 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our briefing this afternoon. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and we are very happy to welcome you to this briefing this afternoon talking about public attitudes about climate change and clean energy and of course it's a very fitting topic as we think about the state of the union is about to be delivered tonight. So this is an issue that may very well be addressed in some way during the State of the Union. It certainly is on the minds of policymakers as we look at many of the issues that are confronting the Congress and confronting state and local leaders as we deal with more and more issues around energy and climate. We are very pleased to be holding this briefing today and as a result of new work that has been done by Professor John Krosnick. Some of you may have been at previous briefings where Professor Krosnick has talked about his findings and we think that it is a very very good opportunity to hear sort of the latest get those perceptions to have a better understanding of what the American public is seeing across the country and across a whole range of demographics that make it all very interesting to learn more about what the current state of thinking really is and of course there are always more questions that need to be asked. We're going to hear a lot of new information today and of course this work that has just been completed in December had been commissioned through the resources for the future and USA Today and so we are very very pleased also to be holding this briefing in conjunction with resources for the future and to have the President of RFF here with us to also make comments this afternoon and to provide some very very useful context I think particularly for policy makers since we have someone who was a very prominent policy maker who is now leading RFF. So at this time without further ado I would like to turn to Dr. Krosnick who has been looking at public opinion for more than 30 years looking at how the American public attitudes are formed how they are shaped how they are changing and how it affects their thinking in action and how it may indeed affect how policy makers feel. He's been an expert recognized worldwide looking at the psychology of attitudes particularly in the area of politics and has been a co-principal investigator of the American National Election Study which has been a preeminent research project exploring voter decision making. So Dr. Krosnick. Thank you very much Carol and welcome to you all it's really a pleasure to be back in this building and I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this new work that we've done I want to just begin by letting you know who you should join me in thanking for what I'm going to share with you today. I'm very grateful to resources for the future and Pete Nelson there in particular who's been a collaborator in this project and who made this all possible. Stanford and the Woods Institute for the Environment in particular has been a supporter in USA Today. Our polling partner there Jim Norman has been very important in pulling this off as well. The research staff includes Yushuang Wang at RFF and my longtime collaborator at Stanford Beau McKinnis and so I wanted to thank all of those folks as well as Alan Krupnick and Ray Kopp at RFF. So any questions you have about details feel free to ask any of those people. So what we're going to do today is begin with a point of deep embarrassment and concern for me and this has nothing to do with climate change at the moment. Let me just show you this graph this looks complicated it's really not that that complicated it's very simple these are poll results taken between April of 2010 and April of 2011 asking the American public a very simple question was Barack Obama born in the United States or born in another country okay and the y-axis over here is the percent of people who gave the right answer in the who said that he was born in the United States and you can see that each of these little objects represents a poll measurement and the lines connect up measurements made with the same survey question so if we just look back here in April 2010 you can see that according to this survey the percent of giving the correct answer was about 78 percent in the country according to this measurement was 64 percent and according to this one it was 58 percent so you can see very substantial disagreements between these low numbers and these high numbers but the what the lines show you is that there is consistency in question wording if you ask the same question at different times you get very similar answers so that to take those lines out and and to make these all dots you would say what a mess why should I believe polling who knows what the American public believes but actually what I'm showing you is that question wording matters and that's an obsession for us and it's particularly important with regard to climate change because this is a comparable graph here with dots and no lines showing you between 1986 and 2013 many national polls asking Americans in one way or another has the earth been warming or not and you can see that even most recently these measurements range from dots around 50 percent to dots around 80 percent or 90 percent so if you were wondering should I pay attention to polls you might look at data like this and say why would I bother because who knows if there's any truth there but the fact of the matter is if I were to connect dots with the same wordings here as well you'd see the same thing consistency over time and results and what I'm going to do is to walk you through results that we get with a set of questions that are based on a hundred years of literature developing across the social sciences in how to design questions to minimize bias and measure what people really think as accurately as we can so that's what we're going to do and to put it in context I'm just going to show you one recent headline this happens to come from NBC news number of Americans who don't believe in climate change rises and this is dated just January 16th of 2014 so this is reporting the result of a poll so let's is it true that skepticism is on the rise let us find out so what I'm going to do is walk you through a series of national surveys that we have done and the great focus here is on the newest one so the newest one as I mentioned is co-sponsored by resources for the future USA Today and Stanford the data were collected very recently and in November and December at the end of last year and we've asked lots of new questions exploring lots of new issues that we haven't in our surveys before but we've also asked a number of questions that we have asked quite often that allow us to track trends over time so in these surveys the surveys beginning as early as 1997 and going through 2013 these are always with representative random samples of American adults who are interviewed by telephone landlines and cell phones are called we randomly select a respondent from among the household residents so that we don't have a bias toward people who are at home at the time of the call and we call back as many times as we need to in order to interview the randomly selected respondent we also work hard at asking unbiased balanced questions so to begin what I want to show you is an update on where Americans are now on what I call the fundamentals has warming been happening has it been caused by humans and is it a threat and here's the wording of the question that we've been asking for a long time to measure the first of those you may have heard about the idea that the world's temperature may have been going up slowly over the past 100 years what's your personal opinion on this do you think this probably has been happening or do you think it probably has not been happening now one I'll tell you before I show you results we've done a series of experiments where people are randomly assigned either to be