Americans are starting to accept that extreme weather events and climate change are associated with each other. However, the results from a recent poll suggest that while they are not yet ready to pay to fix the root cause of climate change, Americans are willing to pay for some degree of mitigation.
The poll – by NPR / Robert Wood Johnson Foundation / Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health – suggests that, overall, 70% of the US public “sees climate change as a crisis or a major problem”. That percentage jumps up to 77% when polls focus on those who’ve been affected by extreme weather events in the past five years. Unfortunately, that number falls to 46% among those who stated that they have not been directly affected.
At the moment, getting the public to pay for measures to prevent climate change is a bit more complex. The multi-part question #26 from the poll:
When respondents were asked if they support a carbon tax, 52% of respondents suggested they likely would. However, that support drops to 39% if that tax substantially increases prices that they would have to pay.
The researchers note that many respondents communicated experiences of financial challenges related to current high energy pricing, and that presumably, these hardships affected their answers. In fact, pricing pressure is apparently so great that 62% of respondents support increased oil drilling to lower gasoline pricing, even if that were to interfere with climate goals.
Broader socioeconomic factors are also affecting those who are experiencing weather events, and more importantly, how these parties can financially respond to these events – and thus how willing they are to pay even more.
For instance, only 29% of households that experienced extreme events had 100% of their damages covered by insurance. Renters though had it worse – with those who have experienced extreme events being uninsured 70% of the time.
The report noted that 22% of homeowners who experienced extreme weather damage applied for federal and state aid, with about half of them receiving some form of support, leaving 88% with no government backup.
The authors suggest that regulations which seem “further from their wallets” of respondents had higher general support. For instance, 65% believe the government should do more to limit climate change via tools such as limiting power plant emissions (78% support) or increasing vehicle fuel efficiency standards (67%).
When asked about fuel efficiency standards and grid resistance, we again see a split between those who have dealt with extreme weather events and those who haven’t. For instance, those who have experienced severe weather events support federal fuel efficiency standards by 18% greater than those who haven’t, 17% more want regulations to push grid resilience, and 24% more support state spending to prepare for future weather disasters.
An important nuance is that the poll self-reported those who have ‘experienced’ or ‘not experienced’ an extreme weather event. It is clearly possible that the pre-existing political and climate related views of these peoples bled into their perceptions of whether they had experienced an extreme weather event at all. Those who are more sensitive to climate change might believe that more things are extreme, whereas those who push back against the science, might deem extreme weather as simply ‘weather’.
As well, those who are in a more challenging socioeconomic position might define an event as extreme more so, since it had a greater effect on their existence, and their literal physical experience of the event might be more direct and life changing.
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We have been hooked on fossil fuels for 6 generations and making the change to all renewables in just one generation will need a radicle incentive to do so. From horse drawn buggies or carts to internal combustion engines only took one generation and a lot of horses got retired. Feeding and caring for the horses was replaced by just a “fill-up” at a service station. Driving over an induction plate in one’s own garage and automatic charging could replace the weekly “Pit-Stop” at the gas station. We no longer have daily ice deliveries for “Ice Boxes” because frost free refrigerators are just plug in and forget. Solar Roofs, long lasting batteries and induction plate EV charging could do it if we just provide the means and affordability to make lives easier not more complicated.
Weather it’s weather or whether it’s not, let’s keep divisive politics and funding out of it until gather enough facts to show cause and effect that’s not
based upon cause and emotion as it is today.
12,000 years ago our last ice age ended after the sun melted a two mile thick ice sheet covering most of North America.
The eighth glaciation we think we know about from ice cores, sediment cores, earth’s orbital mechanics according to Mikankovitch cycles and 172 years of instrumented temperature measurements isn’t enough to accurately forecast future temperatures, sea levels and extreme weather years, decades, centuries or millenia in the future.
Besides, most of us won’t be here to see who’s right anyway and life will go on regardless for those willing to adapt as our ancestors did for millenia after the last glaciation and those before it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation#Known_ice_ages
Ocean temperatures are higher than ever before in our recorded history. CO2 is higher than in the last 50,000 years based on ice Core samples. We have a problem with global heating causing climate change. The balance of nature is messed up by our clear cutting of forests worldwide. With our oceans covering 3/4 of our planet, the warmer oceans are having a direct effect on evaporation and cloud formation. Water Vapor as well as CO2 holds the heat into our atmosphere. Trapped under the permafrost is a lot of frozen peat moss, that when thawed, gives off methane that is another heat absorbing gas. Most of our civilization built the major metropolitan along the world’s coasts to accommodate shipping, and if all of that goes under water, as the glaciers of Greenland and Antartica melt along with the expansion effect of warmer water, the costs could be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars to move them inland. Who will pay those costs? We will in higher taxes and cost of goods we buy. And then, there is the fact that almost half of the world’s fossil fuels in oil and natural gas is already depleted. It is getting more expensive to find and recover as seen in our recent prices at the pump or home heating costs. I installed Solar and batteries to save money. Instant relief on the budget. I also say everybody should do so to help their budgets that are at my age of 50 to 75 years old. For those aged 25 or less, they will need to do it to save the planet, the economy and their lifestyles and the health of their children. Reenables, including Solar, Wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and safe nuclear are the only clear choices we have for our future. We have the tools so now let us use them.
Um…Dave, you do know that the IPCC has based their findings on “enough facts to show cause and effect that’s not based upon cause and emotion”? 98.1% of climate scientists agree that humans are accelerating global warming.
Here’s an article from Popular Mechanics magazine of 1912: “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature.” Obviously those numbers are way down, being 110 years old.
That article was based on fact, not emotion.
People who choose not to accept the established climate science are basing their beliefs on emotion and ideology. Some will never change their minds, because they can’t.
There are plenty of well researched articles about the psychology of climate change denial on the Internet.