Terry JonesVoters have little confidence that anything significant will emerge from this month’s global climate talks that begin in Brazil this week, but they are also split on what the best course forward would be, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
The latest I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from Oct. 28 to Oct. 31, asked 1,418 adults the following question: “How confident are you that the upcoming United Nations climate talks (COP30) in Brazil, with a goal of raising $1.3 trillion in climate finance, will succeed in curbing global warming?”
Overall, just 34% said they were either “very confident” (11%) or “somewhat confident” (23%), while 49% said they were “not very confident” (27%) and 22% said they were “not at all confident.” Another 18% said they weren’t sure.
Looking across responses by demographic groups, two stand out: Responses by age, and responses by political affiliation.
Start with age. Among those 18 to 24 years old, 46% were “confident,” while 38% were “not confident. For 25 to 44 years, the comparable numbers were nearly identical: 47% confident, 37% not confident. But for those 45 to 64, the confident share fell to 26% while the not confident jumped to 52%. For 65 and above, the confident number dips further to 20%, while the not confident surges to 65%.
Clearly, there’s a major generation gap on the climate change issue.
Political affiliation is another difference, but in a surprising way.
Democrats (41% confident, 43% not confident) aren’t really too far from Republicans (35% confident, 51% not confident) when it comes to confidence, but as the numbers show GOP members are less confident overall.
It’s not the Republicans who take the prize for least confident overall, but rather the independents who come in at 26% confident, to 54% not confident. That’s a 28 percentage-point confidence gap, compared to a 16 percentage-point deficit for the GOP and just 2 percentage points for the Dems.
Race is another point of departure. Among white poll respondents, just 29% said they were confident, while 54% said they weren’t. That’s a minus-25 point gap. But when blacks and Hispanics were asked, the response was flipped: 48% confident, 34% not confident, a plus-14 point difference.
Taken together, the whites and blacks/Hispanics are 39 points apart in their responses.
But now comes the question for those who are not confident: What should be done? Specifically, I&I/TIPP asked: “If you are not confident in the UN’s ability to curb global warming, which of the following approaches do you think is best for the future?”
Overall, 21% selected “continue using conventional carbon-based fuels and rely on technology to find better, cheaper replacements”; 25% picked “keep using alternative energy sources, even if they cost more and have limited effect on CO2 emissions”; just 14% opted for “force companies and consumers to use less fuel through taxes and higher prices to reduce global temperatures”; and 21% went for “none of the above — global population decline will naturally reduce the carbon footprint.”
So there really is no solid consensus in how to address a problem as diffuse and ill-defined as “climate change” or “global warming.”
That shouldn’t be a surprise. Some formerly ardent advocates for aggressive global action against climate change have left the fold and now suggest far less draconian measures.
In early November, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates stunned and disappointed many zealous global climate change activists by asserting in a long blog post that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
The New York Post called this a “stunning reversal” after “years of doomerism.” And indeed it was. So was the reversal on climate change by Ted Nordhaus, director of the Breakthrough Institute, who recently noted that “the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.”
Gates, whose immense wealth remains tied up in Microsoft, understands that the move to an artificial intelligence-based economy will require massive increase in electrical output. There’s no way that can happen in a world where, as in much of the European Union, nations are actually deindustrializing by dismantling nuclear power plants and forcing up prices of fossil fuels in order to display their climate-change virtue.
Now, some researchers are making a different case entirely: University of California scientists report because of a “fatal flaw” in the carbon cycle, “global warming could eventually swing in the opposite direction, tipping the planet into an ice age.”
Yes, the so-called “global consensus” has been crumbling of late, as countries struggle with dwindling energy supplies leading to rising prices.
Global freezing? Global warming? Which is it? In addition to rising energy costs, the mixed messages, ideological bias and lack of scientific rigor in the climate change field might be big reasons why voters in the I&I/TIPP Poll are cynical about the COP-30 global climate change talks.
