 Good afternoon. On behalf of the Ford School of Public Policy and in particular the International Policy Center, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our sixth webinar event for the North American Colloquium on Climate Policy Series. The North American Colloquium is an ongoing collaboration between the Ford School, the University of Toronto's Monk School and the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Meany Family Foundation for making this year's programming possible. Today's event focuses on public opinion on climate and energy issues in the three North American countries. First we'll hear from Chris Borek and Eric LaChapelle, who will present new data from their ongoing Twin Energy and Environment surveys in the United States and Canada. Then we'll hear from Itzvotlis Amora Sons, a researcher at the Dominguez Bellisario Institute of the Mexican Senate, who will give us a sense of where the Mexican public is on climate and energy matters. As audience members you can ask a question in writing using the Q&A feature on your Zoom control panel. During the Q&A we'll get to as many of your questions as possible, but apologies that we will not be able to get to all of them. We may go about 15 minutes beyond the scheduled end time of 1pm local time to accommodate as many questions as possible. At this time I'd like to turn things over to Barry Rabe, who is the J. Ira and Nikki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy and the Arthur Thirnau Professor of Environmental Policy here at the Ford School to introduce doctors Borek and LaChapelle. Barry. Thank you Josh for the introduction and I also just want to thank you for your stewardship of this entire colloquium project. It's just been terrific to have all of this important work under your leadership so thank you. I'm very excited about the chance today to do something that is done relatively rarely in environmental policy. And that is to work across national boundaries but think about questions related to public, public views, public opinion. I want to thank all three of our distinguished visitors today and want to say that I'm very much looking forward to their role, their contributions and thoughts on all of this. And I also want to acknowledge that I will be as Josh mentioned introducing our first two speakers, because their work is a formally joined type of a partnership involving a look at public opinion on some of these various issues in the United States, but also Canada. Presenting some very recent work, but also some prior work that they have done. Our speakers for this portion of the program. Chris Borek and Eric LaChapelle are two thought leaders at the intersection of political science, environmental and climate policy and public opinion in the United States and Canada, and have also done some just wonderful work, bringing their thoughts and efforts together on this. I've known both of them for a long time. They're good friends and colleagues. We've collaborated in a number of areas. And so it's always a treat for me to actually welcome them back to Wild Hall. This is a virtual visit there. They've been in the friendly confines of Wild before. Chris is a professor of political science at Muhlenburg College, where he directs the Muhlenburg Institute of Public Opinion. And for many years has been the director of the National Surveys on energy environment, a remarkable ongoing survey project with heavy input from Muhlenburg students and actually some prior former involvement in partnership with the Ford School that I'm very grateful for that really has closely at many of these issues in an American context. Eric LaChapelle is on the faculty at the University of Toronto political science department has published widely in issues of political economy environmental politics and policy. And in recent years, Eric has been the director of the Canadian surveys, the energy and environment, these are not formally merged and joined but collaborate, engage, try to ask similar questions. And it's a real treat for me to welcome them back and say that I'm looking forward to the report my understanding is Chris that you're going to go first, followed by by Eric so welcome to you both and thanks. Thank you so much, Barry for the very warm invite and it's great to be back at Michigan, if only in virtual form I'd love to be at the corner of State and Hill, and doing this in the Betty Ford auditorium and seeing people face to face but it's a wonderful opportunity for Eric and I to to join you Josh thank you so much for organizing this put noble logistics together and the whole series has been wonderful and it's an honor for us to be part of it and as Barry said, we've had a an ongoing relationship the national surveys on energy and environment and the Canadian counterpart that Eric has has stewarded for years are largely originated with with folks in Michigan Barry as as a, a leader in putting this together over a decade ago now now well over a decade ago, but our affiliation with the Ford School and the close up center, which Barry formerly directed as a wonderful wonderful resource, without standing scholars and researchers. So it's, it's really a bit of coming home today to our to work with our friends at Michigan. We're going to take you through a little bit of a journey through our research on Canadian and American views on climate matters broadly defined and and Eric is actually going to lead us off today we decided Canada first in in the order, and back to the United States and as you can see Eric is getting the our slides booted up and without further ado I'll turn it over to Eric to take us to Canada and then we'll cross the border back to the United States before heading south to Mexico. Thanks Chris, and thanks, Josh and Barry for the invitation and it's great to be here happy spring everyone. I guess we're going north to south today so we'll start off in Canada. And by the way I am at the University of Montreal as much as I'd love to be at the Toronto and from Toronto. Just wanted to make that clear. So, as Chris mentioned just a very high level perspective kind of the view from 20,000 feet. We'll start with the Canadian perspective then jump to the United States and if time allows will do some comparative perspective we would have loved to present kind of a comparative poll, including Mexico but that will be for another time. I'll be speaking today, drawing mostly on the Canadian surveys on energy and the environment so this is a data set that goes back to 2011. So quite a few observations we have an end of 11,738. These are based using the same methodology as the American American surveys that Chris will be talking about so these are random digit dialing telephone very high quality representative samples of the Canadian population, but I will also be drawing on just towards the end of my presentation on a 2019 post election survey that we did here in Canada. This was administered online by Leger, and it has an end of about 2500 and just some highlights of what I'll be speaking today. The first is that there's considerable evidence of polarization in Canadian attitudes towards climate change and I think that's an important, something important to kind of tease apart and look at. Because we're, we're, there's a lot of research coming out of the United States and a lot has been documented on polarization in that country. It's an open question of just how polarized publics are in other parts of the world so this is an exciting avenue of research and a way to present the Canadian data that I hope folks will appreciate. Secondly, I will look specifically at some contentious policy issues related to climate change in Canada, notably carbon taxes pipelines and nuclear energy. And thirdly, I'll just look at there's a lot of evidence and a lot of speculation in Canada that environmental and in particular climate, the climate change issue is politically important. There was speculation that it was one of the most defining issues in the 2019 federal election so we'll be looking a little bit about a little bit at the issue voting in the 2019 federal election. So to begin, this is kind of the high level primary belief question that we use in Canada and the United States. It's a question wording is there a solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer the past four decades so it's really looking at the temperature trend or the perceptions of the temperature trend. Overall, if you look at the black line at the top. That's the overall average in Canada, which has tended to be fairly consistent, at least relative to what you'll see in the American data set, but nevertheless, an increase in from about 80% of population that believes there's solid evidence of climate change to close to 90% in 2018 falling off a little bit in the mid 80s. Since then, the red line looks at the perceptions of liberal party of Canada supporters. And you'll see here that it's been fluctuating a little bit around the 90% level. The green line is not the green party of Canada, it's actually the NDP and the NDP actually reached 97% of supporters of the NDP believe that there's solid evidence of climate change so there's a lot of support for the idea that climate change is happening and temperatures are warming. If you look at the blue line just below, that's the Conservative Party of Canada supporters. And we see that between 2011 and 2018 if you just kind of slice the if you put your finger at 2018 you'll see that there's a general increase in the percentage of Conservative Party of Canada supporters who acknowledge warming from a low from the low 60s in 2018 to the high 70s in 2018. But then, and I should say that this tracks very closely American opinion over the same time period so in other words, a Conservative Party of Canada supporters in during this period 2011 to 2018 were more similar to the average American than to the average Canadian. The second thing to point out here is that since 2018, though you see that the gap seems to be widening between for instance, Conservative Party of Canada supporters and NDP and the Liberal Party of Canada supporters and we might speculate that 2018 was when the carbon the Trudeau carbon tax became a reality was coming discussed and began to be implemented. And there's that notion of solution aversion right people deny problems that exist because they don't like the solutions that are proposed for them so that's a bit of speculation there but there is something going on here since about 2018. If we look at the bottom of the chart, these are the percentage of the population that say no there's no solid evidence of warming temperatures, and we see that the. There are very few relatively few about 10% 15% of the population sees no solid evidence, but up to 30% of Conservative Party of Canada supporters and you might have seen in the news last week that the Conservative Party of Canada delegates voted against proposal put forth by some delegates to recognize the reality of climate change that their party recognize the reality of climate change. But these these data suggests that while there are a considerable about a third of Conservative Party of Canada supporters who deny climate change, a majority nevertheless believes climate change is real. And so those Conservative Party delegates are out of step with their voting base. The next few slides are going to kind of rehash some of the same things but what we see here is the attribution to human cause. So, is the earth getting warmer pride mostly because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels are mostly because of natural patterns in the earth's environment. We see again, a trend an upward trend a more a more marked upward trend over between 2011 and 2020 with the average in 2011 at 43%. The black line representing the national average up to 66% of believers who attribute warming, the earth warming and activity. So these are pretty large double digit increases over time, looking specifically at the Liberal Party of Canada, we're seeing an increase of 48% to 78% 30% increase in about a decade. We also see that the Liberal Conservative gap is widening and input isn't particularly wide on this question and so in 2011 it was about 21% between Liberal Party of Canada supporters and Conservative Party of Canada supporters and in 2020 this gap doubled 40%. So when I when I kind of foreshadowed the polar evidence of polarization this is what I'm talking about. And finally, just on the timing question so when do you think climate change will start to harm people living in Canada. Here we're plotting the percentage of the population or subgroups that believe climate change is already harming people in Canada right here and right now, and you can see a pretty remarkable shift in from 2014 to 2017 in 2014, about 35% of the population said climate change was harming Canadians here now and in 2017 that jumped up to 55%. So that's a very short amount of time to jump so high since then it's plateaued. And this is very much I think a product of the impacts of climate change that we've been seeing in that time period. Forest fires in the West and the flooding in the East, which is really bringing the effects of climate change close to home for a lot of Canadians. As we know, we do note that the Conservative Party of Canada is significantly and substantively much lower in the probability of saying that climate change is already harming Canada and that gap again widens if we compare the size of the gap between 2014 and the size of the gap in 2020. The gap is much larger in more recent years. There's a little bit about policy support. So this slide goes over some public opinion on a variety of proposals that are discussed in Canada. These data come from some work I did in the fall of 2020 with echo analytics so it's the most recent data I have nuclear is at the top I hope you can all see it increasing the amount of electricity produced by nuclear power is the specific item. So you see that it's highly polarized with about a quarter who strongly support increasing the amount of nuclear energy and a quarter who strongly oppose increasing the amount of nuclear. That leaves 50 that leaves 50% of the population nevertheless in the mushy middle or in the don't know category so there's quite a bit of the population that has ambiguous views but nevertheless those 20 those a quarter of the population is either couched at the extreme end of the support or opposed spectrum. Now support tends to be concentrated among men English speakers supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada highly educated and wealthy Canadians. In fact, English speakers are twice as likely at 60% to support a nuclear energy relative to French speakers at 30%. And the largest support we find is regionally in Alberta at close to 70% support for increasing the amount of nuclear energy. Carbon tax is just below and carbon carbon tax is even more polarizing the nuclear energy as you can see when now we're up to about a third of the of the population that either strongly a port poses or strongly support carbon tax and for this is evidence of increased polarization because you have more people at the extremes. Now this is not surprising, because this is an issue that is heavily debated in canadian politics with carbon price debates, featuring prominently in partisan communication