Articles by Anna Fahey

Global warming is a hot potato

Last week I reported on the wide and growing partisan divide in U.S. public opinion over global warming: self-identified Democrats are 39 percentage points more likely than their Republican counterparts to rate climate change a serious problem.

But what puzzled me most was the 13-point drop in concern among Republicans since 1999. Call me naïve, but with all the scientific evidence that's been piling up on the issue -- accompanied by increasing media attention -- I guess I expected slow (though perhaps reluctant) increases in concern all across the political spectrum. Years of rising global temperatures, melting sea ice, and solidifying scientific consensus ought to have converted at least some honest skeptics, right?

A big report released last week by Pew, charting two decades of American political values and core attitudes, provides some clues about what's going on.

Typical Republicans, circa 1999, haven't necessarily found their belief in global warming shaken over the years. Instead, for whatever combination of reasons, people who believe in global warming are drifting away from the Party.

On climate, U.S. attitudes are split along partisan lines

Since it came out about a year ago, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's climate change documentary, seems to have pushed the issue into mainstream consciousness.

Millions saw the movie itself -- but they were largely true believers anyway. Perhaps more importantly, Gore's Academy Award has earned him a wider audience among the potentially undecided: 39.9 million TV viewers tuned in for the Academy Awards themselves, plus 49 million saw Gore on Oprah. Heck, combined, that's more than the total number of people who voted for George W. Bush in 2006! It's almost as good as being on American Idol.

But, how much effect has this media blitz had on attitudes among Americans?

Sadly, it's not as dramatic as you may think.

Bill McKibben questions thinking as usual when it comes to climate.

The old thinking, as author and thinker Bill McKibben explains in today's LA Times, goes like this: bigger is always better, growth is good no matter what, and a booming stock market is the ultimate measure of our success.

McKibben illustrates the kind of lopsided priorities that naturally flow when we're ruled by the bottom line, pointing to a scarcely-reported White House report that said the U.S. would be pumping out almost 20 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than we did in 2000, our contribution to climate change going steadily up -- against all warnings to the contrary.

That's a pretty stunning piece of information -- a hundred times more important than, say, the jittery Dow Jones industrial average that garnered a hundred times the attention. How is it even possible? How, faced with the largest crisis humans have yet created for themselves, have we simply continued with business as usual?

New thinking, by contrast, might go something like this: measure what matters.

An international poll points to a window of opportunity for U.S. leadership.

A new international poll finds worldwide agreement that climate change is a threat. Opinions are split, however on the nuts and bolts -- in particular, whether to act immediately and whether countermeasures are worth the investment. Even so, a window of opportunity seems to have opened that would allow leaders with bold solutions to spark international cooperation and make real strides. The poll included 17 countries, representing more than 55 percent of the world population (though not all the questions were asked in each of the countries). Western European countries and Canada* were not included.

While global opinion trends are encouraging, the United States -- the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases -- has some catching up to do. That is to say, an attitude adjustment is in order: