A poll conducted by the University of Maryland shows most Americans have either never heard of President Barack Obama’s climate plan or know little about the president’s overarching environmental regulations.
“The Clean Power Plan is not a household word in America just yet,” a survey from the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation showing Americans’ views of the climate plan.
The poll lends some credence to arguments suggesting that most Americans do not consider global warming a pressing issue, despite campaigns by environmentalists, such as California billionaire Tom Steyer, to foist concerns of global warming into the election’s spotlight.
Steyer’s political action committee, NextGen Climate, announced in April a massive $25 million campaign to encourage young people to support and vote for green energy candidates in the November 2016 election.
The billionaire environmentalist shoveled more than $8.5 million into unsuccessful attempts to get anti-fossil fuel candidates elected to office in 2014. The mega-donor green advocate has sunk more than $13 million so far this election year, according to OpenSecrets.org.
The poll found that nearly 70 percent, or 69 percent, of respondents were either unaware of Obama’s so-called Clean Power Plan, which, if implemented, would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 32 percent by 2030, or knew very little about the new climate regulations.
Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, and co-author of the poll, said he was not surprised the Environmental Protection Agency-administered climate rule hasn’t made any headway this political season.
“It’s sort of blandly titled,” Kull said. “I don’t think the reporting on it has been very extensive. It hasn’t gotten into the elections, and so I don’t find it so surprising.”
In a separate Wednesday survey of Texas voters, 85 percent of people surveyed had not “seen, read or heard of a federal policy called the Clean Power Plan.”
The Supreme Court decided in February not to allow the EPA to implement the president’s plan.
SCOTUS’ move gives the 29 states suing the federal government to stop the rule a small victory — North Dakota and West Virginia, for instance, say the plan will inevitably destroy their respective coal industries.
Only six percent of the respondents have heard a great deal about the plan, while 24 percent said they had heard some talk about Obama’s climate regulations. The findings were the same regardless the respondents’ political party affiliation.
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