and election campaigns, both at the federal level and also at the provincial level. And that's and the carbon tax has been used by a political wedge by various politicians in Canada over the years. I'll dig into some of the details of the carbon tax and in a subsequent slide. The next is pipelines at the in the third row as you see pipelines are also very controversial in Canada a plurality indicating they strongly support canceling plans to build new pipelines across the country, but also a non trivial segment that strongly supports pipelines. This kind of public sentiment, maybe another factor that could explain the puzzle addressed a few weeks ago by Daniel Bella and Andre la Cour who presented in this colloquium series, regarding why pipelines are more politically contentious in Canadian federal. And finally, I just wanted to draw your attention towards the last row where we're looking at nature based solutions there's a lot of talk of nature based solutions across the world and in Canada. In 2020 we found overwhelming support, at least in principle for nature based solutions as a means of addressing climate change to be sure nature based solutions are are gaining traction. Here we see that of all the policy proposals, nature based solutions get the most support support is highest among women and those on the political left but it's important to note as well that a majority in every demographic category indicates strong support for this policy option and I've done some analysis showing that, in particular, hard to reach population at least in terms of climate change public opinion, the conservative middle white middle aged white men are in particular support nature based solutions over and above green technology So there's, I'm speculating here but there might be some room here as as for nature based solutions as a potential bridge, or an opportunity to grow the coalition, the pro climate action coalition in Canada. How am I doing for time do I need to speed up Josh or maybe I'll just really quickly go over a few more minutes this time. So this is a this is looking at net support for a carbon tax so we subtract oppose it's the difference between support and opposition. That's why you see some negative numbers negative numbers indicate more opposition than support positive numbers indicate more support than opposition. You can see the black line is again the national average so very divisive at least in the initial years 2011 2013 2014 we're looking at 5050 splits, but a net support increases over time. So this is implementing this carbon tax, particularly high amongst liberal and liberal and NDP voters, but look at what's happening with the Conservative Party of Canada voters like just vomiting over time right. And you might ask why this what's driving this polarization. I think in 2019, where I'm looking at the interaction between how much people say they've heard about the federal carbon pricing plan, and how much they support or the probability that they support and you see that the more liberals in the red line, the more party of Canada supporter has heard of the climate change plan, the more likely they are to support, almost at a 90% probability, whereas the more a Conservative Party of Canada supporter has heard about the carbon pricing plan, the the less likely they are to support like a 20% probability and what's funny is, what if you look at those who report having heard nothing at all about this policy, the opinions are much more similar at when when at low levels of knowledge but high levels of knowledge that's what's contributing to this conversation. And it doesn't take an in-depth media analysis to document the partisan communication environment which is which is, you know, the Conservatives are very much attacking carbon pricing while the liberals are very much supporting. And which leads me to the 2019 federal election lots of speculation you can see here this is the most important problem question over time so the 2017 2018 2019 concern for healthcare was going down or the probability of mentioning healthcare as the most important was decreasing, the economy was decreasing jobs and unemployment was decreasing, but environment and pollution and in particular climate change was increasing. And so climate change was a very salient issue going into the 2019 federal election with political parties, taking clearly different positions, Trudeau with his approach, I'll talk about this in the next slide. So looking at climate policy coalitions or climate policy politics in Canada is to look at the two most contentious issues taxes and pipelines. And so I have a two by two table here where you have some people like the Liberal Party of Canada Justin Trudeau, you might call this and this is a bit tongue in cheek but have your cake and eat it too. We want to have a carbon tax we were serious about reducing carbon but we also want to build pipelines. We have a pro tax pro pipeline coalition and if we remove the don't knows that's about 30% of the sample at least in 2019 that supported the Trudeau position. Compare this to the Andrew shear position of kind of pro fossil anti tax but pro pipeline, about 17% of the population supported this position. Then you have the kind of the more consistent environmentalist position which is pro tax anti pipeline that represents about 19% of the population, and then I didn't know what to call the anti tax anti pipeline so there's that cave acronym, citizens against virtually everything, or it might actually be the anti tax environmentalists who don't support a carbon tax for a variety of reasons, and are against pipeline but that's 20 that's not insignificant percentage of the population at 25%. I really like looking at Canadian politics or climate politics in this way, and it really helps to kind of unpack what was the role of carbon taxes and pipelines in the last election. Here I'm just looking at one's position on the carbon tax related to their probability of voting for the Liberal Party of Canada. Remember, not too long ago, it was popular in Canada to talk about carbon taxes as the third rail of Canadian budget and die. Trudeau comes in implements his carbon tax and what we see is he did not lose electorally because of this, rather, increased support for a carbon tax goes along with an increased probability of voting liberal. And this is my last slide pipeline politics. Some might say Trudeau took on a real gamble, kind of going right in the middle. I talked about a quarter of the population supporting pipelines, a quarter of the population opposing pipelines but then that mushy metal is really where Trudeau kind of went in. And we see that actually this this gamble kind of paid off because people who support pipelines also voted for the also had an increased probability of voting liberal. And I'll hand it over to happy to answer questions about this and I'll hand it over to Chris. Thanks. Thank you so much, Eric, and for for putting all that in such a, so much in such a quick space it was impressive. I'm going to Eric if you want to drop your share, I'll jump into mine and that way I wanted to ask you to move them along. Excellent. Thank you so much. So please do that. Tech stuff. I think you're good. Yep. All right, sorry about the little transition there a little bit easier than me saying Eric to keep moving slides forward. So yes, we turn to the view from the United States. We have lots of comparable points comparable framing of questions over well over a decade now which is which is great. And so I'm going to use the data that I'm going to report today is primarily from the NSE national surveys on energy in the environment. This is published