asked this question or an alternative version of it so one is a quicker one that gets rid of this introductory sentence and simply begins what's your personal opinion do you think that the world's temperature has been going up slowly over the past 100 years or do you think it probably has not been happening so that's a quicker version of it we've also done experiments where we remove the word slowly because as you may know over the period of 100 years natural scientists talk about the hockey stick and that it's actually not been so slow in recent decades that turns out not to make a substantial difference either and here is what we get with our latest figures so starting in 1997 77% of people said that they thought the earth's temperature probably had been going up that number went up to the mid 80s in 2007 and 2008 went down a little bit went up a little bit down up and the latest number is 73% so let's just stop there for a second as compared to November 2012 a year later in December 2013 this number is essentially flat as compared to the recent past so if I look at this as a student of public opinion on lots of issues not just climate the thing that jumps out to me is a gigantic majority on so many issues we're used to seeing America divided nearly 50 50 and yet on this issue on this particular question they're not but you might say okay fine there there are lots of people acknowledge that warming is happening the real debate is about whether the warming has been caused by human activity so we've asked if warming has been occurring over the last 100 years do you think it's been caused mostly by things people have done mostly by natural processes or about equally by both and here are the results we see for that so when we first asked the question in 1997 81% of people attributed warming to human activity that number is 80% in our most recent survey okay so let's just stop for a second and take a breath what have I shown you I've shown you big numbers and I've shown you not much change over time despite Hurricane Katrina Superstorm Sandy Al Gore's movie a big recession in 2008 millions of dollars tens of millions of dollars maybe hundreds of millions of dollars spent on advertising to try to push around the American public in one direction or another on each of these issues candidates running for president saying I don't think it's real lots of messages attempting to sway the American public and what you can see is that the public has remained relatively steady on these issues over time now when we put these two things together identifying people who say yes warming has been happening and it's been caused by humans you see these numbers started off at 66% in 1997 2013 at 65% really no meaningful change over that time period so somebody tells you oh surveys you can't trust surveys you do the same survey twice you get maybe completely different answers well here we are doing the same survey how many times is this 10 times or more and you get pretty much the same answer each time when we ask people if nothing is done to address it do you think the earth's temperature will go up over future years or do you think it will not happen we see when we first asked that in 2010 75% of Americans said they thought it would occur that number 76% in 2013 again a large majority and no notable change over time now this is beginning to look at the question of seriousness so we asked people if the earth's temperature were to rise by five degrees Fahrenheit over the next 75 years would that be overall a good thing a bad thing or neither good nor bad and here I'm showing you the percentage of people who said it would be a bad thing started off at 61% in 1997 66% today now that's one particular version of warming but we can ask about it in terms of people's perceptions more broadly how serious of a problem do you think global warming will be for the united states in the future in 2006 83% of people said it would be a serious problem for the country that number at 81% today when we ask that same question about the world 85% said it would be a serious problem in 2006 when we first asked it 83% today again very large numbers when we ask people do you think global warming will hurt you personally or will it not hurt you personally here we see smaller numbers only about a little less than two-thirds of Americans have said they thought that they would personally be hurt by it but when we ask will it hurt future generations the numbers go right up back to the territory that we had seen before so people recognize that in not all cases is this about them personally but they think more about it in terms of future generations being affected which I think many scientists would agree with now I've told you so far about perceptions of the state of the world what I haven't told you about is how certain people are in their holding of these opinions so I could ask you do you think Barack Obama was born in the United States or not you could tell me I think he probably was but what do I know you know this is not something I hold with a lot of confidence and we now know from about 50 years of research in psychology that people's beliefs and preferences held weekly are not as consequential as strongly held beliefs and attitudes so we have actually asked people how sure are you about your beliefs and I'll show you here that when we just offer people a five point scale extremely sure very sure moderately sure slightly sure not sure at all that between 43 percent in the original measurement 44 percent today place themselves in one of the top two categories now obviously a question about long-term warming in the past or in the future is an issue for natural scientists to provide information about and for you to say I'm absolutely certain you haven't seen it firsthand you may have seen graphs and so on so I'm not I'm not sure that it's unreasonable for Americans to be less than highly certain about this but there certainly is more room for certainty to go up efforts however at enhancing uncertainty over these years I would say have not been successful at a national level that is arguments being made yeah yeah the planet's warming but we don't really know what's causing it we don't really know what to do about it Americans have not become any more uncertain over time here I'll show you a relatively high bar these are people who are extremely or very sure that global warming has been happening and has been caused by human activities that's about one third of the country who are rock solid in holding each of those beliefs and again no notable change over time from 31 percent to 36 percent here's the hardcore skeptic group these are people who are extremely or very sure that warming has not been happening and you can see this is a tiny fraction of the country 7 percent in 1997 8 percent today it really has not varied notably at all but it's certainly a group that we hear frequently okay let's stop there so what have I shown you these are the fundamentals so far I've shown you that the endorsement of the existence and human causality is very widespread certainty is certainly not maxing out but the group of certain skeptics is quite small now what about government action are people in favor of government doing something about this well the first thing I'll show you is a very general question asking people do you think the federal government should do more than it's doing now less than it's doing now or about what it's doing now about global warming and you can see that back in 1997 about 67 percent of people said the government should be doing more that number is 66 percent today little ups and downs in between but no wavering there when we asked in particular about whether government should limit greenhouse gas emissions by businesses that got endorsement by 83 percent in 2009 81 percent today now let me just pause here because this is quite a striking finding I think that as you know there's tremendous variation in political