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Americans show support for global warming efforts

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December 15, 2009

More Americans believe steps taken to reduce global warming pollution will help the U.S. economy than say such measures will hurt it. It’s a sign the public is showing more faith in President Barack Obama’s economic arguments for limiting heat-trapping gases than in Republican claims that the actions would kill jobs.

In an Associated Press-Stanford University poll, 40 percent said U.S. action to slow global warming in the future would create jobs. Slightly more, 46 percent, said it would boost the economy.

By contrast, less than a third said curbing climate change would hurt the economy and result in fewer jobs, a message Republican members of Congress plan to take to an international global warming conference in Copenhagen this week.

“They’re wrong,” Ron Classen of Seattle, who participated in the poll, said of the GOP stance. “People are going to be shifted from one job to another,” said Classen, a self-described fan of environmentalist and former Vice President Al Gore.

The survey’s results seem to boost Democratic efforts to curb global warming pollution and sign on to an international agreement to reduce heat-trapping gases, despite the concerns many Americans have about the recession and the high unemployment rate.

For some, the recession has manifested itself in a nothing-left-to-lose attitude when it comes to tackling climate and to sparking a revolution in where and how the nation produces its energy.

“I don’t know if anybody has looked around lately, but the economy is dead,” said Jake Berglund, a home-improvement contractor from Portland, Conn. “We are in a sinking ship, and Obama has bought us enough life rafts to keep on going. But we need to figure out how to build a new boat when we are still on the water.”

The poll, however, also suggests that Americans have limits to how much they want to pay to address global warming. Obama and many Democrats in Congress envision shifting the country away from burning fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy, in a part by passing a new law that would set up a cap-and-trade system that puts a price on pollution.

While three-quarters of respondents said they support action of some kind on climate change, just as many said they would oppose the cap-and-trade system if it raised their electricity bill by $25 a month. A majority — 59 percent — wouldn’t support cap-and-trade if it meant paying $10 extra a month for electricity.

Under cap-and-trade, companies that release greenhouse gases when they manufacture electricity would pass the cost of buying pollution permits or investing in cleaner technologies down to consumers.

This added cost allows alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar that tend to be more expensive to compete with cheaper but dirtier forms of energy such as coal.

“People just don’t like higher taxes and higher prices simply to manipulate their behavior,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor of political science who has been polling the public on global warming for 15 years. “Much larger majorities continue to favor government requiring businesses or offering them tax incentives to reduce their emissions even if it would cost Americans money.”

The Obama administration has doled out billions in economic stimulus dollars to help fund clean energy technologies. It has also pursued mandates that would require cleaner-burning cars and require power plants and factories to install technologies to reduce heat-trapping pollution from their smokestacks.

By increasing the cost of doing business, the cap-and-trade bill and the regulations backed by the White House may mean there would be fewer jobs in coal mining, oil refining and other industries that emit greenhouse gases. But many jobs would probably be replaced by “green jobs” such as making wind turbines, installing solar panels and insulating homes.

Walter Hornbeak, a 67-year-old Republican from Tennessee who built equipment for coal- and nuclear-fired power plants in the 1980s, said, “We have too much imagination to sit there and be stagnant.”

Reducing global warming “would give the private sector the incentive to go out and start investing and finding ways to help more,” Hornbeak said.

Some Republicans in Congress disagree.

“If President Obama has his way, the Copenhagen conference will produce mandatory emissions limits that would destroy millions of American jobs and damage our economic competitiveness for decades to come,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said in the GOP radio address last Saturday.

There is a recognition, based on the AP poll, that eventually everyone would have to change their habits. Sixty-five percent said global warming could be slowed only if people make major changes in their lifestyle.

“It would hurt,” said Joe Fletcher, a tax accountant from Woodbridge, N.J., who was among the third who said reducing global warming pollution would cost jobs and harm the economy. Fletcher, however, still supports cap and trade.

“But if you look at it in an overall planetary perspective, you might need to do something like this … to help your environment and grandchildren,” Fletcher said.

Posted by on December 15, 2009. Filed under FUBAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

16 Responses to Americans show support for global warming efforts

  1. griff

    December 15, 2009 at 12:04 pm

    I guess the relentless propaganda campaign is paying huge dividends. Al Gore and friends must be salivating over the billions to be made while the average global citizen has every aspect of their lives under control and observation of an unelected, totalitarian global government run by the benevolent banksters at the IMF and World Bank.

    There is absolutely no limits to the gullibility of the American people. 

  2. woody188

    December 15, 2009 at 2:24 pm

    We should look at the EU to see just how well a cap and trade system will work here in the USA.  It was declared a failure just over a year ago.  Today, no one wants to buy carbon credits in the wake of the Climategate scandal, but you couldn’t tell that by watching American corporate media.  Note the obvious bias in this article above by the corporate media.

    Odd no mention of the UN claiming the USA owes the world over $26 trillion in carbon ‘reparations’ for it’s past burning of fossil fuels, with speculation that they will demand nearly $50 trillion when it’s all said and done. And no mention of how the UN intends to undermine our sovereignty based on green legislation.

