We asked a panel of U.S. adults a series of questions about today’s most crucial issues, environmental policy options, and their own behavior.
In all three categories, I was personally surprised and discouraged to discover that our devotion to the world around us is flagging.
In a survey we at the Harris Poll conducted last December, American adults said climate change was the number one issue facing society.
Today, it comes in second to last on a list of a dozen options, ahead of only overpopulation. Among Gen X men, in fact, more than third dismiss climate change as unimportant.
COVID-19 and the recession have, of course, reordered priorities around the world. Still, the coronavirus didn’t elbow aside other issues as muscularly as it did climate change. (Incidentally, global warming is a bigger concern to retirement-age women than any other age group except millennial men.)
Additionally, we asked about policies the government could adopt to fight global warming or help the environment generally.
There was majority support for only one of nine initiatives, with 51% endorsing tax credits or rebates for greater energy efficiency in buildings.
Moreover, 13% of all respondents say the government should do nothing to improve the environment, a stance that rises to nearly one in five of all survey takers in the South.
More telling is what we are doing—or should I say, what we no longer are doing.
We know from this survey, conducted on July 24, that American adults are burning less fuel than they did before the pandemic hit.
In pre-COVID-19 America, 77% of adults said they used to drive. Today, with more people working from home, or not working at all, just 61% say they are using their cars to get around.
Similarly, only 14% of adults say they are still flying, down from 21% last winter. That’s an environmental plus since it means we’re pumping less greenhouse gas into the air.
But we are also reverting back to a society that throws too much away. Younger men, in particular, are ordering more takeout food, packed in single-use plastic bags and disposable boxes, often with those plastic straws scorned for littering the landscape and polluting waterways.
We are toting reusable bags less often on errands. Probably because more of us are home, we also are consuming more energy to keep our homes cooler in the summer and warmer in chilly months than we used to.
And when the pandemic ends—or at least is suitably controlled—American adults say they’ll behave in ways that would increase their carbon footprint.
According to our survey, we’ll drive as much as we did before, take public transportation less, bicycle or walk less, buy more clothes, and have more stuff packaged up and shipped to our homes.
And most of us plan to jack up the home AC and heat even more than we already have.
Read rest at Fortune
There are far more important things then a total’y made up fake crisis of Global Warming/Climate Change
All life dies without CO2. CO2 is the basic ingredient molecule of life on earth. It is how life, including us, remains the carbon-based lifeforms we all are. And CO2 has been naturally declining from 7000ppm for the entire 600 million year duration of multicellular evolution. To within 30ppm of lethally low CO2 concentrations. Today’s 40% increase in CO2 hasn’t budged the climate outside of the last twelve thousand year Holocene interglacial norms one bit. Or out of the last three million year Pleistocen/Holocene ongoing ice age. It has however, made our environment 30% greener and more abundant. It has shrunk deserts by making plants stronger and more drought tolerant. And it has brought a string of world record crop yields. Canadian Trudeau Liberal Maurice Strong spent most of his adult career pushing the fake climate crisis. Today he’s dead and buried in Communist China, a convicted felon. Half of the last twelve thousand years have been warmer than today with lower CO2. Time to get on with actual problems. Like using soon to be released Covid-19 vaccines to put Communist China’s viral gift to the world in the dustbin of history.