Americans support signing of climate change pact, but don’t want taxes on

“I am anticipating a Democrat succeeding me”, Obama said at a press conference in Paris at the end of a conference on climate change. In Australia, just 16 percent of supporters of the ruling Liberal Party say global warming is a very serious problem, compared with 58 percent of Labor supporters.

“Public support for global and domestic measures to address climate change may provide a lift for American negotiators attending the major United Nations climate change conference that began in Paris on Monday”, the Times wrote in the report.

Also, a vigorous and well-funded network of climate change deniers seems to be unique to the United States.

People in both the USA and China don’t think climate change is that serious a problem, at least as it relates to the rest of the world.

In addition to the House vote on EPA regulations, and threats to block additional climate-related funding, the Science panel is holding a hearing Tuesday: “Pitfalls of Unilateral Negotiations at the Paris Climate Change Conference”. “If we let the world keep warming as fast as it is, and sea levels rising as fast as they are, and weather patterns keep shifting in more unexpected ways, then before long we are going to have to devote more and more and more of our economic and military resources not to growing opportunity for our people but to adapting to the various consequences of a changing planet”.

The poll found 51 percent of people say there is “a lot of disagreement among scientists” over the existence of global warming, down 11 percent from 2008. While 82 percent of Democrats support limiting greenhouse gas emissions, Republicans are split, with 50 percent in support.

Democrats and Republicans continue to largely disagree on the issue. Russia is the No. 4 emitter, yet only 33 percent of Russians are very anxious about climate change. Even in Germany, which has an worldwide reputation as an environmentally attuned nation, only 43 percent of adherents to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party say climate change is a very serious problem. Compared with June 2014 there are no significant changes among Catholics in this view, despite Pope Francis’s encyclical on environmental issues last spring. And ideological and partisan divisions over global warming within a number of democracies serve notice that, if a deal is struck in Paris, implementation may face obstacles at home. The decline in support for more government action is steeper among Catholics than among all other adults.

“What scientists are you relying on to say it’s not a crisis?”

Earlier this year, the Yale Project, like the New York Times/CBS News poll, found that a majority of Americans support curbing coal-fired power plant emissions – even if the governors of their own states opposed Obama administration actions. It’s up by about 10 points since 2009 among independents and Republicans, while essentially unchanged among Democrats.