Support for climate action remains high - so why are we being told the opposite?

Climate change remains the issue of our time. Carbon emissions continue to rise, so the planet continues to warm, with the consequences playing out as science has long predicted, including more intense extreme weather like droughts, bushfires and hurricanes, melting ice sheets, coral bleaching and death, and the harms to human life and ecosystems that go with them.

But if you spend any time consuming mainstream media, you may believe that climate change is something that nobody cares about any more.

‘Climate skeptic’ Bjorn Lomborg’s February 2026 LA Times op-ed lays out the claimed case: a ‘global retreat from climate alarmism’ is happening and the ‘consensus [on the need for action] has been all but abandoned by its once strongest proponents’.

But is it true that support for climate action has evaporated? And, if not, who is driving the narrative that it has?

Support for climate action remains high

Despite the recent US election, which saw the aggressively pro-fossil fuel Trump return to the presidency and a rise in support for Republicans in Congress, global support for taking action on climate change remains at a high level.

An August 2025 Pew poll of 25 nations shows that ‘a median of 67% of adults…say global climate change is a major threat to their country.’ 

While this number has dipped slightly since 2022 in some high-income countries, majorities in every surveyed nation - between 55% and 78% - agree that climate change is a major threat. What’s more, that number is significantly higher in almost every case than it was in 2013, when the poll began to ask this question of the same population sample.

Americans are no exception. Indeed the April 2025 Gallup poll cited approvingly by Lomborg’s piece has as its headline ‘Record-High 48% Call Global Warming a Serious Threat’, with its research further finding that:

• ‘The percentage of Americans who believe the effects of global warming have already begun, now 63%, is up from 59% in 2024.’

• ‘There has been no change in the amount that Americans report worrying about global warming or climate change.’

So what is going on?

Climate change is now a politicised issue

The top line numbers can disguise more granular trends. 

Key is the political polarisation of climate change as an issue. Some of us are old enough to remember when in 2008 a cap-and-trade greenhouse gas reduction scheme was US Republican party election policy, under John McCain. The idea that we should do something about climate change was bipartisan, even if the methods to do so remained a point of disagreement.

Since then, views about climate change and support for climate action have increasingly mapped onto political alignment, with parties of the centre left more firmly in favour of cutting emissions as quickly as possible, while right wing parties and movements tend to support the expansion of fossil fuels and the repeal of climate change legislation and regulations.

This is reflected in polling. The Gallup poll cited above, for example, found that in a majority of countries surveyed: 

‘people who place themselves on the ideological left are much more likely than those on the right to view climate change as a major threat. The largest difference is in the U.S., where liberals are more than four times as likely as conservatives to say this (84% vs. 20%).’

Tech billionaires are gaming social media algorithms to pursue their agenda

The same period that saw the polarisation of climate change as an issue also saw the rise of Big Tech, and the social media platforms that now shape so much of our political discourse. 

The advent of AI agents makes it even harder to know how much of what we see online represents real public opinion, as opposed to a prefabricated echo chamber populated by bots pushing a particular line. Indeed, recent research has shown that in 2025 bots were responsible for more internet activity than humans for the first time, ‘driven, for the most part, by the rapid adoption of AI and LLMs.’

As repeated scandals have revealed, The Algorithm in any given app or site is not a neutral player, but a piece of tech whose outcomes are guided by its builders and, ultimately, its owners.

In the words of Frank Herbert’s prescient sci-fi novel, Dune: 

‘Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.’

And the men with machines have taken a decisive tilt away from the progressive, pro-climate action side of politics.

Elon Musk’s transition from climate champion (of sorts) to conservative darling has been well documented. But the same is true across the tech space. While it was once possible to say that Big Tech companies had a progressive bent, that is no longer the case, at least in their public presentation. 

What’s more, AI data-centres’ voracious appetite for electricity (and water) have driven their owners towards whatever source of power they can find, leading to the absurdity of ancient coal-fired power plants being kept going so that students can cheat on university assessments and create better videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti. 

The problem continues to get worse. Three years ago, the idea that data centres would threaten to derail action on climate change seemed alarmist. Today they comprise 4% of all US electricity consumption, a figure projected to rise to up to 12% by 2028. That’s only just below the 14% used by the entire manufacturing sector in the US.

It is no surprise then that Big Tech is happy to align with politicians and parties that are actively trying to slow down and even reverse the clean energy transition. 

The results are now visible on most social media platforms. In early 2025, Meta, for example, ended its independent fact checking work, including the work of its 2020 Climate Science Information Center, responsible for tackling climate change misinformation. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter meanwhile resulted in an explicit removal of moderation in favour of a more hands-off approach which, combined with the response by many progressives to leave the site for alternatives like BlueSky, has shifted the site firmly to the right.

Climate denialist bot and bot-like accounts are thus now far more prevalent across a range of social media platforms, leading to false perceptions about the popularity of anti-climate action viewpoints by the general public. 

What now?

The temptation for climate activists is to shift away from talking about climate change, and reframe the issue in other ways that may appeal to people’s immediate concerns: something already taking place with political parties and some campaigning organisations.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course. Effective framing has long been a key tool in any effective campaign, and climate campaigning has been no exception. But we should be wary of taking at face value claims about the importance of the issue itself that are the result more of the pushing of a particular agenda by those with power than a genuine shift in the public mood, not least when the felt impacts of global heating are only getting worse.

Instead, we should aim to capitalise on the genuine, legitimate concern that many people have with AI and social media, and build trust with our supporters by reaching them as much as possible without the filter of the Facebook or Instagram algorithm interposing between us. This means publicly banning the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools from our organisations. It means rebuilding our email lists and using them to share tailored, personal communications rather than spray-and-pray outreach blasts. It means taking the podcast-sphere seriously and engaging in it, instead of dismissing it. And it means investing in meaningful community organising. 

And doing so as if our future depended on it.