(U.S. President Trump speaks prior to signing executive order on "energy independence" during event at EPA headquarters in WashingtonThomson Reuters)
President Trump really wants to undo Barack Obama's climate legacy.
With an executive order signed March 28, he scrapped Obama's Climate Action Plan, lifted a moratorium on coal leases on federal land, and started the long process of dismantling various other Obama-era efforts to cut US greenhouse gas emissions, including the Clean Power Plan.
Trump signed his executive order surrounded by a group of coal miners. It was a powerful image: a president who promised to remember the "forgotten man" flanked by workers from an industry he's trying to jump-start.
But many questions remain about the implications of the order, including whether easing regulations on fossil fuels will help boost the US economy or create new jobs.
It's also worth asking why Trump, a president deeply interested in his popularity, is following a course of action that's highly unpopular around the country.
Earlier in March, the Yale Program on Climate Communication released a trove of data from surveys it conducted to find out what Americans actually think about climate change.
Yale mapped this data, and the visualizations show that a majority of adults think global warming is happening in every congressional district in the US — 70% of American voting-age citizens, added together.
(Estimated percentage of American adults who think global warming is happening, 2016Yale Center on Climate Change Communication)
When people were asked they support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, an even larger majority (75%) answered "yes." As the map below shows, there isn't a single congressional district where the majority of adults don't support this regulation.
(Estimated percentage of American adults who support regulating CO2, 2016Yale Center on Climate Change Communication)
Still more Americans, 82%, say they're on board with funding research into renewable energy.
(Estimated percentage of adults who support funding research into renewable energy sources, 2016Yale Center on Climate Change Communication)
Based on that information, you might think Trump's climate policies would be politically disastrous.
But there's another side to the data. Even though most Americans think climate change is a serious problem, few of them actually talk about it much.
There isn't a single congressional district in the US where a majority of adults say they discuss climate change "at least occasionally."
(Estimated percentage of adults who discuss global warming at least occasionally, 2016Yale Center on Climate Change Communication)