Even as Americans see their energy costs rise due to “green” taxes, they see little change in the climate but lots of energy-related inflation. As the American Institute for Economic Research recently noted, “As AI data centers, clean-energy mandates, and regulations collide, the power grid is becoming a battlefield.”
The growing skepticism is also fueled by what many see as the hypocrisy of an estimated 50,000 global climate bureaucrats flying to Brazil for COP-30 in CO2-spewing planes (Brazil added 221 international flights to its schedule to accommodate the crowd) and, once there, will be ferried around by fleets of gasoline-powered vehicles to meetings, lavish dinners and self-congratulatory sessions.
Brazil’s government, eager to host the COP 30, even cut a wide swath of virgin Amazon rain forest to build a four-lane highway for the meeting, which takes place in out-of-the-way Belem.
Despite all this, global media give uncritical backing for the COP 30 climate-change message. The Associated Press, for instance, stated in its curtain-opener for the meeting that “Climate change is already escalating disasters that mean life or death for billions of people around the world, and delaying action will only worsen the problem.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that average Americans lack confidence in the U.N.’s climate change policies.
They know that the U.S., China and India, which account for more than half of the world’s GDP and the bulk of the world’s output of greenhouse gases, aren’t even taking part. That’s why U.S. voters expect little to nothing from COP 30, apart from more rhetoric and an enormous bureaucratic expense tab, as the I&I/TIPP Poll shows,
I&I/TIPP publishes timely, unique, and informative data each month on topics of public interest. TIPP’s reputation for polling excellence comes from being the most accurate pollster for the past six presidential elections.
Terry Jones is an editor of Issues & Insights. His four decades of journalism experience include serving as national issues editor, economics editor, and editorial page editor for Investor’s Business Daily.
I & I Editorial Board
In my opinion, this poll confirms the death of “expert opinions.”
“Expert opinions” assured us that the COVID “vax” was both “safe and effective.”
Dr. Fauci told us so. Many medical experts told us so. It proved to be “2 week effective” until the next variant came along, and not safe at all.
I’m old enough to remember global cooling, when the experts told us that this planet was going the way of the ice age. It was years later that global cooling meta-morphed itself into global warming.
When that proved to be more of a “the sky is falling” preachment global warming then turned into “climate change.”
What surprises me is that many of the young, whose parents were bamboozled into getting them the COVID vax-and suffered and died from it and will have lost their health from it and also suffered though lost graduations, masks tomfoolery, social distancing, and Zoom schooling, believe more than any age group that climate change is real and believe that “the experts” will resolve it-finally, this year.
This just goes to show you the propaganda-swill the public schools serve up is still catchy. It also implies how powerful the NEA is. It might also show that the young are just too tired to fight anymore.
The WW1 generation is often called “The Lost Generation”-due to all the young of all nations who died in that encapsulated inferno. I think, though, the young (who went through the horrors of COVID and the propaganda of climate change) are actually the “Lost Generation.”
COP 30 is nothing more than a tax money laundering operation. Anthropomorphic “climate change” is their justification. They are using our money to destroy Western Civilization by outlawing fossil fuels needed to power the related economies. “Climate change” is one of the many the excuses used by the WEF to roll out the “Great Reset”.
NO US TAX MONEY FOR THE UN FOR ANYTHING, PERIOD
Let us look at facts!!!!!~! Nothing that has ever been predicted has ever come to reality. The proof is always in the accountability and its results nothing more nothing less.
If they were honest, the climate alarmists would admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures — they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.
Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer. For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”
And there you have it, climate communism right up front.
The people are seeing through this whole Global Warming/Climate Change scam just a plot by the UN/CFR/Globalists for a Socialists One World Government
The opinions of the 18-24 year olds shown here are a compelling argument to raise our voting age back to at least 21, where it always had been before the Vietnam War, and maybe even higher, to have more mature and more responsible voters voting to strengthen and to protect the USA.
Please, everyone ask yourselves, “What did you know about all the important issues at such a young and inexperienced age?”