By Frank Newport, Gallup
While 61% of Americans say the effects of global warming have already begun, just a little more than a third say they worry about it a great deal, a percentage that is roughly the same as the one Gallup measured 19 years ago. The public just can’t seem to get worked up about it.
Despite the enormous attention paid to global warming over the past several years, the average American is in some ways no more worried about it than in years past. Americans do appear to have become more likely to believe global warming’s effects are already taking place and that it could represent a threat to their way of life during their lifetimes. But the American public is more worried about a series of other environmental concerns than about global warming, and there has been no consistent upward trend on worry about global warming going back for two decades. Additionally, only a little more than a third of Americans say that immediate, drastic action is needed in order to maintain life as we know it on the planet.
The fact that a majority of Americans don’t believe global warming will pose a threat to them in their lifetimes makes it perhaps less surprising to find that significantly less than a majority of Americans say they worry a great deal about it. In fact, worry about global warming is low on a list of 12 environmental problems that Gallup asks about in the Environment surveys (ranking 10th out of 12 environmental issues). Gallup’s broad measure of worry about environmental issues does not show a concomitant increase in concern. Although there have been fluctuations on this measure of worry over the years, the percentage of Americans who worry a great deal about global warming is no higher now than it was 19 years ago. And the percentage who do worry a great deal—37%—is still well less than a majority, and in fact lower than the percentage who worry a great deal about such environmental issues as pollution of drinking water, pollution of lakes and reservoirs, and toxic waste in the soil. See more here.
By Max Schulz, New York Post
Tuesday is Earth Day, the calendar’s High Holy Day of Green theology. With each passing year, environmentalism more clearly assumes the trappings of a secular religion. Now, along comes Iain Murray to assert that the Green God is dead. Murray’s new book, “The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About - Because They Helped Cause Them,” clarifies the difference between caring for the environment - a reasonable and virtuous belief that people rightly harbor - and the modern-day movement known as environmentalism. The latter, Murray notes, has amassed a shameful legacy over a half century that has killed millions of people and consigned billions of others to backbreaking poverty. “Environmentalism deserves to be as discredited as Marxism,” Murray argues. His book does a superb job of doing just that.
Murray, an energy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, lives a low-carbon lifestyle. He loves nature and the outdoors. He’s practically a tree-hugger. Nevertheless, he makes clear, “I am not an environmentalist.” Why? Because, as he explains, environmentalism has become a socio-political movement exploiting people’s genuine regard for nature as a smokescreen for expanding government and exercising power. And the results have been disastrous for both humanity and the environment. Murray chronicles seven environmental catastrophes, and shows the hand of the professional environmental movement in each one.
At bottom, Murray notes, the environmental movement is rooted not in a concern for the environment, but in a disdain for personal freedom and free-enterprise capitalism. Humanity is the disease plaguing the planet. The antidote must be environmental policies enforced by government diktat, relying on mandates, bans, orders, restrictions and punishments to achieve its goals. The better answer is conservation by private stewards, individuals and corporations, who understand caring for the environment is important, while making choices that are actually logical - and sustainable. Read more here.
By Patrick Michaels, Des Moines Register‘
In a much-anticipated statement on global warming, President Bush on Thursday announced a national goal to stabilize our emissions of greenhouse gases - mainly carbon dioxide - by 2025.To reach this goal, he proposed new fuel-economy standards for autos by 2020, and lower emissions from electricity production in the next 10 to 15 years. The president called for new technologies to further reduce emissions after 2025. If every nation of the world met the president’s goal, there would be no detectable reduction of global warming from a “business as usual” scenario for at least 50 years. If we want to significantly slow warming, emissions have to be cut by more than 60 percent. Pending legislation in the Senate, sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and John Warner, a Virginia Republican, drops them 66 percent by 2050.
The only problem is that no one knows how to do this. The fact is that we simply don’t have - and can’t realistically imagine - the suite of technologies that would bring about such a sweeping change, nationally or globally. Instead, lawmakers propose schemes to make carbon-based energy so expensive that people will use very little of it. Has anyone noticed that gasoline consumption has gone down only a half of 1 percent at current prices? How expensive does it have to be to go down 66 percent?The president is being keel-hauled for being realistic, if ineffective. One can’t simply wave a legislative magic wand and wreck the economy in a futile attempt to halt the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
China has already passed the United States as the world’s largest emitter, and will be far ahead of us by 2025. India won’t be far behind us for long. They are both industrializing largely with coal-fired electricity. What are the technologies that can accomplish reductions in emissions that will have a major effect on global warming? Don’t ask me - or anyone, for that matter. In a telling commentary earlier this month in Nature magazine, Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at University of Colorado, wrote that “enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations at acceptable levels.” What they are remained unspecified. We currently flail from one politically correct technology to another. A few years back it was hydrogen, until people discovered that more energy would be expended in isolating and transporting it than would be saved. Then along came (dare I say in Iowa) corn-based ethanol. Scientists have been warning for years that it, too, would save little if any energy, as was forcefully acknowledged in Science magazine earlier this year. President Bush says “celluosic” ethanol (produced from fiber rather than grain) is just around the corner. Sure. We’re working on it. For 50 years. Will there be some breakthrough technology? Maybe. But we won’t get it without investment, which means we won’t get there without a vibrant economy. The president is right about that one.
Patrick Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, which promotes limited government, individual liberty and free markets.