by Michigan and Muhlenberg well over a decade ago now 13 years in 2008 and it's two national surveys in the United States probability based surveys, phone methodology largely cell phone now that we've kind of been over the over our history of moving from, from landlines to, to cell phones and this is a great example of, of that. The partnership between um and and Muhlenberg lasted between 2008 and 2019 for the last few years it's been exclusively out of out of Muhlenberg but lots of our data and lots of our work it has a deep Michigan tie to it including I just want to make this point available all our over time, with a little bit of a lag over the last few years is stored at the ICPSR at Michigan so it's available publicly, we rotate in after, you know, a little bit of time in our own hands for public use so please if you're interested in the data sets have that and lots of great resources there. And as I didn't put up a number like Eric did but we have well over 22,000 surveys over this period individual surveys and they're big in depth surveys to so lots of rich data that is available for the public. Today, it's my pleasure, and it's very exciting to release publicly for the first time results from our February fielding our most recent recent wave of the NSEE and so it's great. I was holding off kind of having any any public things so we could share it at this event. We will be releasing more substantive reports in the in the upcoming weeks I'll be happy to share those with folks on the on the webinar today. So I'm going to start like Eric did with kind of the big takeaway questions acceptance. Do you think climate change there's evidence of it and this is our time series back to the fall of 2008 and down to the winter of 2021. That same key question framed exactly as Eric said you think they're solid evidence of rising temperatures over the last four decades and you can see a couple of things I think from a quick glance even a cursory observation. During the early stages of our surveys there was movement, some steep declines in acceptance. 10 years ago in the spring of 2010 fall 2010 fall 2009 and then starting about middle of the last decade, some consistency in terms of public acceptance and stability might be the word that I would use to describe that. Since the fall of 2015 only once have we seen the percentage of Americans that says there is solid evidence of climate change drop below 70% and that was in the spring of 2016. Since then we've seen it consistently be over 70 and the last two iterations of the survey, the summer of 2020 and the winter of 2021. We saw record high level 75% of Americans that tonight's easy three quarters to say that think there is solid evidence that climate change is happening and that's our record levels. We didn't surpass our record level that we established in the first iteration back in 2008, all the way until till 2018. So there's been an early turbulence and stability, just a couple of things about the turbulence well studied within the political science literature the public opinion literature of what happened people ask what happened to drive those numbers down 20 points in a few years. The evidence points to a confluence of factors. The elite cues being put out while the United States tried to put policies forth at a federal level during that time with Waxman Markey and other bills drew a big response from the fossil fuel industries Republicans queuing skepticism about climate change there was economic factors number in it to the recession is having an effect. Others point to some climate variability weather during those periods, but important to note, and this is, to me, a key factor in terms of policymaking is while acceptance of climate change isn't a sufficient condition to move legislators it's certainly I think necessary at the bottom to have that there and, and that's stability that I mentioned over this period is is important. Accepting the evidence of climate change is one important factor. The cause is equally important. Do you think it's human cause or you think it's natural cause. And this is a little bit of a busy graph and I'll just give a few points. The green line is the percentage of people that think climate change is happening that attributed to anthropogenic factors human activity. You've seen that from our first iteration back in the fall 2008, when it was in the mid 30s rise to now to become a majority of those that accept evidence of climate change say that it is human induced. An additional. This is the combination the dark blue line, an additional about quarter of Americans that think climate change is happening say at least partially anthropogenic. So the dark blue and the green lines are some degree of anthropogenic cause which of course if you're thinking about policy is a big connection. I do know, and this is an interesting group Barry and I have over the years really been interested in the those that think it's happening but it's a natural pattern. Very different views, often align more with skeptics on some matters and they do those that accept climate change so it's a group that I that that I think is worthy of more research more attention. Over time because they kind of are in this this Eric use the mushy middle I don't know if I'm going to use mushy middle again but I'll throw that out there. A couple of more factors this is the chart that looks at the causes. When you take everybody in total skeptics and acceptors over over the time. And so the dark purple are those that think climate change is caused by human activity up here 38% in our latest iteration. 19% a combination and 16% think that it's it's a natural pattern and the rest are either not sure or don't think it's happening. You can see as the sum of all Americans, the share of gray and teal I guess the light blue has decreased over time. There's a lot of skeptics, while the percentage of Americans that think it's happening has increased and you also see the very important darkening that very dark purple, right and the mid purple, those that think it's, it's anthropogenic rising as a share of the entire population so these are signs of of Americans moving over the last decade to a more accepting position. And so I think that's an important point that I think is crucial in the policy debate and in the overall understanding of where Americans at is their confidence in their appraisal. How confident are they that that what they think is happening is actually happening so they don't just say yeah I think there's evidence, how confident are they, and you can see this chart I think is very important. Over time, there were smaller portions of Americans that actually accepted the evidence of climate change. And among that, that group, the confidence levels were less strong, they weren't as clear. What's really important is if you look in this stage kind of post spring 15 that I talked about this durability stability happening, not only are Americans more American saying they think there's evidence now record highs, but their confidence level in the appraisal is actually higher also. So you're seeing a confluence right of acceptance and confidence, which I think speaks to the durability of climate opinions we back when Barry and I started the survey in 2008 our first round, you know, this was Obama's running for president, we hit 70% we think well maybe that's, you know, gonna hold up two years later it's down to 50%. And the factors that I talked about changing that I think it's a much harder place right now, a more solid position and more difficult to change opinion than it was 10 years ago with things like cues, even economic issues that we've seen over the last