You might think fracking is a highly divisive, heatedly contested issue, but most Americans don’t give a damn about it either way.
The latest Climate Change in the American Mind survey found that 39 percent of respondents had never heard of fracking, while another 13 percent didn’t know whether they had heard of it.
So it’s not too much of a surprise, then, to learn that 58 percent of survey respondents held no opinion on whether fracking is a good thing or a bad thing.
Those who did have an opinion were roughly split between supporters and opponents, the survey found. Older conservative men tended to think it’s ace. Younger liberal women did not.
The survey was conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which asked 1,061 people for their views on fracking in September. Let’s take a look at the major findings in graph form:
And here’s a graph on the political divide:
It’s not just fracking that has Americans shrugging their shoulders. Recent survey results published by the same project revealed something similar about Keystone XL: “Fewer than half of Americans are following news about the Keystone XL pipeline; only one in five are following the issue closely; a majority of those who have heard of Keystone support building it.”
Where the hell is everybody?