Poll: ‘Climate Change’ Remains Very Low Priority For Voters

Yet another in a very long string of state and national polls shows that “climate change” is not a high priority for voters, and they haven’t paid much attention to the latest climate confab in Paris, which had a carbon footprint bigger than a thousand normal Americans living average lives for an entire year.

Since the event was entirely theatrical, and its extravagant cost could only be defended as a “consciousness-raising” exercise, the Paris conference should be judged an abysmal failure. A whole lot of money was spent, and greenhouse gas emitted, for an event that doesn’t seem to have brought much additional public awareness to the cause.

Yet the poll by WBUR News in Boston isn’t really good news for informed skeptics of the climate scam.

For one thing, the entire raison d’etre of the climate-industrial complex – the core belief of the Church of Global Warming – is that voters shouldn’t have anything to say on the subject. No democratic resistance to their agenda can be allowed. If the people are reluctant to spend the trillions of dollars demanded, the money must be shaken from them. If the Little People won’t give up their cars, plane tickets, and air conditioners, they must be taken by force. The “thought leaders” of the climate cult are increasingly brazen in asserting that democracy ends where climate change begins.

With that in mind, a poll that paints a picture of public indifference isn’t great news.

To summarize the results, WBUR found that Massachusetts voters think global warming is happening (78 percent) and it will be a very or somewhat serious problem in the future (72 percent.) An increasing number of them think it can be stopped through human effort (55 percent.) A dwindling number of respondents think it’s too late to take such action (26 percent.)

There is strong support for wind and solar energy (70 percent) and apparently growing skepticism about natural gas, which is now supported by 50 percent, down 16 points from 2011. The construction of a new natural gas pipeline is a major issue in the state.

That all sounds like good news for the climate change alarmists… but when the poll asked respondents to choose the greatest long-term threat to the United States, they chose terrorism over global warming, 58 to 24 percent. Oddly, the poll actually used the term “global warming” in this question, even though climate alarmists long ago switched to “climate change” as the preferred term, because they grew nervous about the lack of warming.

Also, most such polls ask respondents to rate a series of issues in importance, which usually dumps climate change out of the top five, and sometimes out of the top ten. This one offered a binary choice between global warming and terrorism.

It did ask respondents how closely they were following the Paris talks compared to a number of top news stories, and found the Paris terror attacks, U.S. presidential election, and New England Patriots football team ranked far higher than the Paris talks (or the Massachusetts natural gas pipeline), except among respondents who said they were following those stories “somewhat closely,” where the spread was more even.

(Apparently not many people follow the Patriots “somewhat closely.” As one Bostonian interviewed by WBUR put it, “Patriots, terrorism, it’s all right there. Greenhouse effect, right now it’s not one of my top priorities.” Never mind climate change – this was a terrific poll for the Patriots.)

The bottom line here is not much different from what polls find across the nation: people have been absolutely saturated with global-warming propaganda, and they tend to go along with the memes pounded into their heads on a daily basis, but their hearts aren’t really in it. They think they’re supposed to be Very Concerned about climate change, but they don’t want to cripple the national economy or ruin their standard of living over it.

That’s pretty much the story of solar and wind power, which everyone thinks they’re supposed to be in favor of, but no one actually wants to rely on, because they’re hideously expensive and unreliable. A great deal of what environmentalists want sounds great in theory, but falls apart in practice. There are probably few places in the U.S. where pollsters wouldn’t find people saying wind and solar are swell, and they’re all in favor of having more of it… provided they don’t have to pay for it, or compromise their standards of living.

One of the pollsters even notes the effect of media manipulation on the environmental debate, by observing that support for the Massachusetts natural gas pipeline slipped as soon as the devil words “hydraulic fracturing” were added to the poll, since “fracking hasn’t had a good year in terms of public perception.”

It would be fun to see some polling about whether the ostentatious carbon-spewing lifestyles of climate-alarmist celebrities and politicians have an impact on how seriously the public really takes this problem. Leftism is based on the exploitation of envy; it would not be surprising to learn that people who take climate change seriously don’t truly believe it’s a crisis, because none of the high-profile alarmists are acting like they really believe it’s a crisis.

The gloomy thing about polling on global warming is, as mentioned above, that enthusiastic support from the populace is not necessary for the warmist agenda to move forward – only determined resistance will stop them.

That’s equally true of most of the overall collectivist program, or “progressivism,” if you prefer.) Indifference or shallow support is good enough for their purposes.

Poll numbers they like will be cited as part of their “consensus on global warming” fiction; numbers they dislike will be ignored; and if backed into a corner, they’ll say it doesn’t matter what the public wants, because the elites know what is best for them. On balance, it’s probably not a good thing that so few Americans paid attention to the Paris climate conference, because much of their future will be decided based on such events.