Poll: the Tea Party and climate change
Tea Party supporters in the US are significantly more skeptical about climate change than other voters. That is perhaps unsurprising conclusion of a new survey of American voters’ published this week by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
The study, ‘Politics and Global Warming: Democrats, Republicans, Independents and the Tea Party’, details how members of the four political camps respond to the issue of climate change; for the first time, the authors claim, separating Tea Party “members” form the three traditional political categories.
As the 2012 presidential election campaign begins to heat up, the conservative, anti-tax, anti-spending Tea Party movement looks likely to become an increasingly important player.
As Leo Hickman at the Guardian says, with Texas governor Rick Perry leading the polls to be the GOP candidate, “the whole world – not just the US – needs to start seriously preparing for the very real possibility that a staunch climate sceptic could, within 16 months, have his cowboy boots under the desk in the Oval Office.”
Headline findings from the Yale survey include:
“Identification with the Tea Party was then assessed using a separate question: “Do you consider yourself a member of the Tea Party movement or not?” Any respondent who answered “Yes” was assigned to the Tea Party category. Some self-identified Democrats, Independents, and Republicans also self-identified as members of the Tea Party and were therefore assigned to the Tea Party category. Thus the Democrat, Independent, and Republican categories include only those Democrats, Independents and Republicans who did not consider themselves members of the Tea Party movement.”
â?¢ Majorities of Democrats (78%), Independents (71%) and Republicans (53%) believe that global warming is happening. By contrast, only 34 percent of Tea Party members believe global warming is happening, while 53 percent say it is not happening.
â?¢ While 62 percent of Democrats say that global warming is caused mostly by human activities, most Tea Party members say it is either naturally caused (50%) or isn’t happening at all (21%).
â?¢ A majority of Democrats (55%) say that most scientists think global warming is happening, while majorities of Republicans (56%) and Tea Party members (69%) say that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening.
â?¢ Majorities of all four political groups support funding more research into renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power and providing tax rebates for people who purchase energy efficient vehicles or solar panels.
â?¢ Majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans support requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if it cost the average household an extra $100 a year. A majority of Tea Party members, however, oppose this policy, with 39 percent strongly opposed.
â?¢ Likewise, majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans support an international treaty to cut carbon dioxide emissions. A large majority of Tea Party members, however, oppose a treaty, with 55 percent strongly opposed.
â?¢ Majorities of all four parties support the expansion of offshore drilling for oil and natural gas off the U.S. coast, with 46 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Tea Party members strongly supportive.
â?¢ Majorities of all four groups support local regulations requiring new homes to be more energy efficient, the construction of bike paths on city streets, and increasing the availability of public transportation in their county.
â?¢ Tea Party members are far more likely to have heard about the “climategate” email controversy (45%) than Republicans (20%), Independents (27%), or Democrats (16%).
Values and politics
â?¢ Tea Party members are politically more conservative (78%) than Republicans (63%), Independents (27%), or Democrats (11%).
â?¢ Democrats have stronger egalitarian values than all other groups, with Tea Party members holding relatively anti-egalitarian views.
â?¢ Tea Party members have stronger individualistic values than all other groups, with strong anti-government attitudes.
So, a large majority of US voters believe climate change is real and almost half of them believe it’s caused by human activity.
As with all opinion polls there are some issues of interpretation.
The political categories used, because of the nature of the US two-party system, are problematic. The Tea Party is not a party, even by America’s standards where the two main parties are much more heterogeneous, broader, cross-class coalitions than parties in Europe and elsewhere. As seen from the political values breakdown in the study, all camps include those who consider themselves liberal and conservative (itself a problematic cleavage).
It is better understood as a social movement of the most conservative elements of US society, mostly based in the traditional Right of the GOP.
It would possibly be more revealing to see the results broken down by other, socio-economic and demographic factors in addition to political affiliation.
There is also a problem with the nature of opinion polls themselves. Bourdieu has argued that opinion polling makes a false assumption: that respondents have the same expertise as those who set and interpret the polls and that they base their answers on the same logic or experience as the experts.
It assumes all opinions have the same conviction behind them and are formed in the same individualized way. In reality opinions are formed through social group experience and interaction. Rather than individual views contributing to a general “public opinion”, individual ideas are actually derived from collective experience. Opinion polling doesn’t reflect this process. Which is why polls are often unreliable and contradictory.
Additionally, people’s individual opinions are also shaped by the media, much of which plays, at best, an ambivalent role in communicating climate and environmental science.
With the US economy in such a mess, it is possible that many people’s opinion’s are influenced as much by their economic circumstances or fears as by their understanding, or lack of, of climate science.