Last week we wrote about how climate change and global warming have entered the divisive space in politics, similar to other Democrat-Republican hot-button issues such as civil liberties and abortion.
We weren’t the only ones tracking public opinion polls that day. Kate Sheppard from the environmental news blog, Grist compiled data from a slew of recent polls regarding the environment. Her summary confirms another intuitive truism about the environment: the public is more concerned about energy costs than about the environment, per se. Issues that acutely impact people’s lives top priority lists, not those with a more abstract dimension.
Sheppard’s analysis confirms another conclusion we posted last week. Namely that Republican-identified people are skeptical about climate change. Sheppard writes about a poll conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change. In it, the results revealed that 32 percent of respondents who plan to vote for John McCain and 29 percent of those leaning to vote for McCain said that they “somewhat distrust” their candidate when it comes to global warming, meaning that they disagree with McCain that it is even an issue.
On a different note, we can’t end a post the day before the US elections without this plea – VOTE!