year, not moving the dial so it's it's an interesting to think about the durability of opinions. This is when you kind of put them all together. People we asked skeptics how confident they are in their appraisal that it's not happening and look at it comparatively and you can see 51% of Americans this is the entire population 51% now think that they it's happening and they're very confident that it's even back in 2008. Well, I don't have it on slide back in 2010 go back a decade. It was only 32% smaller number of Americans accept it and and the confidence levels were there so we've kind of moved to a different spot. I want to finish up with a few slides before we we had to the discussion on on Mexico. We asked this this is a question we've asked every time and I just wanted to give it from our recent most recent wave Eric talked about in Canada. People saying they've experienced it more it's happening already there. This is we asked a question you personally felt the effects of climate change and as you can see in this majority of Americans say they have they either strongly agree or somewhat agree with that. The majority of Americans we've traced this over time this is at a record high level. Majority saying that they're actually feeling it is I think a tangible piece of evidence about the durability that I'm talking about people say they're not only thinking about it they're experiencing it. Interesting question we asked in this round that I thought would be good good to share NASA has reported that 2020 was tied with 2016 is the hottest year on the planet since we started keeping records in 1880. And I wanted to see how people responded to that. How do they look when they see a report from NASA about records being set. And so we gave them their options and you can see here, 47 almost half of adult Americans said the record heat that NASA reported is evidence that global warming is happening and it's caused by humans. Surprisingly about a quarter given where our numbers say is that the record heat is happening but it's more of a natural cycle, a kind of interesting group, only 13% said it's flawed measurements global warming is not occurring so only 13%. It's kind of overlays with our skeptic population 17% percent we're not sure how do to respond to that. I have more questions before I, before I wrap. This is, I'm really fascinated done work in the past with Barry and Eric and really interested in the dominant approaches right how do we look at approaching climate change at this point and this to me is kind of the fascinating nexus, where we are in in the policy you know mitigation certainly remains an important topic discussed at all levels, adaptation is quickly rising in in many areas, given the realities of our inability to mitigate. And also, discussion of engineering geo engineering options and we've really hit this hard in recent iterations of the survey about the possibility of G o engineering sequestration of carbon atmospheric engineering, if you will, those types of things and so we kind of framed it here in this next question is, which do you believe is the most important approach to take, and about 40% the plurality say it's it's most important to try and reduce climate change about 16% said learn to adapt. This is kind of the accepting okay I don't know if we're going to be able to do anything about it it's really fascinating when you overlay this with beliefs by the way I wish I had more time to do that about 70% 17% and this is the biggest thing we could be doing is promote geo engineering scientific fixes and there and we asked a lot of more specific questions and the rest all equally so to me this this relationship right, is it a complimentary policy approach, we're all hands on deck mitigation and geo engineering, or one substituting for the other right plan be okay we can't mitigate we're not doing it should we invest in these other options so it's it's to me a really rich area to look at. Finally, carbon tax question, we've looked at carbon taxes for years as Eric noted. In the Canadian example, in the United States. We've asked this question and this is from our latest iteration, and you could see pretty close to what Eric found on the overall numbers Canada a little higher as it often is in support. You see 40% of the overall population that we looked at support a carbon tax that's that's fairly normal in our numbers. And we could frame it in different ways, you see slightly more oppose the rest neutral, but those partisan divides that I could have layered into almost any of the questions I showed today. We're highly on display right a majority of American Democrats support only 12% of Republican support and as you try to move carbon tax legislation and get the support of at least a significant portion of Republicans that becomes challenging. I think we are probably at our time, and we could talk maybe in the question and answer about some comparative perspectives but I want to make sure we have time to move on to some Mexico. Hey, thank you so much to you both it's always so interesting to get each of your perspectives, particularly given the longitudinal nature of your work, and the ability to look at these trends and patterns through the same survey over a period of time, much less begin to bring them together. I just wanted to ask one initial question, and then hand things back to Josh. And that is, you know, Eric, you know I've had this conversation for a long time about differences and the challenges of meshing any Canadian and American climate policy because of political differences, including the parties that occupy the heads of state role. And yet it would seem, given the developments of the last literally the last few weeks, including the initial zoom US Canadian summit, but there might be a level of alignment. And so it looks at the policy outcomes. Right now fundamental differences Canada is on a march first to a $50 a ton carbon price and perhaps well into triple digits. The US remains lodged at zero and may well remain at zero in terms of carbon price and on. And so my question to either if you'd like to comment on this drawing on your public opinion work or thinking about overlap between public opinion and politics. Did we see this as a moment where the stars could align, and we could see these two massive neighbors, huge economies fossil fuel dependence, really begin to coordinate and develop similar kinds of policies, or are the fragments and the differences and even some of the opinion variation that you see just too great to expect that any initial thoughts on that drawing on the entirety of your work in this field. That's a great question I'll let Eric lead off. I think here in the kind of Canadian perspective is is is fascinating. Yeah, thanks Barry that's a great question I think there are two, I think I can answer both ways I mean, on the one hand, I am tempted to say no, because just on the coordination I mean I think the Canadian federal government has a hard enough time coordinating with the United States, let alone across nationally with the United States. At the same time we've seen instances where the Canadian Canadian government have imported policies from the United States, whether it be California immigration standards, or the like we've had conservative governments explicitly say we're tying our policy approach to what happens in the United States given NAFTA considerations free trade considerations and competitive competitiveness concerns. I think that this this conversation of coordination cross nationally won't necessarily be by national conversation it could potentially be one where Joe Biden starts thinking about border carbon tax