The Public Wants Action on Climate Change

Not content with doing nothing on climate change, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) wants to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from acting to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. She has sponsored a "resolution of disapproval" to block the EPA from implementing proposed regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from power plants. Several Democrats, most recently Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia have announced their support of the measure.

Senate Joint Resolution 26 would declare that the EPA's endangerment finding "shall have no force or effect." The resolution would not have made it out of committee; all 14 Democratic members of the Environment & Public Works Committee (including Tom Carper) have signed a letter opposing the measure. But 30 senators can force a vote under the arcane rules governing such resolutions.

It turns out that most Americans want the government to act to control global warming. A Washington Post/ABC News polls finds that most Americans think government should regulate greenhouse gases by a 2 to 1 margin, 71 percent to 26 percent. 52 percent strongly favor regulation of greenhouse gases. Even 55 percent of Republicans favor action.

A poll by the Political Psychology Research Group published in the New York Times earlier this week finds that the skeptics are in the minority:

When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.

For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.

Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular.

These poll results are surprising to those who have been listening to the skeptics and the tea party crowd. Apparently most Americans, including most Republicans, think the EPA should be allowed to do its job on climate change.