Dec 11, 2018 07:35 AM
(This post was last modified: Dec 11, 2018 07:37 AM by C C.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...story.html
EXCERPT: . . . The data show that, for all the evidence that climate change is real, manmade and dangerous, and despite wide public acceptance of those propositions, people in the United States do not necessarily want to stop climate change, in the sense of being willing to pay the cost — which is the only sense that really matters.
“The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades [...] ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans” [...] In a series of open-ended Gallup surveys this year asking Americans to name the “most important problem facing the country,” environmental issues never scored above 3 percent.
Even before the recent riots against President Emmanuel Macron’s climate-change-related fuel tax hike in France, there was a quieter backlash of sorts in the United States: Anti-fossil-fuel referendums lost in Colorado, Washington state and Arizona during last month’s elections.
Undoubtedly, there have been well-funded efforts to sow climate-change skepticism in recent decades [...] This could not have helped the climate-change movement, even if scholars have yet to identify a “causal link” between such campaigns and individual attitudes [...] Of course, the climate-change movement was not exactly silent during recent history. [...]
Slashing carbon emissions is a cause that “has no core constituency with a concentrated interest in policy change,” while “a majority of people benefit from arrangements that cause” climate change.
The United States, with its multiple veto points for various regional and economic interests, tends to postpone dealing with long-range crises even more than most democracies, as our failure to shore up the solvency of federal entitlement programs shows....
MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...story.html
EXCERPT: . . . The data show that, for all the evidence that climate change is real, manmade and dangerous, and despite wide public acceptance of those propositions, people in the United States do not necessarily want to stop climate change, in the sense of being willing to pay the cost — which is the only sense that really matters.
“The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades [...] ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans” [...] In a series of open-ended Gallup surveys this year asking Americans to name the “most important problem facing the country,” environmental issues never scored above 3 percent.
Even before the recent riots against President Emmanuel Macron’s climate-change-related fuel tax hike in France, there was a quieter backlash of sorts in the United States: Anti-fossil-fuel referendums lost in Colorado, Washington state and Arizona during last month’s elections.
Undoubtedly, there have been well-funded efforts to sow climate-change skepticism in recent decades [...] This could not have helped the climate-change movement, even if scholars have yet to identify a “causal link” between such campaigns and individual attitudes [...] Of course, the climate-change movement was not exactly silent during recent history. [...]
Slashing carbon emissions is a cause that “has no core constituency with a concentrated interest in policy change,” while “a majority of people benefit from arrangements that cause” climate change.
The United States, with its multiple veto points for various regional and economic interests, tends to postpone dealing with long-range crises even more than most democracies, as our failure to shore up the solvency of federal entitlement programs shows....
MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...story.html
