Undecided Voters & Global Warming

October 20, 2008

One of the great mysteries in America these days are the Undecided Voters (UVs). We Decided Voters wonder: Who are these UVs and what makes them tick? What on Earth will make them decide? Are they sentient beings and is there any hope we will ever find a way to communicate with them?

Researchers at Yale University and George Mason University think they have some answers. In their Oct. 14 national survey of 2,189 registered voters they found that two out of three of the undecided voters (who were 9 percent of the total) say that a presidential candidate's position on global warming will influence their vote.

Excuse me? Don't the candidates already have positions on global warming? In fact, don't they kind of agree on it? How is that going to help a UV? But perhaps my fever of decidedness has fogged my glasses. Let's just read directly from the Yale press release:      

   While few undecided voters rated global warming as the single most important issue that will determine their vote, 62 percent of undecided voters, 64 percent of voters leaning toward McCain and 75 percent of voters leaning toward Obama indicated that global warming is one of several important issues that will influence their vote. "Even in the midst of the nation's financial turmoil, global warming remains an important issue for large numbers of voters," said Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University.

Okay. This is good. Maybe. My big worry has been that the economy would bury the overarching, but more difficult environmental issues facing humanity. So this gives me hope. Not much hope, mind you, but a dribble of optimism that the other issues which our beloved UVs rate as highly as global warming are not such things as UFO conspiracies and the national decline in palm readers. Alas, it still may not help...

          In the race to earn undecided voters' trust on the issue of global warming, the two candidates are in a dead heat. Fifty percent of undecided voters trust John McCain as a source of information about global warming and 51 percent trust Barack Obama. "In the closing days of this election, each of these candidates still has an opportunity to make their best case on global warming to these critical voters," said Edward Maibach of George Mason University.

...and neither candidate is likely to, IMHO, since neither one has anything new or strikingly different to say about it. But, really, it doesn't matter. Even if Obama or McCain were to say something significant, the same survey revealed that many UVs won't believe them....

         Surprisingly, however, 45 percent of McCain supporters distrust John McCain as a source of information about global warming, while only 15 percent of Obama supporters distrust their candidate on the issue.

So where does that leave an especially distrusting UV? Not only are you being pecked to death by competing issues, but you don't trust the candidates. You are alone, alone, alone in a vast wilderness of decisive people you don't understand. Where is a good palm reader when you need one?

Comments

[Atomictoad]

I have had a very strong reluctance to support either party due to the way they are trying to handle global climate change. My home is the desert and is now being referred to as "the Saudi Arabia of Sun". Just about every acre of public land has been claimed by a green energy company for a potential solar farm. In the mountains, it is wind mills. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid has used the word "wasteland" to describe out desert. This of course, is not true. Deserts have as much, if not more biodiversity than northern forests, but cultural bias tells people to write it off. The point is, it is not green to scrape up hundreds of square miles of public lands so we can purchase our energy from a power company. Plus, power lines will be run through some of our most scenic public lands, which include wilderness areas, national wildlife refuges and, yes, national parks. The Bush people ran energy corridors through some national park lands in the Mojave Desert and the democrats said little. Not to mention all the private residence located in the way of these transmission lines. You know there is much talk of eminent domain. Plus desert plants and soils down to the fungi level store carbon. CAM plants and Mycorhizzae fungus in desert ecosystems hold carbon. Scraping it up will release the carbon and we have added to the greenhouse effect.

How about using rooftops, solar canopies above parking lots, disturbed lands? There are so many ways to minimize the amount of land that is disturbed, but none of the so called environmentalists are talking about this. Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club along with McCain and Obama have all decided that my home needs to be sacrificed to save the rest of the planet. How noble of them! Robert Kennedy is heavily invested into Bright Source Solar Corporation, giving him a direct financial interest in an approved application for the horrible environmentally disastrous 7,000 acre Ivanpah thermal solar project in Ivanpah Valley, California which is prime desert tortoise habitat.

How did this new environmental trend become so much the opposite of green? I guess there's a lot of money in it...

Good website:http://www.allianceforresponsibleenergypolicy.com/

[Larry O'Hanlon]

This is something we need to make a lot more of a stink about in the near future. It's just crazy to destroy the desert wildlands when there are thousands of square miles of empty roofs all over cities that are already wired to the grid and ready for use. I have to agree with toad that part of the problem is the cultural numbness to deserts. These are not wastelands. They should not be sacrificed -- especially when there are better ways to gather solar energy.

[trees]

The thing that really irritates me is the fact that both candidates still blindly appeal to "clean coal technology" when in actuality there is no such thing. Beyond sacrificing miles of homes for animals, bugs, and even people who contribute to our delicate ecosystem (until it grows back ten or so years later), it still releases sulfuric acid and other poisonous chemicals to the air, among other reprocussions. I'm disappointed that they are not more supportive of just plan clean technology. There is plenty of information out there to take advantage of the wild wind here in Oklahoma (but few wind farms), plenty of roofs to put solar panels on, rivers and oceans to take advantage of their natural power, etc.

[Larry O'Hanlon]

I agree Trees. That "clean coal" BS has been bugging me too. It just goes to show you how powerful the coal lobby is. Every time Obama mentions it I have to sigh and hope he gets some one like Al Gore to advise him (i.e., some one who actually talks to independent scientists about these things).

[Oscar]

I wish americans would stop castigating themselves for the environment when a lot more is done by burning Amazonia in Brazil and forests in Borneo and other industrialized countries,add all together and they surpasses USA environmental impact.I know we are No. 1 and so we are to blame for everything and the kitchen sink but is about time to look at China and India and Brazil and the hell other places where industrial and other types of polution are being created.Australia is killing the Barrier Reef, but who cares?.It is Australia and who cares about Australia not even australians anyway.And so it is over the world but we castigate ourselves while the rest of the world gets away with murder.We may polute,but we also do more than everybody else to clean our act.Get over it,Mr. Gore.

[Atomictoad]

Let's leave the rivers flow free. Our energy needs can be cut down if we conserve more. Swamp coolers can replace air conditioners. I had a car in the 1980's that got 49 miles per gallon. This was long before hybrid technology. Appliances can be made to use half the enrgy needed. I do not think there is an energy crisis. It is more of an obesity/over use crisis. We don't need greedy people like T-Boone Pickens telling us to invest in his new energy empire. We can do it with out him. He has enough billions already...

[Glenn]

1. There is no correlation between graphs of temperature and CO2. CO2 has gone from about 300 ppm to 375 ppm in the 20th Century. An increase of 25%. Yet our daily temperatures have not changed. I an 69 years old and can see no significant change from my childhood. Last winter was as cold and severe as that of 1947-48, this summer was the coldest and wettest on record. Show me a graph that correlates the two.
2. Show me a computer program, given the data up to 1950, that predicts the weather from 1950 to the present.
3. Lorenz proved back in the 1950's that weather is un predictable. See James Gleick's book Chaos for details of this.
4. Global warming ranks with communism and Freudian analysis.
All dreamed up as a theory desparately in search of any kind of supportive data, correct, incorrect or fantastic. Lovelock talks of boiling oceans in a century. Kyoto has taken on the nature of some kind of Messiah.
Compare GW to the depletion of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons. The whole chemical process was clearly understood and all scientists agreed on the situation and unanimously went for their abolition. Global warming is a spseudoscientific theory, like acid rain.

[Larry O'Hanlon]

Poor Glenn: He can neither spell pseudo-scientific nor grasp its meaning.