Nearly 70% saw the increased domestic production over the past few years as a positive development. 

Only 39% said they thought the Biden-Harris administration’s climate policies took the country in the right direction, and 43% thought those policies were wrong for the U.S. Another 18% weren’t sure. 

Of those surveyed, 36% said having power available when they need it is most important, followed by the cost of the energy they use. Only 19% thought the effect on the climate was the most important aspect of the energy they use. 

Americans don’t think weather is becoming more extreme

While many media outlets seem to report every weather event as “extreme” and "unprecedented," the survey finds most Americans don’t see the frequency of extreme weather events — hurricanes, tornadoes, doubts, floods, cold snaps and winter storms — as changing one way or another, or they see them decreasing. The notable exception to this is heat waves, in which the survey found 60% of Americans believe these are becoming more frequent. 

The survey notes that these views are in line with the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of the world’s leading climate researchers. The IPCC analyzes extreme weather trends with two points — detection and attribution. Detection refers to the identification of trends one way or another in extreme weather over a period of decades, and attribution, which refers to the identification of a cause or causes of the detected change, if any. 

While the IPCC has detected changes in heat waves, heavy precipitation, some types of drought and fire weather, which refers to wildfires, there have been no trends detected in other types of extreme weather. 

With respect to the trends that respondents say they have observed, most attributed it to natural climate variability, or they weren’t sure, again with the exception of droughts and heat waves, of which 52% said the trends were caused by human-driven climate change. 

The survey also asked respondents how willing they’d be to support proposals charging a fee on their electricity bills to “combat climate change.” While 47% were supportive of a $1 fee, only 26% would vote in favor of a $20 hike. Nearly 70% would vote against a $40 fee. At $100, only 11% would vote in favor of the measure. 

“Americans are overwhelmingly far more pragmatic than the views found in the media or even those of most elected officials — both of which in 2025 tend to emphasize partisan politics over policy practicalities,” Pielke wrote of the survey results on his “The Honest Broker” Substack. 

Legacy media continue to push the narrative 

Reynolds of Restoration News said it’s likely that people aren’t buying into the media narratives painting weather as growing dangerously extreme every day because they’re not personally observing these alleged trends in their own lives. 

“We go outside and there's variation in the weather. And through human technological advancements, we've almost eliminated deaths from climate,” Reynolds said. 

Reynolds said that the destructive and disruptive antics of groups like Just Stop Oil, whose activists were known for throwing soup on paintings, and Climate Defiance, whose protests would loudly shut down public events that had nothing to do with energy — even those events held by left-wing politicians — don't win any sympathy to their cause. Instead, their actions leave people with the impression the movement wasn’t sincere or rational. 

“It’s all performance art. There’s nothing scientific to it,” Reynolds said. 

While the national discussion on climate and energy is taking a different path, the mainstream media don’t seem to have yet noticed. Earlier this month, flooding in Texas claimed more than 120 lives. Multiple media outlets tied the disaster to climate change, despite there being no data supporting the claim that flash floods in that area are unprecedented or becoming more frequent. 

It seems that it may be some time before media outlets start catching up to the public’s understanding of these issues, or recognize that willfully pushing the crisis of immediacy is a form of hidden persuasion.