There Are Climate Change Policies That Rural Americans—Even Republicans—Support
A new survey finds ways to reach those who are typically less gung-ho about climate policies.
Legislators attempting to pass environmental bills aimed at reducing the risks or effects of climate change have repeatedly run into brick walls.
A February survey of American voters, conducted by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute and the University of Rhode Island, found that attitudes in rural America are much less receptive to this sort of legislation than urban and suburban voters, regardless of party affiliation. And rural America, being home to most of this country’s agricultural industry, has an outsized role to play in any broad efforts.
A followup survey, by the same institutions, focused on rural Americans in the Midwest region of the country, dialing deeper down into how people living in this area feel about climate change and climate change policies. What they found suggests that rural Americans, particularly farmers, aren’t at all unconcerned about the environment, but they are more likely to support policies presented in certain ways.
Rural America and the agricultural industry in particular are extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change; increased frequency of extreme weather events like droughts, floods, and heat waves can easily wipe out an entire year’s work. But the demographics of rural America are not representative of the nation as a whole. This new survey took a demographically representative survey of the rural Midwest, and found that it was 95 percent white, nearly 60 percent over the age of 50, and 48 percent Republican. (Nationwide, those numbers are: 60 percent white, 34 percent over 50, and 30 percent Republican.)
The survey found that party affiliation was the single biggest predictor of how a respondent felt about climate change, but even when adjusting for that, rural Americans are significantly less concerned about climate change—regardless of party—than urban and suburban Americans. Rural Americans make up less than 20 percent of the country’s population, but have an outsized amount of political power, meaning that any attempt to push through major legislation—and climate change legislation is certainly major—needs the support of rural Americans.
The survey found that rural Americans, despite declaring climate change less important to them than it is to other Americans, are not necessarily opposed to progressive climate policies. Essentially, if policies aren’t explicitly labeled as broad climate change packages, rural voters often support them; there is a significant amount of distrust of the federal government and of “climate change” as a concept, which is often seen as politicized.
But huge chunks of climate change legislation would have broad support in rural America, if presented simply as standalone laws. Financial incentives to improve water and soil quality through buffers, cover crops, and other methods have massive support in the rural Midwest. Reducing pollution, especially from factories, has broad support. Making vehicles, including cars, trucks, tractors, and planes, more fuel efficient, also has broad support. In general, placing more environmental restrictions on corporations (and factories) has a ton of support; rural Midwesterners often reported feeling unfairly targeted, without the resources to skirt environmental protection laws as corporations do.
In fact, 25 percent of rural Midwesterners who said that climate change is “not a problem” still “strongly supported” one of those climate change policies, especially those that included provisions to economically assist rural communities. And there’s absolutely no reason why climate change legislation shouldn’t boost the economies of rural communities; these policies often naturally will, as in the case of renewable energy subsidies that provide income for energy produced and create jobs. (The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to slash this program.)
In general, rural Midwesterners approved of messaging that was aimed at farmers. Respondents connected with emphasizing that these policies—like creating wind or solar production facilities on farmland—actually help farmers survive during a period when being a farmer is insanely difficult. Mostly, the respondents want to be included, want to hear how these policies can help farm life survive and improve. It’s not a crazy idea, and it’s not impossible.
Funding that encourages farmers to, say, use cover crops would have broad support: It saves farmers money on fertilizer and water because the land isn’t destroyed each year, it can provide a source of income, and it can benefit the environment by providing for pollinators and reducing erosion. Rural Americans, and farmers especially, are in favor of that kind of thing; why wouldn’t they be? But the way that messaging is presented is vital.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].There Are Climate Change Policies That Rural Americans—Even Republicans—Support
by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
July 9, 2020
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Really Dan, us farmers ‘destroy the land yearly’. Then I would say you never ever farmed. With a statement like that, that you made, I assume you have never ever been on a farm. Thanks for the wonderful (haaaaa!!!) publicity.