Great piece, as usual, from Shannon Osaka.

This is the central question about US climate attitudes: what happens after Trump leaves office and Biden tries to pass ambitious climate policy?

THREAD https://twitter.com/shannonosaka/status/1351590923784736768

I've argued that thermostatic dynamics are the primary driver of shifting US climate attitudes over the past few decades. Efforts to take action on climate change have mostly lowered concern, and Trump’s ostentatious denialism has raised it. https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/climate-attitudes

If this remains the case, rising climate concern should level off or fall as Trump's denialism is replaced by Biden's aggressive policy campaign.

I think it will. But I'd guess that much if not most of this will be driven by a reaction from the Republican public.

What about Dems? On the one hand, Dems may finally feel heard by Biden's efforts to pass climate legislation and therefore report less concern — that's how thermostatic effects work, and that’s precisely what happened in the days of An Inconvenient Truth and Waxman Markey.

At the same time, climate change may have become so central to the Democratic brand that climate concern remains a key way that Democrats express their identity to pollsters.

Time will tell.

How much and in what way public climate attitudes matter for the prospects of various climate policies is of course a very different question.