It’s an effort to manufacture consent for a dirty deal whose elements are poorly understood by most U.S. voters—through little fault of their own.
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In late August, Heatmap published an article titled “Americans Say ‘Okay, Whatever’ to Permitting Reform.” The piece, which is based on polling commissioned by Heatmap, purports to provide a snapshot of public opinion on the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, a deregulatory bill introduced in July by Senators Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and John Barasso (R-Wyo.). It fails to do so. The writeup is an effort to manufacture consent for a dirty deal whose elements are poorly understood by most U.S. voters—through little fault of their own.
Without seeing the survey, it’s impossible to know how Heatmap defined “permitting reform” when asking respondents whether they endorse the Manchin-led effort to enact it. In his summary of the poll results, Heatmap’s founding executive editor Robinson Meyer wrote that “most Americans support the idea of a bipartisan law that would make it easier to build new clean energy projects while benefiting some oil and gas development.” So that’s the best approximation we have of how the outlet framed the issue.
According to Meyer: “Some 52% of Americans said they backed the general idea of the legislation, the poll found. About a quarter of Americans opposed it, and roughly another quarter said they weren’t sure.” That a quarter of U.S. adults expressed uncertainty regarding how they feel about the Manchin-Barasso bill underscores the folly of this exercise. The fact is that, on most complex policy issues, a majority of people are uninformed or misinformed. This means that pollsters aren’t merely measuring public opinion; more often than not, they’re shaping or even inventing it.
This is not a fresh insight. The problematic assumptions, methods, and consequences of the polling industry have been discussed at length. I highly recommend exploring what David W. Moore—former managing editor of the Gallup Poll and author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls—has written over the past few years for Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR).
To its credit, Heatmap gave underinformed respondents an out by allowing them to say they’re not sure how they feel about permitting reform. This is an improvement over notoriously manipulative and deceptive forced-choice polls that require respondents to “approve” or “disapprove” of a policy or the handling of an issue regardless of their level of knowledge.
Had Heatmap relied on a forced-choice poll, it’s likely that more than 52% of respondents would have expressed support for the Manchin-Barasso bill. Nonetheless, Meyer still inflated support for the legislation when he wrote that “permitting reform is about 15 to 25 points above water,” a conclusion that depends on excluding or making assumptions about those who said they weren’t sure.
Notably, Meyer acknowledged the limits of Heatmap’s permitting reform survey in his introduction to the daily newsletter featuring his writeup of the data: “[B]ecause so many of the issues at hand are so wonky, we haven’t gotten a good sense of how the public feels about the proposal. Now, after our latest Heatmap poll, we have a slightly better one” (emphasis added).
Do we have a slightly better understanding now? Not really. “Reform” is a misleading word when it comes to issue-based public opinion polling. That’s because it’s vague but has positive connotations. Given how unjust the status quo is, many people are in favor of reform; there is widespread disagreement, however, over what to change and how. Recent surveys about Supreme Court reform and policing reform are indicative of the problem. On both issues, there appears to be robust support for change across the political spectrum even though Republicans simultaneously convey strong approval of the high court’s justices and law enforcement officials alike (it turns out their enthusiasm for reform declines when proposals are linked to Democrats). Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m pretty sure a “Reform Feeling Bad on Mondays” bill would poll incredibly well irrespective of its specific contents or practicability. It sounds good!
It’s a bit surprising that only 52% of people said they support Manchin and Barasso’s energy deregulation legislation given how positively Heatmap framed it. First, Meyer misidentified Manchin as a Democrat (Manchin became an Independent in May), presumably so he could describe the bill as a bipartisan compromise. Manchin may caucus with Senate Democrats, but his erstwhile membership in the party was spent scuttling its best proposals (e.g., tanking Build Back Better and leaving us with the decent but watered-down Inflation Reduction Act). More accurately, the Energy Permitting Reform Act is the product of two non-Democrats from fossil fuel-producing states (both are top recipients of oil and gas industry cash and Manchin is a literal coal baron who profits from his family’s gob business). It’s not like Barasso wrote the bill alongside Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) or another Green New Deal champion.
In addition, Meyer also described the Manchin-Barasso bill’s proposed trade-offs in a rather glib fashion. For example, he wrote that the legislation “would make it easier to both build zero-carbon energy and drill for oil and gas on public lands” or it “would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry.” These statements are technically true, but they dramatically undersell how harmful the bill’s polluter giveaways are. We can only assume that the survey used similar language.
If that’s the case, then downplaying the damaging aspects of the Energy Permitting Reform Act does Heatmap poll respondents a disservice, and it underscores why I said that voters’ general ignorance of this legislation is hardly their own fault. The public ought to be informed that this bill is largely a reformulation of Manchin’s Building American Energy Security Act of 2023, which was reportedly drafted by the American Petroleum Institute (API). They ought to be told that it has received vocal support from API, the Partnership to Address Global Emissions, and other fossil fuel front groups, all of which signals that the dirty energy industry—not the burgeoning clean power sector—stands to benefit most.
As the Center for Western Priorities has explained, the Energy Permitting Reform Act “includes important and needed provisions that would help accelerate renewable energy development,” but it also “props up the continued development of fossil fuels at a moment when the nation should be doing everything it can to transition to clean energy.” According to two recent analyses, the Manchin-Barasso bill’s LNG provisions alone could negate the decarbonization gains derived from building more transmission lines to carry renewably powered electricity.
Climate scientists have been unequivocal about the need to restrict new fossil fuel production to give the world a fighting chance of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C and thus averting the climate emergency’s worst impacts. Meanwhile, the permitting debate has become so reductive and convoluted that we’re overlooking more straightforward ways to expedite the clean energy transition, such as requiring electric utilities to buy more green power, sooner.
Of course, utilities would probably insist that there’s not yet enough transmission capacity to deliver more clean energy. That’s why a standalone bill to improve existing transmission infrastructure and accelerate the construction of new power lines—with no pro-fossil fuel strings attached—makes sense. Increasing energy efficiency and boosting residential solar would also alleviate pressure on the grid, and lowering interest rates would make it easier to complete capital-intensive offshore wind projects. By portraying the expansion of fracking on public lands and the growth of LNG exports as mandatory concomitant measures to green energy provisions, Meyer’s piece advances the interests of the fossil fuel industry.
All of this begs the question: What’s the point of this Heatmap poll? Meyer suggested that the goal was to provide a “good sense of how the public feels about” the Energy Permitting Reform Act. I’m not convinced that objective was realized. For his part, Meyer described the survey’s findings that over half of U.S. adults are in favor of the Manchin-Barasso bill as “good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass this term.”
But Meyer—one of several prominent supply-side liberals who have advocated for deregulation to maximize production and supply of, for example, all-of-the-above energy sources—is hardly a disinterested party. Put simply, this looks like a media outlet engineering support for an outcome that its leadership favors (even after one of its reporters quoted experts who predicted that the legislation in question would ultimately set back the fight against the climate crisis).
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