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When it comes to environmental issues, Americans are more concerned about immediate problems like contaminated soil, polluted drinking water, and even the loss of the rainforests than they are about global warming. From Gallup:
It would seem Americans’ environmental concerns follow a rather clear hierarchy based on both physical and temporal proximity to us. The top environmental issues are things that could at this very moment hurt individuals or their families, such as polluted drinking water.
Americans’ second biggest environmental concerns are things that we can see happening right now but don’t appear to put us in immediate danger, such as the loss of rainforests and animal extinction.
Global warming ranks the lowest most likely because we see it as something that will be a problem in the future.
This is human nature. Evolutionarily it makes most sense to be most concerned about problems that are immediate and nearby as opposed to problems that are far away in time or space. This is a dynamic that people in the environmental movement need to deal with when trying to win public support.
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Public apathy toward global warming shows is that if you have enough money and a dumb enough audience, you can literally buy your own facts.
Its no coincidence that the largest chunks of “dont care” in the “not at all” collumn Are global warming, extinction, and rain forrest destruction…the 3 most heavilly lobbied and politicized categories…it may be true that they are percived as remote and not immediate by those surveyed…its also likely that those surveyed have been polluted by the oligarchal, capitalist pig propaganda campagin, which has demonized those issues with the ol’ “elitist-librul-handwringing” paintbrush….
To see why market capitalism can’t and won’t solve these problems, see pages 4-7 in this (pdf).
In a time when you can log on to YouTube and see photos of people lighting their tap water on fire, the fact that local pollution is foremost on people’s minds is not unusual.
“. . .Global warming ranks the lowest most likely because we see it as something that will be a problem in the future. . .”
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In a perverse way I have to agree.
The “last chance” was Copenhagen in 2009, which failed. That was the wrong message, since we are still here. Or rather, if there is no future after 2009, perhaps an end of time party might as well be in order while we can still briefly enjoy it.
Instead, perhaps the message should be about the rapidly escalating costs of mitigation as the can gets kicked down the road. It’s not an end date tomorrow, but a much bigger bill going forward along with a deteriorating standard of living for our kids.
The American public is a collective of dunces. Of course they are encouraged to be idiots by corrupt politicians and a complicit corporate media.
No form of capitalism, whether it be market, regulated, deregulated or crony can solve any of America’s problems yet the public slavisly worships “free market capitalism.” Capitalism and democracy are synonymous in their small minds. They are worshiping a system that will ultimately destroy them and their families.
A couple of points.
First, it isn’t the long-term quality of global warming that is at odds with the taken-for-granted, habitual consciousness (or what Husserl called the natural attitude). Rather, (1) the conscious effort to deny the reality of global warming probably accounts for the majority of the “a little” and “not at all responses” and (2) the proposed solutions to global warming are utterly systemic and require the end of the automobile as default transit system the end of the suburbs and single unit housing. That the solution to the problem of global warming requires revolution in the American way of life means that people are strongly predisposed to deny global warming and thus the results in the survey.
Second, Each global greenhouse gas has independent other strongly negative environmental effects. Our team hasn’t done a good enough job linking climate change (which is a form of pollution) with other forms of pollution..
Third, No need to invoke the arm-chair speculation of evolutionary psych. Unsexy and un-cool mainstream conventional Social-Psych and symbolic interactionism provides more proximate and parsimonious explanation of attitudes about environmental problems than the “just-so” ideology and evidenceless claims of evolutionary psych. Human nature is far more plastic (and neutral) than the evolutionary psych crowd with their unmediated model of natural selection directly shaping the contents of human consciousness.