52 percent say there is a climate emergency: poll

Voters are split over whether the world is facing a climate emergency, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released exclusively to The Hill on Monday. 

Fifty-two percent of respondents said they believe “we are under a climate emergency,” while 48 percent said they did not believe there is a climate emergency. 

The poll showed a stark partisan divide over the issue, with 70 percent of Republicans saying they did not believe there was a climate emergency and 74 percent of Democrats saying the opposite. 

The results also appear to reveal a racial divide over the issue.

White respondents were split on the issue, with 52 percent saying they did not believe there was a climate emergency and 48 percent saying they believed there was an emergency. Of Black adults surveyed, however, 65 percent said there was a climate emergency and 35 percent said there was not an emergency. Sixty-three percent of Hispanics polled also said they believed there was a climate emergency, and 37 percent said the opposite. Among Asian respondents, 68 percent said they believed there was a climate emergency and 32 percent said they did not believe there was one.

The findings come as the U.S. has upped its response to climate change under the Biden administration. On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule that would decrease the use of planet-warming gases called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 85 percent over the next 15 years. 

The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey of 1,872 registered voters was conducted from April 27-29. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and The Harris Poll.

Full poll results will be posted online later this week. The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. As a representative online sample, it does not report a probability confidence interval.