ideology across the spectrum from liberal to conservative in the United States and people on the conservative end of the spectrum in the general public tend to endorse smaller less interventionist government but you can't see numbers as high as these unless there are majorities of democrats and independents and republicans saying the same thing the math just doesn't add up and I'm not going to show you anything about the party divisions today with these data that'll be the next installment of our work with this survey data set but I will tell you when you look at big numbers like this you can anticipate what I'll tell you next time which is that even majorities of republican citizens express these points of view otherwise you just can't get results that look like this okay should the federal government limit greenhouse gas emissions by power plants now this happens to be a question that we started asking in 2006 in our surveys little did we know that the federal government would turn its attention to existing source power plants very recently as a mechanism to reduce emissions as you can see this was an idea supported by 86 percent of americans in 2006 that number is 79 percent today when we asked let's see I don't think I have a slide for this when we asked um our respondents should the federal government limit emissions by power plants only if congress consents to that or even if congress does not consent the majority of our folks said they should go ahead and do it regardless of whether congress consents so that's an interesting issue there so here are now a series of questions asking do you think the federal government should either require businesses or encourage them with tax breaks to do a series of things or should the government stay out of each of these and what you can see is very high levels of support starting off in excess of 80 percent and ending up around 80 percent for a series of different proposals reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions by power plants building these are these are just enhancing cafe standards for vehicles building buildings that require less energy to heat and cool building appliances that use less electricity each of these very popular even when we tell our server respondents that it will cost them more money to impose each of these standards the only one that's not quite so popular as you can see here is building all electric vehicles this has never been as popular as other strategies we have not explored in depth what causes this to be less popular but you could easily imagine despite the the rising sales of those vehicles we don't yet have a charging stations everywhere gas stations are not prepared to swap out batteries so it may be that technology needs to change before support for that mechanism increases here are a series of other questions that each involve taxes so let me begin by focusing your attention at the bottom you may know that economists propose that if you want to change behavior one of the ways to do it is to change the cost of that behavior so if you want to reduce the amount of gasoline people burn or the amount of electricity they use just increase the cost to them and of course they'll turn the light switches off more and they will drive less as it turns out only very small portions of Americans like the idea of increases tax increasing taxes on gasoline or electricity simply to reduce use of them so this at this point in our most recent survey measuring this these numbers were at about 25 to 28 percent these other policies offering tax breaks to utilities to produce more electricity from water wind and solar power very high levels of approval across this time period offering tax breaks to reduce air pollution from burning coal less popular but still a majority in support and I'll show you a little bit later why I think this is a little bit less popular offering tax breaks to build nuclear power plants is even less appealing when we asked in particular about an idea for the first time we've never asked about before this is imposing carbon taxes on businesses so when we asked do you think businesses should be charged a tax for each unit of greenhouse gases they are responsible for emitting this idea achieved support from only 49 percent of the sample so again this is not a particularly popular idea the idea of either taxing consumers or taxing businesses and I would propose to you although I have no evidence of this that one possible explanation is as follows if the federal government were to increase taxes on gasoline or on electricity or to impose a carbon tax on businesses there's only one guaranteed result from that prices will go up there is no guarantee that emissions will go down so Americans would have to have taken economics courses and believe in the logic of the economic analysis in order to see that and it may be that from their point of view they're not guaranteed the benefit for the guaranteed cost one possibility we explored two possible ideas that might explain why nuclear power plants are not as appealing as other methods the first was we asked people do you think that nuclear power generating electricity from nuclear power puts out fewer greenhouse gases than using coal oil or natural gas puts out the same or more and what you can see is that only 60 percent of Americans said that they thought nuclear power was responsible for less greenhouse gas emissions I'm told that natural scientists say that is the right answer to this question and that's an interesting point for educating the public that to make nuclear power a more viable alternative perhaps people need to learn that it is less responsible for greenhouse gas emissions the natural inclination you and I might have is to say well probably the reason people are not so positive about nuclear power is because of the safety risks that they might perceive especially following the Fukushima accident which has certainly gotten its share of publicity but as you can see only 55 percent excuse me that 55 percent of people said that safety risks are not a reason to prevent the building of nuclear power plants that is a minority only 45 percent of Americans oppose nuclear power because of safety concerns so this for us raises interesting questions about how to investigate a little bit more where does that negativity come from because you know we're not seeing the support for nuclear power as a way to address this that one might imagine now I want to tell you a little bit about general posturing toward other sources of energy when we ask people do you think that the federal government should or should not pay part of the cost for people to put solar panels on their homes 68 percent of Americans supported that strategy we also asked questions about cap and trade and I'm going to show you three different versions of the cap and trade question we did an experiment here so for those of you who are not familiar with experimental methodology in about 90 seconds you will be what we do is we have the computer randomly assign each survey respondent to get version a version b or version c of the question what that means is that those three groups of people are identical in every way except for the way this question has been asked and I'm going to show you why because we wanted to explore whether changing the wording would change answers that we got so here's the first version it's a little bit long so let me read it to you and I apologize for the unreadable red here there's a proposed system called cap and trade the government would issue permits limiting the amount of greenhouse gases companies can put out companies that did not use all their permits could sell them to other companies companies that need more permits can buy them or these companies can pay money to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that other people or organizations put out this will cause companies to figure out the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would you favor or oppose a cap and trade system to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases the companies put out so I'm again I apologize a little hard to read these words but it says this will cause so as you can see that's an assertion and it's an assertion based on economic theory and research and observations over decades but it's an assertion made by us the survey question writers so the second version of the cap and trade question changes those words wow and you really can't read this what it says is instead of this will cause it says economists say that this system is likely to cause okay so the whole question is the same except we've just changed this will cause to economists say that this system is likely to now you should realize this was a bold move for resources for the future an organization filled with economists to see what difference does it make to say economists say that it's likely to versus saying that it will here's version c of the question and again I'm sorry this is hard to read that same phrase economists say that this system is likely to is in place there but we added another sentence because this converts cap and trade into cap and dividend it is the money the government makes from selling the permits would be returned to all Americans equally by reducing the amount of income taxes they pay so prices go up and then you get a rebate okay so what we're going to look at is does introducing economists change evaluations and does introducing the dividend change evaluations and here are the results version a 59 percent support version b I'm sorry to say statistically significant decline shifting to uncertainty 48 percent but look at this gigantic almost 20 percentage point increase by including the dividend in the process so that of course as you know at least my understanding is that the the proposals to tax carbon consumption don't hinge on that money disappearing so the idea of it being available in the form of dividends somehow is plausible and it's advocated by some in this space and it looks like a good number of Americans can be converted even in the face of the uncertainty to see this as a favorable way to go next we asked about the tax breaks that you know are in place now for various industries so companies that make electricity from sunlight wind and water should these tax breaks continue 73 percent said yes should government subsidies to oil companies continue only 31 percent of Americans said yes and natural gas companies come out in between at about 55 percent so this is the first hint from questions that we've asked directly here about a preference for solar wind and water over oil but to me the most surprising results of this entire survey come from a set of questions that we never asked before and I don't know of others who have asked them we simply ask people do you think making electricity from each of the following sources is a good idea a bad idea or neither good nor bad and let me show you what we saw in a moment but before we get there on the way to it let me show you the result that we saw about the Keystone pipeline when we asked we described to people the Keystone pipeline we asked them do you think the federal government should allow the Keystone pipeline to be built or not 56 percent of people said they thought it should be built so this is another instance in which we are seeing support for this approach other organizations the Pew Research Center and others have seen similar numbers approving sorry I guess I gave you a heads up to questions that will come in a minute so we'll get to those generation methods shortly so before we get there will government action be painful you might be wondering about the argument that taking steps to address climate change would hurt the American economy would cost jobs would hurt our international competitiveness as you can see when we ask people do you think the u.s. doing things about global warming would hurt the national economy would help the national economy or would have no impact you can see that the percent of people saying we would hurt ourselves economically was 2027 percent in 2009 30 percent in 2013 no substantial change this is not an argument that has caught on with the American public so secondly should the u.s. take action on this issue to reduce emissions even if other large nations generating greenhouse gas emissions such as China and India do not or should the U.S. only do it if those other countries do and the answer is about two thirds or more in our most recent survey three quarters of Americans said the U.S. should take action regardless of whether those other large emitting countries do or not what about the effects of climate change we asked about a series of effects for example do you think global warming has caused there to be more droughts fewer droughts or had no impact on droughts and you can see that only a bare majority of people see impact on droughts so far in 2012 and 2013 when we asked the same question about storms about the same results 55 percent in 2012 62 percent in 2013 if you think superstorm Sandy as a single event would change people's opinions you might imagine they would this number would increase a lot it didn't it is a significant increase but it's not a substantial one single events like that don't seem to push people around however when we asked people do you think super that Hurricane Sandy caused the damage excuse me let me say it one more time do you think that global warming caused the damage from Hurricane Sandy to be worse or not 57 percent of people did say they thought it was enhanced in terms of its damage when we ask people do you think you've seen any effects of global warming so far again a healthy majority 71 percent said they think they have seen some effects and I won't spend too much time on this I just want to highlight for you these are the effects that people mention so increasing natural disasters are effects that 25 percent of Americans say they think they have seen from climate change so far changes in weather or weather patterns by 22 percent icebergs melting by 20 percent warmer temperatures being caused by climate change 19 percent and smaller numbers talking about precipitation ocean rise snow polar bears and so on so my point here is to say lots of people think they've seen some effects of climate change but they are diverse in nature there's no single effect that is visible for people despite attempts I think by some observers to link particularly dramatic events to climate change so far as you may know one of the arguments sometimes made by people trying to whip up public concern about this issue is that extreme weather events are the answer if we want to get Americans concerned we just need to really play up events like Hurricane Sandy so when we ask people do you think the world's weather patterns have been more unstable less unstable or about the same in recent years as you can see about 70 percent of 2006 said they had been more unstable recently that number is 62 percent in 2013 there's no evidence that Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy altered numbers like this one single event even the typhoon in the Philippines does not seem to be enough to alter people's perceptions of weather instability okay now as you may know the skeptical lobbying effort in part on this issue has attempted to discredit natural scientists working in the area and one of the things that we've done is to ask people how much they trust scientists studying the environment and global warming in particular over time and as you can see these are ratings from a rating scale these are respondents putting a natural scientist at the top three points on this rating scale starting out at about 72 percent 64 percent here in 2013 if you want to look at this graph and ignore this number and say 75 down to about 70 down to about 65 you can see a small trend downward in these numbers but there I personally would not see this as a huge headline myself I would say that trust in scientists has been high and has remained relatively steady over this time period the last question of this set should we take steps now to prepare for the possible effects of climate change or should we wait and see you could easily imagine that some people would say you know look that no scientists can know for sure what's going to happen 10 or 50 years from now so why would we want to invest in preparing for those problems if that money might be wasted why don't we just wait and see what happens in fact what we see is a breathtaking 83 percent of Americans saying we should take steps now to prepare for the possible effects rather than taking chances by waiting for the future okay this finally brings us to what I found to be the at least for me personally the knock my socks off findings of this survey so when we ask people is it a good idea a bad idea or neither good nor bad to produce energy from a series of different sources here's what we see 91 percent of Americans saying solar power is a good idea 84 percent saying wind is a good idea 83 percent saying hydroelectricity is a good idea natural gas dropping to 48 nuclear power at 33 and coal down at 21 now this is an interesting set of results given that as you may know coal is remarkably inexpensive as a source of electricity this is the American public saying okay I understand it's cheap but to me it doesn't sound like a good idea this looks like a public to me saying they prefer to move in this direction rather than in this direction oh the entire country yeah everything I've shown you so far as the entire country okay now we're coming into the home stretch here I'm almost done I want to show you just a couple of of last tidbits and this was a this is a bite but it's a big bite as you may know about a month ago we released a new set of results that I'm just going to share with you now so these are not exactly new but for those of you who haven't seen them I want you to get a taste of it the message I heard talking to people in this building repeatedly over time is that national surveys like what I've shown you so far are interesting and helpful but not nearly as helpful as are needed because each elected representative in the House and Senate represents a particular geographically located constituency and I may tell them what the nation as a whole thinks but I'm not telling you them what their constituents think so we developed a technique where we concatenate surveys together put 22,000 respondents into a single analysis break them up by state so we have random samples of people in almost all the states and then we produced maps showing the percent of people in each state who hold each of a series different of different beliefs so here's the first map and next time we'll invest in a more modern projector so you can see a little more sharply but the darker the state the bigger the majority saying that global warming has been happening and answered to our question and I'll make your task of looking at these maps a little quicker and more efficient by telling you we didn't find a single state that was majority skeptical on climate change across the different measures that we looked at instead what we see is either bare majorities or large majorities or huge majorities on the green side of the issue in this case the numbers range from as small as 75% to as high as 88% and you can see that the darker states tend to be around the edges of the country in this case yep we do not I'm so sorry not that we don't like Hawaii and Alaska but we didn't have numbers to be able to do that we need to have interviewed enough people in those places in order to do it well we didn't I'm just going to show you a few more of these maps quickly but they all tell basically the same picture this is whether warming will continue in the future numbers range from 60% to 82% and by the way states like this that have no number we don't we don't have enough respondents in those states to actually produce a reliable estimate whether warming has been caused by human activity these numbers range from 65% to 92% whether warming will be a serious national problem ranging from 58% to 94% okay and there are lots of maps I'm going to go too quickly for you to read them but they all tell the same story now what about engagement in the issue how much attention have people been paying how strong are their feelings well this is showing you the percent of people in each state who say the issue of global warming is extremely important to them personally these are the people who wake up in the morning and say another day another opportunity to influence government on climate change they're people who are skeptical about climate change and their people who are green on the issue and you can see that these numbers vary from a low of 3% to a high of 16% these are the people who vote based on the issue these are the people who give money to lobbying organizations on the issue they write letters they make phone calls and these groups are about typical for most issues that get a lot of attention in the congress gun control abortion capital punishment and others the small group of passionately engaged people is about this same size this shows you the another measure of engagement percent of people who say that they are highly knowledgeable about the issue these numbers range from 29% to 69% and you can see some states are more involved and knowledgeable at least according to their own assessments than others okay i'm not going to show you these maps but they're just like all the rest of them showing you lots of support for policies so in each of those cases without spending time on details there's no there's no state that comes out majority skeptical now you might imagine that states like west virginia or texas places where there are significant economic interests in fossil fuels that there would be skepticism about this issue but those are also places that are warm those are places that are along coastlines there are various different competing factors that are at play and there are places that know the dangers of heat and so what we find in our analysis is that economic interests play only a small role if any in governing the opinions that people express so what conclusions can we reach well first of all opinions have been overwhelmingly green i think on the issue and have remained relatively steady over a period of years despite many events that speculators thought might have influenced opinions that hardcore skeptics remain a tiny fraction of the nation that all states that we were able to look at are a majority green there's no state that's a majority skeptical on the issue and the clear message for more than 80 percent of americans is to prepare for the likely effects of climate change now not to wait and see and deal with those problems later solar wind and water are viewed favorably by the vast vast vast majority of people as sources of of electricity coal is viewed favorably by a very small fraction of the country um and the message is clear from americans to end subsidies for the coal industry while at the same time continuing government subsidies for solar wind and water power generation and supporting the installation of solar panels on homes okay so um thank you for your patience let me uh say i appreciate the your your time and working through these details these are in some sense very new results but at the same time they are results that reinforce a picture we've seen for some time the american public stands uh clearly on one side of this issue in my opinion based on these measurements and i'm privileged to have had the opportunity to do this measurement again i thank r f f and usa today and i thank you and we can do questions later i think is that right good always fascinating john and before we open it up for uh discussion with with all of you we want to take a few minutes to