If you think politicians are out of touch, you’re right. The American public would pay extra to get green electricity, but partisan politics means their elected representatives still won’t legislate for it.

In his January 2011 State of the Union address, Barack Obama called for a national clean energy standard (NCES) that would see 80 per cent of the country’s electricity produced from clean sources by 2035.

To find out whether Americans supported this, Matthew Kotchen of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and colleagues surveyed 1010 US citizens.

On average, people were in favour of Obama’s clean energy standard provided it added no more than 13 per cent to their annual electricity bills. A 2007 poll for New Scientist drew similar conclusions.


Kotchen used the survey data to simulate how the current US Senate and House of Representatives would vote on different versions of an NCES bill, assuming each representative votes based on his average constituent.

Here the results were very different. The team found that the bill would only pass both houses if it added no more than 5 per cent to electricity bills.

That’s because the number of Democrats and Republicans in Congress are not directly proportional to the political persuasions of the districts they represent (Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1527).

“There is public support but it’s difficult to mobilise votes to make it happen,” Kotchen says.

Before last year’s mid-term elections there were more Democrats in both houses, and Kotchen’s data suggest the NCES could have passed even if it boosted electricity bills by 13 per cent. “If people really care about this, changing the balance of the houses makes a big difference,” he says.