Finally! Folks, this is important. New Scientist reports that according to an exclusive global warming poll, conducted in April by New Scientist, the WaPo, ABC News and Stanford University in California, fully one third of Americans now name global warming as the world's greatest environmental threat, i.e. double the number who did so just one year ago. Even more significantly, 85 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, and 7 in 10 want the federal government to do something about it. And get this:
Americans turn out to be suspicious of policies that use market forces to help bring down emissions, and are much more likely to support prescriptive regulations that tell companies exactly how they must achieve cuts.
In fact this is HUGE. We ARE approaching a public opinion tipping-point. More quotes and a link to this Must-Read article (which itself links to the entire survey itself) after the flip...
Was it Al Gore's movie? Or is it the legacy of hurricane Katrina and a growing realisation that the US is as vulnerable as anyone to extremes of weather and climate? Whatever the explanation, Americans are growing more worried about global warming.
These poll results read like a blue-print for policy-makers and politicians. I strongly urge everyone to go and read the entire article. From now on recalcitrant Dem congresscritters (and unrepentent equivocating triangulators like Clinton and Obama) should be bombarded with the numbers.
The results of our poll challenge some common preconceptions. They show clearly that policies to combat global warming can command majority public support in the US, as long as they don't hit people's pockets too hard.
Environmentalists still have their work cut out for them on weaning Americans off their automobiles, but that should provide added incentive to automakers to provide the public with cutting-edge hybrid and battery-powered cars as fast as humanly possible (unless they want Toyota and other non-American automakers to put them out of business altogether). The key to lowering priceds is going to be mass-production, and as of now, the Japanese are years ahead of the American Big Three.
So what did we find? One striking result was that, at the costs we quoted, the US public has a clear preference for action in the electricity sector rather than vehicle fuel. Even the least popular electricity policy - cap-and-trade - won more support at all three prices than the most popular vehicle fuel policy.
This is good news for all of us who are scared shitless about the Cheney-Energy-Taskforce-mandated proliferation of coal-powered plants in the U.S. (let alone China, but I think we all agree that until the U.S. leads on this issue, the Chinese will just tell everyone to piss off until further notice).
The enthusiasm for standards over both emissions taxes and cap-and-trade was perhaps the most striking result of the poll. In both the fuel and electricity sectors, standards were significantly more popular than the other two options. Differences between the emissions taxes and the cap-and-trade schemes were not statistically meaningful at any price.
This totally puts the lie to every Republican talking-point on regulating industry. It's time to use these numbers and call them on their shit, every time they or their lobbyist friends go on CNN or some other pliant news venue to sell their fraudulent wares.
The relative lack of enthusiasm for emissions taxes should come as a no big surprise: when is a new tax ever popular? But the fact that cap-and-trade was viewed with similar suspicion gives pause for thought, as such schemes feature in bills to limit greenhouse emissions currently being considered by the US Congress
Again, once-and-future President Al Gore is going to have to explain, educate and persuade the American people on the subject of his Carbon Tax but it shouldn't be too hard a sell (providing the American people are allowed to hear him, which is where this community and other netizens come in), since he's also proposing to eliminate the payroll tax so that the new tax would effectively be revenue-neutral.
It remains unclear how the cost of a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade scheme would stack up against standards. But our poll suggests that cap-and-trade would have to be significantly cheaper to overcome public scepticism towards the idea. In the electricity sector, for example, our results suggest that cap-and trade would only command majority support if a typical household were paying less than an extra $6 a month by 2020; a standard requiring companies to generate more electricity in ways that don't emit greenhouse gases would enjoy the same popularity even if it caused a typical bill to rise by $70 a month.
These findings remind me of the poll numbers currently showing support for a Gore presidency, even though he's not running. The heart flutters when one thinks of what pollsters will be reporting once the public starts getting real facts and information on all these matters!
As expected, supporters of the Democratic party were more likely than Republicans to favour government intervention to limit global warming. So were residents of the western US, though why this should be is less clear. Concern about weather extremes such as drought - currently afflicting the region and expected to get worse with global warming - is a possible explanation.
Western Red States are turning Blue(r). as we already know, and this is part of it.
Our survey raised another intriguing question: who are the people concerned enough to say they are prepared to pay $15 a gallon to fill their vehicles with fuel? In total, 38 per cent of respondents assigned to this price point backed at least one of the three fuel policies. These people are not noticeably wealthier than the rest of the sample, nor do they live in households with no car, of which there were too few to analyse. But there were some significant associations: they are more likely to be women, support the Democrats, and live in the western US.
Fertile ground. That's where it lies.
UPDATE Do read the whole story.