It’s No Dirty Secret: Voters Love Pollution Disclosure
By Julian Brave NoiseCat, Sean McElwee, John Ray, and Ethan Winter
On February 25, Senators Warren, Whitehouse, Booker, Van Hollen called on BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to endorse the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, legislation Warren introduced, in light of Fink’s recent comments about climate change. In a long story in the New York Times, Fink said, his firm would, “introduce new funds that shun fossil fuel-oriented stocks, move more aggressively to vote against management teams that are not making progress on sustainability, and press companies to disclose plans ‘for operating under a scenario where the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees is fully realized.’” We can’t rely on investors to do the right thing, however. To address climate change we need government action which means investors should put their policy where their money is.
In the letter to Fink (the full text of the letter can be read here), the Senators called Fink to detail how much greenhouse gas emissions Blackrock is responsible for, the total amount of assets related to fossil fuel the company owns or manages, how the company’s valuation would be affected by climate change, and the company’s risk management strategy related to climate change. In a recent survey, Data for Progress and YouGov Blue surveyed whether or not voters favor this kind of disclosure. Specifically, voters were asked,
Would you [support or oppose] requiring companies to make information public on carbon pollution and other environmental harms from their activities?
We found that voters overwhelmingly favor additional disclosure for the potential environmental impacts of their activities. Fully 73 percent of voters somewhat or strongly support this idea, with just 17 percent opposing.
Majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans support this policy. About 89 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Independents, and 55 percent of Republicans agree that there should be more disclosure of corporate impacts on the climate. Net support for requiring companies to make information public on carbon pollution and other environmental harms from their activities is positive among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.
Controlling for other factors, support for this policy is higher among women voters than one would expect. While about 73 percent of voters overall support the policy, 79 percent of women voters do. Notably, while it is often the case that women voters are more willing to report they are unsure about a policy than to report they support or oppose it, here we find that women are no different from men in the share of voters who don’t know how they feel about the policy.
The largest gender gap in this result occurs between men and women Independent voters. About 74 percent of women Independents and 53 percent of male Independents support the policy, with such a gap persisting when controlling for party identification and for other factors. There was also a considerable gender gap among Republican voters, with 64 percent of Republican women and 45 percent of Republican men supporting climate disclosure. We observe no gender gap among Democrats, who overwhelmingly support the policy.
For context, this would make environmental impact disclosure a highly popular climate policy among Independents, who are often skeptical of government obligations for the climate. On net, Independents are slightly more supportive of this particular policy than they are of the average climate policy we have tested in the past.
But most notably, even controlling for the differences attributable to party identification and gender, net support for the policy is positive. Even Republican men, who are almost always the most conservative subset of the population, on net support the policy by a 45-53 margin.
Additionally, controlling for other factors, we find some differences in the role of income in predicting support for this policy. Namely, lower-income Independents and Republicans support this policy more than wealthier Independents and Republicans. Among Democrats, support is actually higher among wealthier voters.
For example, about 68 percent of Republican voters earning under $30,000 per year support additional climate impact disclosures, down to just 45 percent of the wealthiest Republicans. Support for the policy is about 17 points higher among the lowest-income Independent voters than it is among Independents earning between $100,000 and $150,000 per year. While support for climate disclosures is the highest among the wealthiest Democratic voters and lowest among the lowest-income Democrats, support is overwhelming across the board for Democrats.
While there are clear differences across the partisan spectrum, and across income and other factors, voters overall overwhelmingly support new climate impact disclosures, setting this particular climate policy apart from other forms of climate action, which tend to be more polarized along partisan lines. Many of the Democratic presidential candidates have proposed policies that will accomplish precisely this, including several proposals for disclosure rules that could be implemented by Executive Order, which would allow the President to circumvent an unhelpful Senate should they face one in 2021. Disclosing climate risk is a common sense action that the public and all politicians, regardless of party, can get behind.
Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Data for Progress.
John Ray (@johnlray) is a senior political analyst at YouGov Blue.
Julian Brave NoiseCat (@jnoisecat) is the Vice President of Policy & Strategy.
Ethan Winter (@EthanBWinter) is a Senior Advisor to Data for Progress.
On behalf of Data for Progress, YouGov Blue conducted a survey of US registered voters using YouGov's online panel. The survey fielded from 2019-10-19 to 2019-10-21. The survey included 1159 US registered voters and was weighted to be representative of the population by age, race/ethnicity, sex, education, US Census region, and 2016 US Presidential vote choice. The mean of the weights is 1, and range from 0.1 to 6.6.
Here, we present topline summaries of demographic subgroups of interest whose relative support and opposition levels are statistically significant in more sophisticated statistical models that include controls for other demographic and political factors. We focus on the overall numeric quantities for simplicity.