Voters Finally Want Candidates To Act on Climate Change
Bloomberg published a piece detailing the state opinions installment of Climate Insights 2020, noting that majorities in all states favor federal action on climate change.
Environmental protection has long been seen as a kind of luxury good. It’s great to protect endangered species we’ll never see, conserve lands we’ll never visit, and slash emissions for a future only our kids will know — as long as Americans can put food on the table and meet other basic needs like housing, health care and education.
This argument is what researchers would call a “testable hypothesis,” and 2020 has given them an opportunity to do just that. If the argument held, then when a terrible event occurs — say, a global pandemic that throws millions of people out of work while civic unrest rages over police violence — you would expect interest in climate change to plummet as day-to-day concerns overwhelm a nebulous, hard-to-grasp problem....
Resources for the Future, a Washington economic research group, Stanford University, and survey company ReconMR today published the latest analysis of recent polling, which found that clear majorities in all states (except for a few without data) favor federal action on climate change regardless of what other countries do. When asked whether the government should limit private-sector pollution, the numbers in support were very high.