hear from somebody to who can to set uh all of this in a bit more of a context from a policymaker perspective and we are delighted that we've been joined this afternoon by phil sharp who is the president of resources for the future and prior to uh being at r f f uh phil had served in the house of representatives for 10 terms as a representative from indiana and during part of that time he also chaired the energy and power subcommittee of the house energy committee and then he also had taught at harvard at at the institute of politics and the kennedy school so while he was in congress he was always very very well known for uh being heavily engaged in trying to reach across the aisle doing so much policy work on energy in a very bipartisan way and so i think that in his uh many many years of public service and now in terms of uh being president of r f f he brings a very unique perspective in terms of what does this mean now that we've heard professor cross mix say all these things what what should or how might policymakers respond to this phil well carol thank you very much and thank you john for your uh not just work on this particular poll but uh previous work as well and i'm delighted to be uh back here and frankly as a former member of congress i'm delighted to be invited just about anywhere but um i'm just going to take a couple minutes and we're going to open up to your questions and your comments and and some of what i'll say probably is very obvious to folks in this audience first i just need to say a word about resources for the future we are a 60 year old research organization in which we do independent we believe high quality uh research uh analysis primarily through an economic lens on environmental and natural resource issues but we are not an advocacy organization our independent scholars can take their own points of view from their research they do present them here on capitol hill we do lots of work on climate on the electricity issues on energy issues on land and water issues and the things so there's a wide diversity but we do not as an organization take an opinion so please don't hold anything i say against the organization uh these will be my own personal points of view and partly from wearing my previous hat in the last millennia uh when i was a member of the congress here let me say i do want to just say and you may be interested in looking at some of our work on this we have done analytical work on virtually all of the major policy proposals at the federal and state level for dealing with climate change we're doing lots of work right now in the carbon tax we're doing on the tax changes that the finance and the ways and means committee are talking about we're doing lots of work on the epa proposed rules that are in development on carbon rules kind of thing we've done work on the clean energy standard we did a lot of work on the cap and trade and actually had some of our work turned up in the legislation uh that was considered here on capitol hill but let me just say a couple i think that are obvious things and one is that this poll and other data shows overwhelmingly the american people are not the issue as to where they stand on this question the american people as much as on almost any other issue show very strong concern and support for government action and i don't think there's any way to get around uh this one can argue over what that action ought to be how intense it ought to be when it ought to happen all kinds of questions but the fact that some commentators talk about having to wait for the american people to catch up this is pure baloney the the question is whether american leaders of whole stripes whether it's partisan or whether it's in business or whether it's in academia or wherever whether leadership groups in this country are willing to come to a more activist point of view and many are of course on that second thing i would simply say is one figure i don't believe john brought today that's in there that was to me one of the more politically surprising things that when asked the question do you think the u.s government ought to take action even if other governments like china are not uh taking action and of course this is a natural competitive concern of anybody in the policy arena on this issue the public said yes you ought to take action something like 75 percent said we ought to act even if others are slow to act now i hope you know that many other governments are actually being more active than we are uh but the fact is i think that is a politically significant proposition and i also think that um that as as the current debate has swirled now and will swirl for the next two years around the epa initiatives i think it's very clear there's very strong public support for government taking action that doesn't mean people are going to dictate or know exactly which action ought to be taken but what i suggest to you is that this leaves room in the american political system for actions by people that want to engage in this issue in a serious and informed way and uh i think that's the real test for capitol hill and it's the real test for the american communication system as to whether we are going to continue to engage in willful ignorance on this issue or whether we are going to try to like adults uh examine the facts as best we can and uh and and actually deal with the serious questions of what are the practical steps that we ought to take and when ought to we take them and who's hurt and who's helped and what what do we want to do these are tough political questions to be worked out there's plenty to argue about but the nonsense the continuing argument over science or weight or whatnot it seems to me is pretty well settled in the public mind in the scientific community and in the academic world so great thanks well let's open it up for your questions and comments and if you would just identify yourself please when you ask your question and i must say i thought there were so many interesting things that john presented and um i don't know about you but i could have listened to him for another half hour easily in terms of looking at all of those maps and everything any questions or comments go ahead if you could identify yourself hello my name is john weinberg i'm a freelance policy consultant and uh my question has to do with the um the the debate that we that we've seen seems to center around environment versus jobs or you know advocates for clean energy talk about green jobs and opponents talk about petroleum jobs and coal jobs and i'm wondering if any of the polling data asks any questions about the interaction but whether people feel like doing something with clean energy is a threat to their you know economic security yeah thank you um we've asked questions in a number of surveys including the most recent one about whether doing things to address climate change would cause there to be more jobs would cause there to be fewer jobs or would have no impact on the number of jobs in the country as a whole and in the respondents own state and what we found is that only a small minority 20 to 30 percent of people say that they think it will doing things about climate change will reduce the number of jobs in the country and in the state and in fact the plurality almost 50 percent of respondents have said uh they think that doing things about climate change will increase the number of jobs both in their own state and in the country as a whole so it looks like the argument that addressing this issue is a job creator rather than a job killer seems to have caught on with more people about twice as many people as except the the skeptical view i was interest dina stoner cooperative finance cooperation i was interested in two questions and i'd like to ask you about affordability when you ask about preference for different fuels the public clearly preferred renewables but when you went to the specific strategies the three alternatives which was very clever