adjustments and then inevitably Canada and Mexico would probably be brought online. But again, I mean, in terms of a coordinated carbon tax I'm highly skeptical, but I do think that there are particular policies that that could spill over into Canada as has been the past. I'll just really quickly agree with what Eric said and I'm, you know, Barry, we those cross national work between the two. I've been more impressed and you've written about this extensively the things that Eric talked about the more subnational relationships between states and provinces and those types of things as being the door I won't say back door to this but the kind of on the on the national levels I think the hurdles remain Herculean. But things as the last point that Eric mentioned, you know, about about maybe, you know, thinking about border taxes as a way to open options for the Biden administration as they look at ways to possibly broach a carbon tax. Some form of carbon tax seems to me to at least have a possibility because it might be seen as as some ways indirect costs we know that from the research lots of greater support for those types of avenues compared to more traditional, you know, gas taxes or levels like that so still a reach, but but certainly I think some of the underlying factors that we saw today opened the door for that to be more considered, we could talk about that and the question and answer. Thank you both, Josh. Thank you. Thank you both that was really informative. At this time I'm going to introduce our next speaker who will talk about Mexico but before I do a reminder to the audience that you can use the Q&A button on the bottom of your zoom control panel to ask a question of any of the panelists and writing. If you would like to direct it to a particular panelists please just stay whom. At this time it's my pleasure to introduce it's Whiteley Samora signs, who is a researcher at the Dominguez Bellisario Institute of the Senate of Mexico in the area of public opinion in parliamentary work. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the Latin American faculty of the social sciences, also known as flasco. And he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for social research at UNAM, which is of course our Mexican partner for the colloquium series. It's widely has taught at both UNAM and the Mora Institute, and is currently part of the national system of research in Mexico. It's widely. And please unmute your. Thank you, Josh. I'm going to share my presentation. Can you see it. Yes, looks good. Okay, perfect. Good morning to everyone. First of all, thank you very much to Joshua Massesius for inviting me to participate in this webinar. I also want to thank Jessica Olmos and Jennifer Lopez for their support of the research. I hope that information I will present today will be useful to doing gain sense of Mexican public opinion about renewable energy. Let me tell you that in the Bayside Institute just realized one national story every year, and it's more focused about the political subjects of the Congress. So when we are making a research about other topic or item. We need to choose and systematize other national service available. And that's the way I'm going to follow in my presentation. At the end, I have a link where you can download the full document, and you can see the sources and the methodology, the methodology of all of the source. The first section of my presentation concerns the current political context of Mexico, as the energy issue has been very important to the government. Precisely, one of the core policies of President Lopez Obrador is to restore energy sovereignty. Now, important efforts have been made to strengthen state owned companies such as the Petroleum Company, better known as Pemex, and the Federal Electricity Commission. In this regard, President has made two major decisions to give fiscal support to Pemex to continue its investment in oil exploration and extraction and to prioritize electricity generation through the energy produced by the Federal Electricity Commission. First with either power and then with gas and oil based plants. This second action was promoted with the Electric Industry Act passed by the Congress on the first week of March. At this time, the implementation of this law has been halted until a political and legal process determines its legality. All right, now let's look at public opinion indicators with particular interest in what people know about it. Their assessment around environmental effects and how they prioritize the energy issue in terms of the policies. In this graph, you can see that there is some knowledge on the part of Mexican population about our country energy metrics. Two of the three most important important energy sources such as petroleum and hydroelectric are clearly identified. However, there is an overvaluation of solar energy and the contrary little knowledge about the role of gas. The share of gas in our country energy metrics is very significant and has increased in recent years. A situation that seems to have gone unnoticed by the public. In short, solar energy is not yet sufficiently hard as in Mexico. In this indicator, the people survive probably respond more in terms of the potential of solar energy than in current role in the energy matrix. In the next graph, renewable energy is a topic of interest in Mexicas. According to the National Environmental Survey carried out by the most highly regarded public university in Mexico, approximately 95% of respondents claim to have an interest in these energy sources. However, there is another gap on the part of population in terms of precise information. In graph two, the two options most frequently mentioned petroleum and natural gas are misidentified are renewable energies, since both are fossil fuels. The same situation happens with diesel and coal options. The renewable energy with a higher level of knowledge is the wind power, followed by the wood and renewable energy with a lower degree of knowledge is geothermal energy. The reasonable conjuncture can be made regarding of the Mexican public concerns about the environmental effect of fossil fuels. Two different stories demonstrate some consistency on this issue. In the National Environmental Survey, nine of the respondents claim that they are very, they are very concerned about the environmental effect of gas, oil and coal. If you can see this data in graph three that 53% respond that much and three that's something. On the other hand, in this figure number one, which shows some interesting data from the National Survey of energy consumption private homes, carry out by the institutional responsible of the official statistics in Mexico. You can see how there is a higher level of understanding about the environmental damage caused by the use of certain energy, particularly in particularly gasoline in vehicles. 