In the US, how are different generations viewing climate change? | The Excerpt

On Wednesday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: In the 1980s, Republicans and Democrats alike were concerned about global warming. Today, how worried you are about the environment is more closely aligned with your political leanings. Though the climate affects everyone, younger generations are making major life decisions based on what is to come. USA TODAY reporters looked at a variety of issues and topics, ranging from climate change to retirement planning, through the lens of generations old, aging, and young. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise joins The Excerpt to talk about the role of age in determining how we feel about climate change in this third of four specials exploring how different generations are handling life’s pressure points.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, October 16th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. Climate change isn't coming. It's here. But how we view it and how we choose to shape our lives around it varies widely based on age. USA Today reporters looked at a variety of issues and topics, including things like retirement planning and choices we make regarding sex through the lens of generations, old, aging, and young.

Here to discuss the role of age in determining what climate change means to us is USA Today National correspondent Elizabeth Weise. Beth, thanks for being on The Excerpt.

Elizabeth Weise:

As always, it's a pleasure.

Dana Taylor:

The fight against climate change is often associated with younger generations. Well-known climate activist Greta Thunberg, now 21 years old, began her school strike for climate change when she was just 15. Are younger generations leading the push for solutions to climate change, or did you find that it's now widely an issue for all ages?

Elizabeth Weise:

It's an issue for all ages, and that was actually the central issue or the central question we set out to answer. Because intuitively you think, well, it's going to be people who are in their 20s or teens who are thinking, this is my life forever, and they are perhaps going to be more riled up about it. It turns out that's actually not true.

People are equally concerned at most age groups that there are variations, which we can get into. But that was surprising because I mean, this is really one of those stories where you go into it thinking, oh, I know what this story is about, and then you start doing the reporting and you're like, oh no, in fact, it's not, which is why we do the reporting.

Dana Taylor:

Beth, you mentioned there are variations. Tell me about them.

Elizabeth Weise:

So when you look at the US population as a whole, I mean, we've got people from who are over 100 to people who are in grade school right now. It turns out that the biggest factor that determines how you feel about climate change, it's not your age and it's not how much money you have, it is your political meanings.

We talked to the folks at Yale who've been doing climate survey work and climate communication work for decades, and basically people who identify as Republicans are much less likely to believe that climate change exists. Or if they do believe that it exists, that it's a real problem, they're much less inclined to believe that it is human caused. They think it's part of natural variations in the climate cycle.

Whereas people who are Democrats are almost universally convinced it is human caused, it is real, it is here, and we need to deal with it. And people who are independents are kind of in the middle. So the divide in the US, and this is not true across the globe, the divide in the US is political.

Interestingly, and the one thing that's starting to shift the folks at Yale said is they're beginning to see that younger Republicans, so Republicans who are in their 20s and early 30s right now, are starting to be more concerned about climate change than older Republicans.

Dana Taylor:

How is climate change factoring into some of the life choices being made by Gen Z? And is it having a similar impact on people in other age groups?

Elizabeth Weise:

It was interesting as we started interviewing people, and we interviewed upwards of 30 people and we looked at a ton of surveys, so you see two things happening. People in their teens, 20s and early 30s, they're making two buckets of life choices. The one is they're coming into adulthood and they may never own an internal combustion car. They may just presume if I get a car, it's going to be electric. Some of them say, "Oh, I'm never going to own a car at all."

They are concerned about having kids because they see climate disaster after climate disaster and some of them say, "Boy, I don't know. Do you bring kids into this world?" They might make different career choices. We did talk to a fair number of young people who said, "I had a good job, and I just looked at the world and I thought, gosh, I need to be focused on this topic."

And I talked to one young woman who was actually studying emergency management in North Carolina, and she just said, "I have to focus my life on this." And she took pay was cut in half to go work up in Minnesota with immigrant communities who are being impacted by climate change.

Dana Taylor:

As part of your reporting, I know you spoke with a 72-year-old farmer in Iowa about the causes of climate change. What did he say to you?

Elizabeth Weise:

So yeah, he's interesting. I mean, he's very conservative, very proud Republican, quite conservative. He has seen it with his own eyes. He's like, "We're planting a couple of weeks earlier than we used to. We are getting these torrential rains in ways that we never did before." He's been farming the same ground for going on 40 years, so he's seen it. He is not convinced that climate change is in fact human caused.

And he said, "Maybe. I don't know. Maybe." But he's dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, and he's someone who is making very pragmatic choices about, I don't necessarily know why this is happening, but it is happening, and because my livelihood depends on things like when I can plant and how much rain there is and when that rain comes. He's making decisions based on that.