    Cap and trade is a disaster.  It is a death knell for small manufacturers like where I work.  It does nothing to curb pollution, and only works to enrich the traders on Wall Street and Al Gore.  In fact, it may actually increase pollution as companies treat the carbon credits like a permit to pollute.

    FYI, Obama is connected to the Chicago Climate Exchange as he helped fund it’s creation via grants while he was on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1998 to 2001.  And of course Al Gore is connected to Generation Investment Management and stands to make billions off of your ignorance. So much for full disclosure.

    Most of this is moot now anyway what with the EPA making an end run around Congress and declaring CO2 a threat to “the health and welfare of current and future generations.”  Can’t wait for the CO2 meters strapped to our faces so they know how much to bill us for breathing.  Funny how they waited until the cap and trade agenda was on the rocks to do that.  They will tax you for CO2 one way or another.

  3. griff

    December 15, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    Not long ago folks used to suggest the government would tax you on the air you breathe if they could. Well, they surely found a way.

    Enjoy this video for a preview of the kind of thievery that is already occuring in Europe’s carbon exchange.

    “Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.” – James Madison

  4. woody188

    December 15, 2009 at 2:50 pm

    I should probably invest in some swamp land and sell the carbon credits to AEP or another power generator.  It’s great getting paid to do nothing but sit on land that was formerly deemed worthless.  Wonder how many acres of swamp it would take to become a carbon credit millionaire?

    They have to create these false economies because they destroyed our real economy.  I’d rather see us get back to being able to support ourselves and create our own products instead of importing everything from overseas.  Because only by selling products, and not creating money out of nothing via some trading scheme, will America be able to lift itself back out of this depression we are in now.

  5. griff

    December 15, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    Ha. I would recommend a nice peat bog. You can smelt yourself some iron and become a blacksmith. Surely we’ll be back to horse and buggy days before long. Stay ahead of the curve, Woody!

  6. woody188

    December 15, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    Hehe, ya if the carbon police don’t shut me down for burning coal in my furnace.  And they’ll want to strap a meter on my horses patoot for releasing noxious gases from his bowel.

  7. griff

    December 15, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    Pure genius, Woody! We need to get together and collaborate on a methane scrubber for livestock pronto. You fire up AutoCAD and I’ll book our flight to Copenhagen. Who says the American entrepreneurial spirit is dead?

  8. woody188

    December 15, 2009 at 6:46 pm

    Well you know there is carbon in flatulence. So it’s probably on the list to tax.  Carbon is one of the most common elements on our planet.  Are graphite pencils, diamonds, calcium (limestone), magnesium, and iron hazardous to our health?

    Our bodies are some 18% carbon.  Are we pollutants too?

    See how ridiculous it is to argue over CO2 levels?

  9. bryan mcclellan

    December 15, 2009 at 4:04 pm

    Carbon based units attempting to rid the Earth of excess carbon.

    HMMMM, isn’t there is a three letter word for that…?

  10. griff

    December 16, 2009 at 8:49 am

    I don’t know, but there is an eight letter word for it…genocide.

  11. griff

    December 15, 2009 at 4:09 pm

    http://21stcenturywire.com/2009/12/15/tony-blair-arrives-in-time-for-snow-storm-in-copenhagen/

    Excerpt from article…

    Piers Corbyn, astrophysicist of Weather Action (UK) solar-based long-range forecasters, said: “We are very pleased with these blizzards forecasted by our Solar Weather Technique which depends on solar-particle and magnetic effects and has nothing to do with CO2. “Our forecast created about 30 days ahead and announced about 20 days ahead was very specific that 14-16/17 would be particularly snowy with biting cold winds in the region. What we said 30 days ahead was as good as standard Met 2 days ahead. “The blizzards might concentrate some minds into the realisation that the whole of the CO2 Climate Change junket is a world scam based on failed science and fraudulent data”.

     

  13. Carl Nemo

    December 15, 2009 at 7:08 pm

    We all know Algor is a scheming hyprocrite…!  Hey, he learned from the best of the best in the game; ie., Bill Clinton…no?!

    He’s another guy that was awarded the Nobel Prize and for what I might add?   It seems the prize has degenerated to simply be within the domain of extreme left, liberal, “liars”!

    So lets say within a few years it starts snowing in July in the northern hemisphere and doesn’t stop until the following May and on this process goes as the glaciers advance again and everyone in the Northern hemisphere is crapping ice bricks because their heating bills have become a “moonshot”. 

    While the glaciers advance the “cap and traders” will no doubt still be shoving their bogus agenda down our collective throats saying that the cooling is simply an anomalous event and we’re soon to realize their collective prognostication of folks losing their expensive beachfront property wherever, due to rising ocean levels… : ))

    Then what?!   Ooops!

    My suggestion…let’s get a rope,  tar, feathers and a sharp edged rail even before this anomaly happens…!

    Carl Nemo **==

  14. Carl Nemo

    December 15, 2009 at 6:40 pm

    duplicate deleted

  15. bogofree

    December 15, 2009 at 7:57 pm

    Maybe Michael Moore should get a Nobel?

  16. bryan mcclellan

    December 16, 2009 at 12:25 am

    we alredy have one we fail to use…….