Monthly Archives: January 2010

Prior to Copenhagen, advocates of the US cap and trade legislation were arguing that although its ambition was likely to be low, the best strategy was to get it through the Senate and then aim to strengthen it.

The chances of passing a US climate bill with an economy wide emissions cap this year, however modest, now appear to be fading. Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican sponsor of the bill who as such is critical to its success, was quoted in the New York Times as saying ‘Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere.’ Mr Graham believes that Americans favour a focus on jobs, either from clean energy or new oil exploitation, over a punitive emissions cap that forces up energy prices.

On Monday, we posted about two new opinion polls; they suggest Senator Graham may be correct, although others disagree and hold firm to the view that President Obama will use his State of the Union address to underline his commitment to a fully fledged climate bill. Continue reading →

A recent poll conducted by Frank Luntz, a political adviser more often associated with the US Republican Party and Fox News, further confirms the view that voters respond better to climate change policy if it isn’t framed in environmental terms.

In Luntz’s poll skepticism about global warming is again found to be less significant than resistance to environmentalism. So while 80 per cent of democrats and 43 per cent of Republicans are either definite or pretty sure climate change is at least in part human induced, they reject the idea of ‘sustainability’ in favour of ‘cleaner’, ‘healthier’ and ‘safer’ and ‘green’ jobs in favour of ‘American’ jobs. Continue reading →

There’s a useful spreadsheet on CAN US’s website for keen followers of who’s in and who’s out of the Copenhagen Accord process. The 31 January deadline for sign on now appears to have been shelved.

Brazil, South Africa and South Korea are the only countries so far to have filled in the box on reductions committed; predictably each has put in the same target they were pledging before or during Copenhagen. Continue reading →

A new poll from the Brookings Institution has caused some anguish amongst environmentalists, as it shows evidence of an increase in climate scepticism in the US in the wake of the Climategate controversy. In fact, things are not that bad – the proportion who think there is no solid evidence for warming has increased by only 3 percentage points. Despite their depiction in Europe as anti-scientific irrational nuts, a good two-thirds of Americans still do accept the science, according to the survey – surely a comfortable majority.

In contrast with this small movement, the big numbers in the Brookings study are actually about support for climate policies. Continue reading →