As Australia burns and the Earth just ended the warmest decade on record, Democrats and Republicans disagree so sharply on climate change ideas that there's no hope of working on the problem, right?

Actually, wrong. Despite all the squabbling, the majority of Americans – of all political parties – say climate change is real and agree on many things we need to do to fix it.

There’s substantial accord on several areas that would help fight global warming while strengthening the economy. That consensus has stayed well above 50% over the past 20 years.

A new Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos survey finds a preponderance of Americans – Republicans, Democrats and independents – support increasing energy efficiency, modernizing the electric grid, investing in research to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and government help for cities and states to fight climate change.

“I found the poll very encouraging,” said Peter Kareiva, director of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Overall, 86% of Democrats, 55% of Republicans and 78% of independents say they want to reduce the effects of global climate change.

That’s a total of 72% of Americans who support it.

“The data say – robustly – that Republicans and Democrats agree that climate change is a problem and that we have to do something about it,” Kareiva said.

Ideas for solutions cover substantial ground. Majorities in the poll support:

•Modernizing the U.S. electric grid to reduce waste in energy production and distribution: 70% of Republicans, 83% of Democrats and 81% of independents.

•Government investment in technologies to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse-gas-causing pollutant, from the atmosphere: 55% of Republicans, 81% of Democrats and 64% of independents.

•Creating stronger energy efficiency standards for new and existing buildings: 63% of Republicans, 82% of Democrats and 71% of independents.

•Expanding reforestation efforts, the protection of sensitive lands and the restoration of wetlands: 73%of Republicans, 83% of Democrats and 77% of independents.

When it comes to the transportation system, there’s broad backing to create a nationwide system of low pollution, high-speed trains, supported by 58%of Republicans, 79% of Democrats and 75% of independents.

There’s support for requiring new mass transit vehicles, including planes, buses, trains and boats, to be energy-efficient.

Not that there aren’t differences. Only 34% of Republicans support banning drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic and other sensitive areas, and 31% want to ban drilling for oil off the East and West Coasts.

The biggest area of difference is taxation. Republicans are less enthused about using government funds to assist U.S. cities and states to fight climate change. Eighty percent of Democrats support it and 50% of Republicans.

Spending U.S. tax dollars to aid developing nations with efforts to fight global warming is also not popular with Republicans. Thirty-six percent support it, while 70% of Democrats and 58% of independents do.

The survey captures the sharp difference between responses people give based on their political leanings and their actual beliefs when it comes down to what policies they’d like to see put in place, the pollsters said.

“When you don’t use partisan, tribalized language, you see that people are in the same place, apart from taxes,” said Chris Jackson, a vice president with Ipsos, which conducted the survey.

On many climate-change-related issues, Republicans, Democrats and independents poll within 25 percentage points of each other.

“If it were 25% versus 75%, it would be a yawning gap. But most of the time, everybody’s up around 60% to 70%, or the Republicans are around 50%,” said Will Friedman, president of Public Agenda.

Though that’s not full consensus, it shows the strong potential for public support on many measures to reduce climate disruption, Jackson said.

Climate agreement is long-standing

The survey results underscore almost two decades of often unappreciated accord among Americans on various aspects of climate change.

In more than 20 years of surveys by Stanford University’s Political Psychology Research Group, large majorities of Americans have said global warming is a significant threat and merits government attention. The researchers found that the majority of Americans favor a range of government policies to reduce emissions and oppose policy approaches that seem unlikely to be effective.

“A majority of Republicans are actually on what I call the ‘green side’ of the issue, a huge majority of Democrats are, and a large proportion of Independents,” said Jon Krosnick, a professor of political science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has long conducted survey research on attitudes toward climate change.

At the University of Washington in Seattle, Ann Bostrom, a professor of environmental policy, has polled Americans on climate change since the 1990s. Her results show substantial areas of harmony, similar to the Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos survey.

There’s strong agreement among people across political ideologies in investing in research into renewable energy, according to her research.

Majority say climate change is real

Americans who say climate change is real and agree with at least some methods of addressing it – whatever their political affiliation – have always been in the majority.

Belief in climate change has shifted over the past 20 years but overall has never dipped below 57% of all Americans, according to surveys by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. In 2019, it was 69%.

What’s changed is the context. “When you look beneath the hood, concern about this issue has soared among Democrats, increased among independents but has stayed flat among Republicans,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale program.

He attributes the strength of the hard-line dismissives in part to fossil fuel interests putting money into delaying carbon reduction policies for as long as possible.

According to Yale survey data released Jan. 16, the proportion of Americans who are either dismissive or doubtful about climate change has decreased to 20%, down 5 percentage points since 2014.

“The dismissives, people firmly convinced this is a hoax, are the smallest they’ve ever been,” Leiserowitz said.

That could be good news for creating policies on climate change that the majority of Americans will support. There’s broad-based social and political consensus on at least one of the main issues around climate change, the transition to clean energy. It’s true among Democrats, Republicans and independents, Leiserowitz said.

More movement could be coming

The portion of Americans who consider themselves “alarmed” by climate change reached 31% in November, an all-time high, according to Yale data. That number tripled from 2015 to 2019. Six in 10 Americans consider themselves either “alarmed” or “concerned.”

Discussions of climate change have shifted from predictions and complex mathematical models to people's personal experiences.

Video of horrific fires and dead and dying kangaroos and koalas in Australia, massive flooding in the Midwest and the deadliest and most destructive fires ever recorded in California make the reality on the ground difficult to ignore.

“You constantly hear people saying things like, ‘I have never seen it this hot before, I have never seen it flood like this before.’ This is just normal people, and it wasn’t the case five years ago. It’s direct human experience with climate change,” said UCLA's Kareiva.

“This year at UCLA on July 6, we had the hottest day ever – 111 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.

The Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos survey shows that in general, public opinion is not a barrier to doing something about climate change. That suggests the roadblocks come from interest groups and tribal politics, said David Schleifer, director of research at Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.

There’s a lot of belief among Americans that it’s necessary – and possible – to do something about climate change, and a fair amount of agreement on what should be done.

“That’s something that feels heartening because changing public opinion is tough. The fact that public opinion is already there suggests there's a lot of potential energy to deal with climate change,” said Ipsos’ Jackson.

“We’re trying to dispel the myth that the reason we can’t make progress in this is because the public is at each other's throats on these issues. The public is actually in broad accord on a number of areas. The stopping points are coming from elsewhere,” Public Agenda’s Friedman said.

“It could be a much calmer, more rational, reasoned debate if we ever actually get past taking sides,” Jackson said.

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The findings from the Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos poll are part of an election-year project by USA TODAY and Public Agenda. The Hidden Common Ground initiative explores areas of agreement on major issues facing the nation.

The opt-in online poll of 1,006 adults was taken Jan. 10-13. It has a credibility interval of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points for Democrats, plus or minus 5.6 percentage points for Republicans and plus or minus 11.1 percentage points for independents.

The Hidden Common Ground project is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Kettering Foundation serves as a research partner to the Hidden Common Ground initiative.