Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner polled 1000 Americans and got some encouraging results. Three in ten respondents chose stopping global warming by reducing dependence on fossil fuels as the most important threat, above student performance, business competitiveness and retirement security. Only reducing healthcare costs did better, pulling only three percentage points more support.
Majorities of Americans feel we're lagging the world in developing "clean, alternative energy" (13% think we've fallen behind, 40% think we're falling behind), and 64% of the public thinks we need to "immediately" move away from coal and oil to cleaner alternatives. Nearly 80% think that "shifting to new, alternative energy production will help America's economy and create jobs." About a third of the public backs that only somewhat, suggesting that they are probably willing to listen, but could still be convinced by naysayers. Six in ten feel "we must take action now or it will be too late to stop it," while only a third think "We need to take action on global warming, but the effects will not occur for decades and we have some time before we must take action to stop it." Only 12% back the second statement strongly, leaving 20% who could be convinced otherwise.
Telling people about the risk of greater government regulation actually increases support for immediate action, boosting support from 60% to 65%. Even when respondents were told that a carbon cap might weaken the economy, support for the proposal was close to 60%; support for tax credits for renewable energy was much stronger (70%), as was raising fuel economy standards (66%) and a 25% renewable power standard. (65%).
Remarkably, these proposals actually get the strongest support among Independent voters. This suggests that those issues could be more important in close elections than they might have seemed at first.
I have to say that these results are somewhat surprising and I remain skeptical. A global survey by Pew found that concern about global warming reaches its lowest levels in the US, at least among industrialized nations. In a national poll, people rated global warming relatively low as an issue (though energy policy and the environment in general also ranked highly).
Comments
I'm always searching for the counter-arguements, fighting the short phraseology and seeming good sense slung by the Right.
I'm happy with this :
Maybe it’s because we grew up with smog, that we think of pollution as a noxious chemical stew or a hot exhaust spew. The ignorant wing reads their ideas into the Global Warming reports, and reduces it to their simple notions and words. The Peanut Gallery repeats it back and forth.
The Global Warming Theory says that the increased CO2 retains heat (physics), NOT makes heat (chemistry). The heat can be man-made, or extraterrestrial sunspot activity, it doesn’t matter - we can’t get rid of it! The past ice ages and warming periods are actually a confirmation of the correlation of CO2 and temperature. The fact that CO2 is natural doesn’t lessen the fact that we are flooding our atmosphere. That the molecule CO2 is in itself non-toxic is meaningless. Water is natural and non-toxic, but too much is called a flood, and we do something about it.
The physics can be demonstrated : park a black car, windows up, in the sun. The paint will be too hot too touch, yet the interior will be hotter than the blackly enclosed trunk. The glass retains the thermal heat energy wavelengths, trapping them inside. Global Warming is a very real problem.
Posted by: Richard W. Crews | May 3, 2007 3:48 AM