Shaping Climate Policy
Over the past few years, Data for Progress has used our best-in-class polling to show Congress and the Biden Administration that ambitious climate policy isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s also overwhelmingly popular.
Our polling has helped the progressive movement lead a paradigm shift in climate policy, changing the conversation towards green jobs and climate justice. We’ve shown the Biden Administration that voters across party lines support green jobs and clean energy investment — and the president responded by placing ambitious climate policy at the center of his infrastructure proposal.
Here’s how we’ve helped shape the conversation:
We pushed Biden to embrace an ambitious climate plan. Throughout the 2020 election, we identified key areas for improvement in Biden’s climate proposal, including through our Green New Deal candidate scorecards, our polling of Biden’s climate plan, and our battleground state surveys. We also showed Biden that climate was the issue voters trusted him most on compared to Trump, and that targeting climate investment to frontline communities makes voters more supportive of the Build Back Better agenda. Ultimately, Biden has made his climate plans more ambitious over time, and his Build Back Better Plan will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy.
We laid out a comprehensive roadmap to a Clean Energy Standard with Evergreen Action. In February 2021, we worked with renowned scholar Dr. Leah Stokes and fellow progressive organizers at Evergreen Action to release a roadmap to a 100 percent clean electricity standard — and how Democrats can overcome the filibuster to achieve it. We hosted a press conference joined by Senator Tina Smith on the release of these results, and our report was covered by The Atlantic, Axios, The Hill, and Vox. Since, we’ve continued our work by joining more than 150 environmental groups to push President Biden and members of Congress to adopt a Clean Electricity Standard and publishing continued polling showing the overwhelming popularity of a CES — and we’re just getting started.
Throughout 2021, we pushed for significant climate investments in Biden’s infrastructure packages. We pushed for an Indigenous-led land stewardship strategy to meet President Biden’s 30 by 30 conservation goal. We showed that Build Back Better’s investments to tackle the climate crisis and create new clean energy jobs are highly popular and critical components of the plan. As those provisions faced cuts, we partnered with Sen. Ed Markey, who wrote a blog declaring that progressives would not cut climate investments from Build Back Better. And in September, we found that the 48C Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit — a little-known tax incentive for companies to expand their clean energy capacity — would create 140,000 jobs nationwide over the next several years. An $8 billion investment in 48C was ultimately included in the final BBB framework.
We’ve helped climate champions win up and down the ballot. In 2020, we teamed up with Lead Locally to raise funds for the Green New Deal Slate — local candidates in key districts fighting for strong environmental action — and in 2021 we renewed our commitment with a new slate of local candidates. We’ve raised more than $200,000 to help climate champions win important city council, state senate, and transit board elections. We’re proud that Michelle Wu, now Mayor of Boston, Abdullah Hammoud, who became the first Arab-American mayor of Dearborn, MI, and Justin Bibb, who became the fourth Black and second youngest mayor of Cleveland, OH, were represented on our GND slate. We will keep raising money for candidates up and down the ticket who are committed to making the Green New Deal a reality.