A recent poll has found that Americans place a higher importance on energy policy than environmental policy when choosing between presidential candidates, with 77% rating energy policy either very important or important, and 67% giving these values to environmental policy.

This poll by Harris Interactive follows two polls which find that more Americans are concerned about Global Warming than in previous years, with roughly two-thirds of Americans believing that the earth has been getting warmer over the last few decades.

"This summer we experienced a heat wave that swept across the country, setting record high temperatures and contributing to the worst drought in 50 years," notes Natural Resources Defense Council Legal Director of Western Energy and Climate Projects Kristin Eberhard. 

"Millions of people without power were forced to sweat it out without air conditioning due to violent weather that, according to an increasing number of scientists, is the result of climate change."

"And with super-storm Sandy that packed a hurricane-sized punch to North Atlantic states this week, it’s difficult to ignore the evidence of climate change or the statistics that show more Americans it is occurring."

Environmental policy least influential

The Harris poll found that among policy areas tested, environmental policy was the least influential. 88% of survey respondents considered economic/budgetary policies very important or important, followed by tax policies at 86%, employment policies at 86% and health care policy at 85%.

The poll also found that 48% of Americans find nuclear power to be either harmful or very harmful to the environment, followed by "clean coal" at 34%. The presence of this phrasing is problematic, as clean coal is a coal industry marketing term and including it gives a bias to the poll.

Finally, the poll found that 32% of Americans consider the benefits of hydraulic fracking to extract natural gas as outweighing the risks, compared to 31% that felt the opposite and 38% that were not sure.

Americans waking up to Global Warming

The two polls that find that Americans are concerned about Global Warming were conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, and a collaboration between the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

The first survey found that 67% of U.S. residents believe that the earth's average temperature has been increasing over the last few decades, 4% more than 2011 and 10% more than in 2009. The second found that 70% of Americans believe that Global Warming is real.

The Yale-George Mason survey found that 54% attribute human activities to causing Global Warming, whereas 42% of those polled by Pew considered human activity to be mostly at fault.

The United States may be the only place in the developed world were a large portion of the population still has doubts about man-made climate change, which has been impacted by an enormous amount of money spent by fossil fuel industries to sway public opinion.

2012-11-02 | Courtesy: Harris Interactive, NRDC; Image: Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen/U.S. Air Force/New Jersey National Guard | solarserver.com © Heindl Server GmbH

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