77 1.1% note that there is that there is a lot of impact of the environment. The environmental damage from firewood and cold is also widely recognized. However, it is not worth it that people do not recognize the environmental effects of natural gas at the same scale, as we saw that they did for gasoline, firewood and coal. I think that people who identify some type of involvement for cylinder of stationary gas were less than half the population survey, while for natural gas was 31.1%. I put a picture because maybe in the United States and Canada are not familiar with the cylinder gas that is in the container we're using at home to store the gas. It could be conjured at the low level of recognition of the environmental damage caused by gas is utility communication shortage about natural gas compared to car pollution. It's possible that people are familiar with their use of gas in the home. They do not the whole process and environmental effects behind each extraction. In this graph number four, we show the perception of Mexicans regarding the future of energy sources. It identifies great optimism that in the medium terms, and it means 15 years, there will be a greater capacity to take advantage of renewable sources to join and solar to generate electricity in the house. There is also a majority of the starving population that is confident that the people will improve certain habits related to the use of fossil fuels, such as gas and petroleum derivatives, as well as in the use of electricity. Public opinion was right on the future about the ability of gas and gasoline, as 44.4% respond that they will be declared in 15 years, while 42.5% say that we will not be the case. Finally, a negative perception prevailed about the possibility that gas and gasoline could improve to reduce their environmental impact. In the chart. Number one shows a comparison of three service that allows us to identify the place of climate change and energy on the citizen agenda of priority problems to dissolve with better laws, or with the development of science and technology. Climate change in the table because one of the most intentionally recognized internationally recognized policies for its mitigation is precisely the development of renewable energies. In 2019 National Survey of the Senate, people place climate change in seventh place among environmental issues that need to be addressed with more comprehensive and stricter laws with 24% of dimensions. Which wise, it is far from the first two places, a significant air pollution effect of the fuel in fossil fuel use, take first place and the deforestation cause of climate change that takes second. In the story of the city's science and technology agenda for 2018 climate change strength third, while energy rank for it's part the national science of technology serve. Climate change ranks for as a problem that science should have to solve over the next five years, while energy ranks seventh on the list. Finally, another very important topic that informs public opinion on energy in Mexico is related to one of the strategic projects of President López Obrador. That is the construction of the, those workers refinery in Tabasco. The construction of this infrastructure work is part of the of the Obrador administration actions to restore energy sovereignty. As you can see in the in the next graph graph number five. This action is recognized for more than the health population. Graph six show that this project is considered to be the second most important, only behind the construction of the new international airport. In this, the last two graphs. Not only do people know about project and recognize how important is to the to the government, but there is also significant social support for it. The graph number seven show how that the 70 67% of Mexicans agree agree with the construction of the refinery, only two of 10 people claim to disagree. The graph eight shows that benefits are most recognized for different sectors. There are thought to be practically practically the same level of benefits to the state of Tabasco, where the refinery is being built to the country as whole. 56% of people, regardless of their economic status of they have a car field, they will have benefit from this project. It will be it will have been interesting to include among the answers the benefit to the environment to see what the population were responding to. With this view of the refinery, it seems to me that we have enough information to say that despite the interest in alternative energy sources. Oil and its derivatives are regarded by the Mexican population as fundamental elements in designing economic development policies. This was in the 1950s and 1960s. This longing for the welfare state of that time allows to understand to some extent, the social support that the energy policy of the current government has with this idea and don't thank you very much. Thank you so much. It's widely it was really great to be able to have some information from all three countries in this event so we really appreciate your presentation. At this point, we have time for a couple questions. So I'm going to lead with a question from Caitlin Ray me who's on the faculty here at the Ford School. She has a question about the slide that Eric showed tying polarization to self reported familiarity, wondering if perhaps there could be a different causal direction. And noting that her work shows that people who feel superior about their own views, then tend to overestimate their knowledge and engage in selective seeking out of new sources so what are your thoughts on that. Thanks I think that's a that's a great question. I don't know if I inferred causality I guess I was speculating a bit. I think both are plausible explanations for that interactive relationship. I think though an important point and I don't know if it's worth me putting it back up that slide but an important point I think is that the conservative party of Canada supporters and the liberal party of Canada supporters are exposed to different kinds of information. And I think that's really important to consider now whether or not that is causing them to support the carbon tax or whether or not it's there kind of pre existing, I guess belief superiority or partisan identification or partisan predispositions, I think is an open question and I don't have any kind of data or experiments done to kind of tease that out the arrow of causality but I think it's a very important point to raise that it's might not necessarily be information randomly kind of transmitted to these individuals that's making them. I believe there's probably some self selection going on here with partisans, looking at different types of information depending on, you know who they follow on Twitter, or who they're what their networks are on on on Facebook, and that sort of thing. Thanks for the question. Chris was, did you have anything to add or is that pretty much. Are you good. Okay, thumbs up. Alright, so the next question deals with carbon taxes. This is asked by nude natal Hoffer, and he's differentiating between a carbon tax generally and a carbon fee and dividend plan with, which is I apparently what citizens climate lobby and the Climate Leadership Council are proposing. Do you have any, did you ask about that level of distinction or do you have any insights about how the public might feel about that distinction. Yeah, Josh and newt's point is, is very important framing of carbon tax and the use of dividends has significant impact on public support, we've tested this in various forms various frames over various iterations. There are some important differences, it matters right so for example, and we didn't do it in this particular way we just asked the, the kind of neutral framing that I presented and that Eric ran in Canada at the same time, but we have including kind of matched Eric over time on dividend use. The most popular dividend use by far which raises overall public support are two things, transferring any dividends to renewable energy use and development that scores consistently popular dramatically raises support for the mechanism as a whole. The other is in some type of revenue neutral return to citizens, basically using that money that's generated in some kind of offset for something like income tax other affixed sources or destinations for the revenue don't pose as great success. We've tested things like debt over time using it to pay down debt or deficits, and it actually