Yesterday was a good one for the climate, and a bad one for Big Oil. In Europe, a Dutch court ruled that Shell has to reduce emissions 45% by 2030, after 30% of its shareholders voted last week to demand a more ambitious climate plan. A lawyer for Friends of the Earth Netherlands, Roger Cox, called it “a turning point in history… the first time a judge has ordered a large polluting corporation to comply with the Paris Climate Agreement. This ruling may also have major consequences for other big polluters.”
Speaking of other big polluters, a campaign to replace climate deniers with more reality-based experts on ExxonMobil’s board succeeded yesterday, and Gregory Goff and Kaisa Hietala will bring their expertise on energy and climate into the upper echelon of the company’s ranks. Seems that even among business types there is a growing recognition that climate denial’s a bet that’s not just risky, but already losing.
And even the loser’s own polling shows as much. Not that they’d admit it, of course. According to the headline for a Valerie Richardson story at the Washington Times, “One-third of Americans unwilling to spend $1 to fight climate change.” Richardson barely rewrites the Koch et al-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute's press release about a poll of 1,200 registered voters, telling readers that “35% were unwilling to spend any of their own money to reduce the impact of climate change, with another 15% saying they would only go as high as $10 per month. Another 6% said they would be willing to spend between $11 and $20 per month. At the other end of the spectrum were those who said they would part with between $901 and $1,000 per month on climate — they numbered 1%.”
Richardson also reports that “the penny-pinching on global warming came even though 67% of respondents said they were very concerned or somewhat concerned about climate change. That said, 53% said climate was not a factor in their 2020 election vote, while only 6% said it was the top issue.”
CEI didn’t release the actual toplines and questions to the poll, which was no doubt quite biased, given that it was conducted by the polling firm KellyAnn "alternative facts" Conway sold to the people who propagated the Swiftboat disinformation attack on then-presidential-candidate John Kerry. On the other hand, they did publish a glossy and graph-y slide deck.
And amazingly, it shows a much different picture than Richardson’s regurgitation of CEI’s press release. For example, when asked about “the most important issue facing the United States,” only 5% of people said “climate change.” But that’s the same percentage as answered “national debt,” and more than those who responded “National security”, two of the biggest rhetorical fronts conservative free market groups hide their regressive, greedy, climate-denying and racist agenda behind. Somehow, though, “Climate just as important as national security and debt to voters” was not the headline CEI got Richardson to write!
On climate, they found that even 41% of conservatives (and 39% of Republicans) are concerned about climate change, and overall, 45% of voters factored climate change into their decision on who to vote for President! While yes, only 6% considered it the “top issue,” another 19% considered it “a major factor,” and another 20% considered it a minor factor. All together, nearly half of registered voters were thinking about climate change at the ballot box, according to a poll by people who would prefer no one think about climate change, ever.
Then we get to the question about the amount of “your own money you would be willing to personally spend each month to reduce the impact of climate change.” First, however, the obvious: people shouldn’t have to spend any of their own money on climate change. The companies who knowingly profited by polluting the climate should be responsible for cleaning up that pollution. So even the most militant climate activists might answer zero, on perfectly reasonable and ideologically consistent grounds.
In fact, slightly more reliable polling found that 68% support generating government revenue for an economic stimulus package by requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a tax on their carbon pollution, and another 63% support a tax on the fossil fuel industry to help pay for additional coronavirus stimulus checks for average Americans. Admittedly those are not exactly the same questions, but clearly people want money in their pockets and not in the pockets of fossil fuel companies!
Putting CEI's intentionally biased framing aside, people seemed much more willing to spend their own money than CEI wants you to think. Because while 50% of people are only willing to spend $0-10, the other half of registered voters are willing to pay more than $10 a month of their own money to fight climate change!
While only 35% of people aren’t willing to pay to clean up a mess they didn’t make, 36% of registered voters are willing to pay at least $50 a month, and overall 63% are willing to give at least $10 of their own monthly income to climate action. With something like 200,000,000 registered voters in the United States, that translates to a combined personal budget for climate action of $1.26 billion dollars a month, or $15.12 billion dollars a year. That’s a lot of solar panels and wind turbines!
But again, it shouldn’t be on individuals to solve this systemic problem. ExxonMobil alone made $178.6 billion last year causing climate change, maybe CEI can poll them to see how much they’re willing to spend to clean up their mess?