New survey found 62% of Americans think Global Warming will hurt plants and animals species... but only 32% think it will hurt them personally...
The Envrionmental Inverted Pyramid
The survey, conducted by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, reveals that Americans are concerned about global warming in the abstract -- but perhaps only in the abstract. Just 32 percent of Americans think global warming will harm them "a great deal" or a "a moderate amount" personally. The further we get out from the individual, however, the more impactful people think climate change will tend to be: more impactful on their families than themselves; more impactful on their communities than their families; more impactful on their country than their communities; more impactful than other counties than on the United States; more impactful on future generations than the present one, and finally, more impactful on plants and animals than on humans.
These beliefs are not necessarily irrational. Climate change probably will have more impact on the developing world than the developed one, and it almost certainly will have more impact on our children than it does on ourselves.
Nevertheless, the fact that fewer than a third of Americans are worried about the effects that climate change will have on them personally strikes me as significant. Although more aggressive policy responses on climate change generally poll fairly well, they are also often the first things to be sacrificed in Americans' minds when something else intervenes, such as a recession or higher energy prices. Advocates of cap-and-trade may need to find ways to personalize the terms of the debate.
Can I just point out that we are an animal species!?!?!?
For more on similar front... Hot air from the flat earth society (and the industry that backed them)
Weekly Standard Compounds $3100 GOP Lie With A $3900 Lie
And for those conservative ivory tower types... its called an externality
With respect to the environment, fossil fuel production creates a host of negative externalities. For example, fossil fuel energy production is the primary contributor of the greenhouse gasses (GHG) associated with climate change. All of the costs of the potential problems associated with climate change, loss of coastal land, dramatic weather changes causing floods or drought etc. are not costs that are or will be borne by the energy producers. They will borne by those directly affected in the U.S. and around the world. One need go no further than the Adirondacks of New York to discover that the costs of the cleanup from acid rain and the losses from fish kills and dead rivers and lakes are costs related to the coal burning power plants in the Mid-west.
Health issues also add uncalculated costs to fossil fuel energy production. During the past decade thousands of research projects documenting the ill effects produced by the fossil fuel energy production process have been published. For example, the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) recently released a report called Danger in the Air stating that "Every year, some 64,000 people may die prematurely from cardiopulmonary causes linked to particulate air pollution".
In summary, if all the costs associated with fossil fuel energy production were borne by the energy producers then the cost of producing this type of energy would be substantially higher. A gallon of gasoline at the pump would be higher, and your electricity bill would be higher.
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