Growing strength—and divide—in climate opinion

Even as Americans become more willing to act on global warming, opinions are solidifying along party lines.

Although recent polls show that a majority of Americans are willing to tackle climate change, the political divide over this issue is deepening. Democrats support climate action overwhelmingly, but the number of Republicans who believe that the earth is warming and who rank global warming as a top policy priority has dropped compared with last year.

However, there is some good news for climate action supporters. A new survey of U.S. electricity consumers shows that Americans seem ready to open their wallets—at least a crack—to slow warming. The study, released in May by the accounting and consulting firm Deloitte LLP, found that 62% of 1000 Americans surveyed say they would pay higher electricity rates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their state. They would accept only modest increases, however; although 62% say they would pay 5% more, only 5% would accept an increase greater than 15%.

Overall, 74% of consumers expressed concerns about global warming, says Branko Terzic, Deloitte's energy and resources regulatory policy director. When asked about specific technologies, more than 60% supported "clean coal" and nearly 60% supported nuclear power. Deloitte did not survey enough people to break down the results by political party, Terzic says, but the overall findings can help regulators gauge public sentiment.

In a 2007 survey conducted with New Scientist magazine, social scientist Jon Krosnick of Stanford University and colleagues described to 1500 Americans several electricity and gasoline policies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "People were more keen on electricity emission reduction policies than gasoline policies across the board, and people preferred mandated standards to a cap-and-trade system," notes Krosnick's colleague, research psychologist Ariel Malka. Raising taxes was the least popular option, and support dropped as costs rose.

Americans' views on global warming have shifted fairly sharply since 2006. From 2006 to 2007, the number of Americans citing climate change as the world's biggest environmental problem doubled in one poll, from 16% to 33% (Washington Post/Time/ABC/Stanford University). Environmentalists hailed this as an important rise in the issue's prominence, because global warming has lagged behind other environmental issues, which in turn rank low among policy concerns. For example, polls by the nonprofit Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 2006 and 2007 found that global warming ranks just 19th out of 23 policy priorities for the president and Congress.

A partisan divide has deepened over the same period. Polls conducted by Pew in April 2008 found that the percentage of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the earth is warming slipped to 71%, down from 77% in January 2007. That slippage is mostly on the Republican side, which dropped from 62% to 49%, says Pew associate director Carroll Doherty. Likewise, the number of Republicans ranking climate change as a top priority dropped from 23% in 2007 to 12% in 2008, compared with 47% of Democrats and 38% of independents. "With a climate bill before the Senate, there are a lot of people casting doubt and many conservatives saying that the alarm is exaggerated,"Doherty notes. Such skepticism likely affects rank-and-file Republican opinion.

Malka and Krosnick's research shows that the partisan gap increased between 1997 and 2007. In part, Malka says, this could be because as an issue becomes highly politicized, partisan elites tend to divide and take party followers with them.

Democrats and Republicans also use information about climate change to arrive at different conclusions. In February, researchers at Texas A&M University published a survey in Risk Analysis suggesting that the more Americans know about climate change, the less concern they have about it. Malka and Krosnick challenge that finding in a paper submitted to the same journal. They reanalyzed polling data from 2006 and 2007 and found that for Democrats, more knowledge led to more concern, but for Republicans and those who did not trust scientists, more knowledge did not translate into anxiety. In fact, people who did not trust scientists at all were less worried if they knew more. The different information sources that each group seeks out may lead them to different conclusions, Malka says.

"You still have 70% of the public saying global warming is happening," Doherty notes. "But when pitted against the economy and Iraq, those issues still have much greater importance for people." —ERIKA ENGELHAUPT