A poll of 1200 registered voters taken by the Competitive Enterprise Institute found 35 percent unwilling to spend anything for carbon dioxide reduction:
“When asked about willingness to spend out-of-pocket to mitigate climate change, 35 percent of respondents said they would not spend a dollar. Fifteen percent said they would spend up to $10 of their own money on climate change policies. The poll also found 53 percent of respondents would be somewhat or very unlikely to spend extra money to replace a gas-powered car with an electric vehicle.”
Said Myron Ebell of CEI:
“’This poll shows once again that Americans are unwilling to pay for the left’s anti-energy policies,’ said Director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment Myron Ebell. ‘The more people learn about the Biden-Harris Blackout Agenda, the less support there will be for spending trillions of taxpayer dollars for no measurable benefits.’”
Image by Thomas Breher at Pixabay.
I have covered similar results from numerous previous polls. For instance, just a week before CEI published the results of its poll, in my Climate Change Weekly lead essay, “‘CLIMATE CRISIS’ CLAIMS AREN’T MOVING PUBLIC OPINION MUCH,” I wrote, “[o]pinion polls conducted over the past two decades show climate change consistently at or near the bottom of the public’s list of concerns.
In a 2019 Washington Post/Kaiser Family survey, 60 percent of respondents said they believed the world had fewer than 10 years to prevent the worst effects of climate change, with a majority saying the world has two years or fewer to act.
Even so, 51 percent of those surveyed would be “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed to paying a $2 monthly tax on their residential electric bills to fight climate change. Similarly, 61 percent would reject a 10 cents per gallon increase in the gasoline tax to fight climate change.
The numbers opposed to electric bill fees and gas tax hikes rose sharply when the proposed fees were increased: 71 percent oppose a $10 monthly tax on U.S. residential electric bills, and 74 percent oppose increasing the gas tax by 25 cents per gallon. These relatively modest cost increases are far less than what the Biden administration’s climate change efforts will cost.
A survey released in early May by MWR Strategies, conducted on behalf of the American Energy Alliance, similarly reported 37 percent of those surveyed said the amount of money they would be willing to spend “each year to address global warming” was zero, and another 44 percent said they would only be willing to spend less than $10 annually on it. In other words, 81 percent of those surveyed would be unwilling to spend even a piddling $10 a year to fight global warming, meaning many of those who say they believe climate change is a major challenge or a crisis are unwilling to put much effort into fighting it.