and you ask whether or not people would like to have a strategy that took the the taxes being paid or whatever taxes small t and give it back in terms of dividends indicates that there is a concern about getting money back did you ask any questions around affordability do do people in the survey understand that some of these other ones that they prefer might have cost implications just curious yep thank you so this is obviously an important issue and we've gotten out of the number of different ways in our most recent survey and an earlier one so i'll summarize the results for you i would i would have been happy to keep you here if i had carol's permission i would have been happy to give two more hours of presentation but i thought i should keep it to the limit the by the way you can see they're on on our web page at stanford there are videos of many past presentations that i've done on this that go into tail on many of these issues and you're more than welcome to to look at them it's actually the website for what's called the political psychology research group at stanford pprg so to answer your question first of all we have looked at one of the concerns you expressed which is we can ask about policies that will in fact according to experts cost consumers money if they're imposed so for example some people argue that cafe standards increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles would increase the cost of cars while perhaps decreasing the cost of the fuel that people end up buying the when we have experimented in actually telling people that it would increase cost to them we don't see public support for those policies going down notably more importantly we've done a series of measurements using a technique called contingent valuation which is a well-established 60-year-old technique in survey research where we describe to people a a benefit that they might get which is in this case the description of the reduced emissions that could be produced by a policy and we describe a cost very specifically in terms of dollars to their household so we say for example we could reduce us emissions by 80 percent by 2050 but it would cost your household about 180 dollars per year in increased cost of the goods and services you buy if you could vote for or against this policy how would you vote so this is an opportunity to find out when you tell people specifically what the benefit is and specifically what the cost is how do they react so the first thing i want to tell you is that when we randomly assign each respondent to be told one of a series of different prices so some people might be told 100 a year others might be told 150 dollars a year others might be told 250 dollars a year the people who get the higher prices vote yes less often so just as economic theory would suggest when the price goes up people are less and less willing to buy it what that suggests to us is they're paying attention they are aware they're not willing to pay an unlimited amount for this however what we find is that using epa and cbo computations of the likely cost of emissions reductions of that magnitude that when we aggregate up the amount of money the american public says they're willing to pay by their yes and no votes the public is willing to pay just enough to cover those costs so that to me is pretty telling we have evidence that people are answering the question thoughtfully responding to the price being provided and we don't get 80 or 90 percent voting yes when we tell them it's going to cost even 100 a year we get only about 65 percent of people voting yes but those people the amount of money they're willing to pay multiplied out by how many households there are in the country provides enough money to cover the costs um hi my name is molly i work at the epa so i'm happy to see that the majority of american support renewable energy sources and i'm curious if you asked about uh do they know where their electricity comes from and do are they aware of other options that they can make that choice yeah that's a great question we actually started doing research ray kopp and i on this issue back in the 1990s and one of the very first things that we did was to give americans a quiz asking them what percent of american electricity do you think comes from each of a series of different sources and uh it was embarrassing back in those days that uh americans really were not in touch and what i used to be able to do when i gave lectures or in teaching courses is i could give that quiz to people i could say you know so put up your hand when i say a series of different sources of electricity tell me if you think that's the source that produces the largest fraction of electricity how about coal how about nuclear how about solar and so on and what i saw was you know hands all over the room for each one of those sources kind of a tie vote for each of them really people were out of touch and it was embarrassing back in those days it's not nearly as fun to do that exercise anymore because the hands all go up when i say coal um america has become much more knowledgeable about energy issues now than it was even a decade or two ago so it's an interesting case political scientists love to hammer on the american public saying how embarrassing it is that people do poorly on quizzes but when it comes to energy uh people are remarkably in touch and i think maybe it's not that surprising uh the issue has touched many people's lives and dominated news coverage for a long time um so uh we have not done those kinds of quizzes ourselves in surveys recently and so it'd be interesting to explore um you know the extent to which people are in touch with the facts about um and back in that study that ray and i did we were not only looking at how accurate people's understandings were of sources of electricity but also how accurate their understanding of the attributes of those sources were did they know which was the cheapest did they know which was the most polluting did they know which was the most had a supply that would last the longest and so on and we found lots of misunderstandings then and be fun to explore whether educating people um on that um led to changes of opinions um we did not in what we saw back then when we corrected their misunderstandings we didn't see much change of preferences um uh i will say that that work was supported partly by the epa so helpful question um jc burton from emerald city is collaborative i've got a two-part question one for dr sharp and then one for dr cosmic have you has your research seen or shown that there are policies that are supporting the idea of workforce around sustainability especially around retrofits and in trying to move and position um assets to to embrace renewables is the first question then second um because of that those policies that may or may not be in place are you seeing that americans are trending towards wanting policy to help govern ourselves or as a a marching order or or way to get us from coal which they don't support to renewables of any kind i think uh pulling part of that i'll leave to john um if i understood your question on the first one on renewables we have not done sort of labor studies if that's what you were asking about what is the the job impact of the different choices of the renewable subsidies kind of propositions and frankly i think those are probably to be honest with you very difficult to get a a lot of accurate information about as you i think we're articulating there's a different character in the kinds of job that you can end up with uh with different choices and there's also a theoretical question of what do you count as a green job i mean you need accountants to make sure you run the business for windmills just like you need somebody to manufacture windmills so i don't have a we don't have that information for you others have done some work on that i think maybe paraphrasing your second question do americans want government to push