in some cases reduces support levels from the neutral framing so not all things are looked at but certainly connections to renewable energy and certainly connections to some type of offset for other taxes scores very very well. So it's important and unfortunately in this particular iteration we didn't do any of those tests I have more time series available, if you'd like to see them. Great. Well thank you so much. The Q&A is still open if anyone would like to submit additional questions but I guess I'll ask a question in the meantime which is, you know, it seems as though, obviously, that, you know, the data that it's what Lee presented was not exactly comparable with the data that but nevertheless, there seems to be a clinging on to more traditional sources of energy in Mexico oil gas, a sort of, there seems to be more of a meeting of the minds as Barry alluded to in his question between Canada and the US, despite some differences as well. So this is a question I'd be curious it's what Lee's perspective but also Chris and Eric if you have anything to add, you know, one major difference of course, you know, is just in terms of the resources that Canada's already so reliant on hydro and nuclear which are non emitting sources. To what do you attribute sort of the distinction between Mexico and how the other two are seeing renewable energy. Do you think it's because of more like government factors like the Obrador administration and his policies, or more about just the resources that are available in each country. Maybe with the answer, I can touch a little bit the question of Barry Ray about the regional coordination, the possibility of that. And I think that in Mexico, the population have an extra strong idea of the of that the petroleum is very important for the economic development. And this is the, the, the narrative and the, the political discourse that we have here in the last 50 years petroleum, the oil is ours, and is to improve the quality of life now fall of the Mexicans. So, we've in the last administration, we, we shift a little bit about a to change the energetic matrix to improve the renewable energies to open the energy to the private investment. And with the political change. The discourse of press of the president Lopez Obrador was the that in first in first place that all the, the, this private investment was part of the big, the big corruption that has met. So, we cannot, we must stop that opening because it's just corruption. And it was core and in the second place, this shift of the last administration was just to sell and to destroy the Mexican state owned companies of the electricity and petroleum. Because of the neoliberalism, they try to try to destroy all the state owned companies and the is like like the to recover the golden age of Mexico in petroleum and all the golden age of 50 60s, but now it's the tank the time is changing and I think that the president is moving back to another complete direction about comparing with Biden and maybe with Canada. So, maybe that that will be a very problem or a potential conflict with a regional agenda to coordinate and to the carbonize the economy, because we are moving forward to another completely direction. Because of due to that, that too many ideas that I, I told you know the private investment is corruption, and we need to return to the golden age of the welfare state that we improve that improves the quality of life of Mexicans. So, it's a, it's part of a political point of view and a narrative and they are trying to recover to, to, to, to what to what lies to this administration, and is potentially in, I insist. It's a problem to the regional coordination with the other countries, and maybe a problem with the team with the NAFTA, because we have agreement about renewable energy. So, I don't know what's going to happen with that with that point. Great. Well, yeah, there's a lot there and you know obviously another indicator that would be interesting because it seems kind of implicit is trust in government right the government versus the private sector and, and who you trust more to not be corrupt. So one last question that's directed towards Chris and Eric, both. It's asked by Heather Malar from the University of New Brunswick who will be a future participant in our colloquium series, wondering if Chris could say more about the relationship between beliefs and support for adaptation, and if Eric could comment on support for nuclear, and whether it's driven more by partisanship by partisanship, or regionally. This is a great question, Heather, and I look forward to hearing Heather's, Heather's talk. Yeah, we've broken it out. So there's different, you know, tests that we could use about adaptation, playing it in a kind of a zero sum game where people have to pick the most important adaptation versus mitigation versus geo engineering, or just more neutrally trained perspectives on adaptation so there's different ways we can kind of look at underlying beliefs. One notable thing from our early cuts on the 2021 data and overlaid with some previous studies is that that group that we talked about the, I think is evidence of climate change but attributed largely to natural cycles are very much when you kind of pose it in a zero sum game, more likely than those that accept, and more likely than those who deny climate change to support adaptation as their choice on that list and again I bring up the slide I wish I could do that without probably confused people. That's the way I said it, but it's really interesting right because it makes intuitive sense. I think back to Heather's question is, they don't think it's happening because of anthropogenic factors, but it's happening. So how do you deal with it mitigation declines relatively to adaptation measures and geo engineering, I think also relatively as geo engineering is seen if this is a natural cycle can you really change it, as opposed to countering human induced factor so it's really fascinating relationship, lots more there. Heather I'm sorry if I didn't lay it out as well as it may be, but I'll turn it to Eric at this time will improve. I doubt it but I'll try. I have a question I you're kind of anticipated I ran out of steam, or time, probably combination of the two. And I wanted to run some kind of analysis on the nuclear question over and above kind of like the bivariate analysis that I kind of presented. I didn't quite get to, I was really close to answering your question Heather and I really regret it now but because you asked the question I wasn't prepared for, but I can tell you I did nevertheless look at those bivariate relationships and so, while not controlling for partisanship, looking at regionalism is where you find the largest differences. In particular I mentioned Alberta 70% support for nuclear energy and Alberta relative to Quebec 24% support for nuclear energy and those differences are just huge now. To the extent that partisanship is important here I'd really like to compare how partisanship plays out in those two areas to see if that kind of mitigates these regional differences but if I, if I had to bet right now I'd say region might be partisan, right, you know, as of now, but I will double check and I promise to get back to you on that. Great. Thank you so much Eric and that's all the time we have. Thanks to those of you who stuck, not only towards the bitter end but 15 minutes over I think it's really a testament to how fascinating the presentations were. We hope you'll join us for our next NAC webinar event on April 8 at 1pm Eastern time, and Barry and I would like to thank you all again both the audience and the panelists. Have a good afternoon. Take care.