Zach Frechette
Former Editor in Chief of GOOD
- April 27, 2009 • 6:10 pm PDT
- + responses
An interesting new study (.pdf) confirms a long-held suspicion of politicians and, more importantly, anyone working in the field of climate change awareness: Americans are only worried about global warming abstractly.As the chart at the left illustrates, the things people are most concerned with when it comes to global warming (climate change, as we prefer to say) are as far removed from the individual as possible-including "Future Generations of People" and "Plant and Animal Species." Practically speaking, this helps explain why we've been so slow to act on agressive climate change legislation, and why we're so easily distracted from the topic as soon as anything (like a collapsing economy) comes up.
Via FiveThirtyEight.