us in the direction of renewables and what i can tell you is that you know we've we haven't asked that question as a as a broad principled single question but i feel comfortable answering your question based upon answers to lots of specific questions that we've asked over the years in this arena and what we see is there we've really looked at three different kinds of ways in which government could push the country one is through mandates or standards where there are requirements cafe standards and others like that that's that tell businesses how they must conduct their activities um there are positive incentives like tax breaks for doing the right things this in quotes and then there are negative incentives tax increases to punish uh desired behavior that we desire to to reduce perhaps someone could argue um and what we found is that that last category is not particularly popular punishing undesirable behavior doesn't appeal to people even it's when it's not their own behavior um that incentivizing uh desired behaviors is more positive and that mandates or standards are even more positive than that so it does uh there you know as you saw there's lots and lots of evidence from this survey and others that americans do favor government activity and restrictions interventions into the business world to reduce emissions um and to do so in the form of either standards or incentivizing in a positive way i'll just say as an old recovered politician that i found given the intensity of public debate over the last half a dozen years on this issue of government regulation and whatnot and the worries of the economy it was surprising to me the continuing strength of the willingness of the population to engage in mandates essentially what we would call mandates that is necessarily the way the language always works and to regulate and to uh favor that as a high option and i must say other polls that i've seen that have specifically asked questions about standards codes and standards over the course of the last 20 years have always come in very very strongly in support of of whether it's cafe standard appliance standards but but utilizing that approach it's always been very popular okay next question yeah i'm james rink from the department of the treasury i was wondering if your research had looked into any attitudes about supporting mitigation or adaptation in other countries so the u.s. supporting developing countries that are suffering from climate change yeah we we have not yet explored whether the u.s. should address the effects of climate change in other countries or should encourage reductions in emissions in other countries and so on and that's a very interesting direction to go in i will tell you we uh we are now uh hoping to do a project we have a proposal out under consideration to do certainly the most ambitious measurement we've ever done on this issue that you may know that the gallup organization runs something called the world poll in which they uh do interviews in hundreds of countries with representative scientifically uh solid samples of of the residents of those countries and we are hoping to ask a sequence of questions for the first time ever on climate change and related issues identically across all of those countries to be able to start picking up opinions of people in those countries that's different from the issue you raised and i think it we may be able to get to your issues more quickly than we'll get the nationals the international survey work done but we hope to do both but that's where i must say that i was also really really impressed by the number that you cited in terms of people saying that we should take steps to prepare which i found really staggering actually in terms of that and one could think about that in terms of what that means both domestically as well as um internationally as well other questions okay back here hi uh lucas buffara c2es um excellent work professor really nicely done uh that number the 91 that favor solar is really an excellent and very encouraging number um but i'm curious um how do you think that number would change if you mentioned that the bulk of those panels are being imported from china yeah that i think there are a number of of arguments that you could make in fact the project i referred to earlier um that ray and i did looking at people's understanding of sources of energy um not only could one say well look you know if you're if we're um producing lots more solar power now than we had before we're going to be pumping a lot of money into the chinese economy because those are the inexpensive panels that's where consumers will go um you you might imagine to some people that might be a negative um it's also true that uh as i understand it that production of electricity from solar power is not that inexpensive and there are issues even of the production of waste products from solar power that are not trivial and so educating people about a series of potential drawbacks could well change their impressions um and so this raises an interesting contrast for surveys like i do so one is to say maybe my job is to measure what people think today and that's what i've described to you and another way to think about it is we could measure what people would think if they had other sets of information and that can be interesting as well and that's what you're highlighting and i think if if ray and i ever get back to really redoing again that project we did years ago we would be giving people lots of new information to educate them about the pros and cons of various different sources of energy and who knows where they would move um okay any other questions because i wanted to ask you what you found out with regard to fracking thank you so we actually did in this survey ask a series of questions on fracking um the the first question we asked was whether people were familiar with fracking and what we found is that there was a substantial number of americans uh was about a third pete maybe who did not remember hearing about it and um among those who had heard about it what we saw was that there was uh considerable uh support for government effort to monitor and regulate the process to be sure that it was safe did i cover all the key points there was a few and uh i would expect people about time to get in more and there's also a question should the point of regulation be staged in the government and i was left with a few oh should the should the regulator be the individual states and i would also just say that you go to rff.org slash climate survey 2013 all smushed together great any other questions or comments you've got this guy here right now on your site so anyway um and and i must say there were some of the questions i think that certainly lead to additional questions that we would all love for you to be looking at and um and once again i think that it is absolutely fascinating in terms of what you're finding and in terms of some of the consistency and i from looking at things from a congressional perspective it is i find it absolutely um uh so interesting in terms of looking at those maps and and the really high percentages across the country that i think are is really important for everybody to really be aware of and to to look at um the briefing today uh the video will be on ees i's website so please feel free to go back and look at that if you want to get more information and to pick up some of the things that have been presented by by dr cosnick and you've also got the rff um uh address so that you can get more and more information there as well as do you want to say the stanford um uh website address to where you had some of your other if i had it memorized i would be happy to share it with you but if you put my last name into google and put pprg you will find it okay that's that's what i wanted you to do okay great so thank you all very much for coming thank you very very much john and thank you very very much phil for being here