He was very much somebody who said, "I want to reach across the aisle." I mean, he's like, "I'm a farmer. We talk to our neighbors. We work together, and I don't have time to yell and scream at people because we have work to do."

Dana Taylor:

You also spoke to a 26-year-old environmental justice coordinator based in Los Angeles. Her focus is on the impact of climate change on disadvantaged communities. What did she share with you?

Elizabeth Weise:

She's very much working with Black and brown communities in Southern California and the impacts, double impacts really, of not just climate change because people live in neighborhoods that have fewer trees, it's hotter, they also tend to live where there is the causes of climate change, the power plants and the oil refineries, and that's something that historically has always been the case, and that's where disadvantaged people end up living.

So her work is getting the communities that are most impacted, which tend to be communities of color, to both work with the government to clean those places up, but also give them political power to make change.

Dana Taylor:

You wrote about increasing climate anxiety amongst younger generations. How was that defined and how worrisome is it?

Elizabeth Weise:

That was another fascinating thing. I spoke to a woman in Illinois who's a horticulturist, who's worked for the Illinois Ag Extension for more than 40 years, and she's seeing kids... So this is Generation Alpha now. These are kids who are 12 and under, and this is the only world they've known. And partly it's social media and partly that climate change is so much in the news these days, so they're getting barraged with it.

But to them, in ways that were not true for older generations, it feels like just outside is scary. And it's called climate anxiety, that these kids, they know that things are changing, they know it's different, they know it's not good, and it feels to them like just outside is scary. And part of her work is teaching them to be out in nature and not be scared of it.

Because she said, "How can you want to preserve it if you don't even know what it feels like?" So she takes them out and they see big trees and she's like, "Go climb trees," and they're like, "Why would we do that? It's dangerous." And she's like, "Because it's fun." And by the end of the fall when they've been doing this every week, she says the bus opens its doors and they run out. They're in the creek, and they're up in the paths, and they're climbing the trees, and it's great.

Dana Taylor:

Beth, was the sense of responsibility for addressing the effects of climate change different from one generation to the next?

Elizabeth Weise:

That was different. We actually went to a couple of protests. One in San Francisco. There was one in New York. They called them Rocking Chair protests where there were people who were... Mostly baby boomers and the silent generation, so folks born just after World War II and just before World War II.

And many of them were saying, "I am at a point in my life where I know this is happening. It's not going to impact me as much as it is younger generations, but I have the time and I have the freedom. I can come out here and get arrested because I don't have to worry about going to a job. I'm retired. I'm 80 years old, and it's my responsibility because my generation was kind of asleep at the wheel when this was all happening. And now I'm going to fight it."

Some of them had been fighting it all along. One of the signs was like, "I can't believe I'm still trying to get people to believe in climate change."

Dana Taylor:

Where did you see a willingness to make personal changes or sacrifices in confronting climate change? Did that vary in any way across age groups?

Elizabeth Weise:

It did to a certain extent, and this is more anecdotal. People in their 20s, who tend to be more liberal, are making life decisions based on concerns about climate change. They might say, "I don't want to work for a company that is a fossil fuel company or one that doesn't have a really strong environmental ethic. I want to work someplace where the company and the money that it represents is doing important things that I feel are ethical in the world." And that might mean not making as much money, but they're making ethical choices that include climate change in that calculation.

Dana Taylor:

And finally, you've reported frequently on this podcast on the growing impact of climate change and the work being done to counter the effects. Did anything surprise you when you looked at this issue across different generations?

Elizabeth Weise:

I think the interesting thing is, if you go back and listen to speeches by President Bush in the '80s, Republicans and Democrats were equally concerned about climate change. They were equally invested in dealing with climate change. It was not a partisan issue. And then it became a partisan issue in part because of efforts on the behalf of fossil fuel companies to engender confusion and concern about it.

And then the other thing that really surprised me, and this was because I was looking for surveys because I wanted to see generational data on what people at different age groups thought about climate change, every time I looked at a survey, I had to make sure it was only in the United States. Because if you look at surveys in the rest of the world, they don't have that political divide around what they see as a scientific issue. It's not a political issue too. It's a scientific issue.

Dana Taylor:

It's always good to talk to you, Beth. Thank you for being on The Excerpt.

Elizabeth Weise:

Happy to be here.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producers Shannon Ray Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistant. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How different US generations view climate change | The Excerpt