Figure 1. Responses to a 2019 YouGov survey question posed to 30,000 people in 28 countries. Thinking about the global environment…In general, which of the following statements, if any, best describes your view?”
While it is tempting to attribute the findings for China in Figure 1 as evidence of a form of climate denial by a large proportion of its population, the recent findings by Yang et al. (2021) would seem to suggest that a sincere misunderstanding of the nature of climate change might be a more important consideration. In other countries, other survey data are largely consistent with the data presented in Figure 1. For example, in a 2019 Irish Times/Iposos MRBI poll (Leahy, P., 2019), respondents were asked if they agreed with the following statement: “I don’t think climate change will be as bad as some say so I’m not that worried about it.” While 57% of the respondents implicitly endorsed the scientific consensus by disagreeing with the statement, 33% agreed. In this same poll, only 44% of the respondents agreed with the statement, “I am okay with the price of oil, gas, petrol and diesel increasing to help tackle climate change.” This is obviously not a majority and thus represents a challenge to implementing policies to reduce emissions.
A November 2018 survey of 1,202 adults by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the AP-NORC Center yields useful insights (EPIC, 2018). According to this survey, 57% of the respondents were willing to pay a $1 monthly fee to combat climate change. About 23% were willing to pay 40 USD per month. However, 43 percent were unwilling to pay anything, highlighting the challenge of doing anything significant to reduce emissions. Acceptance of the view that human activity contributes to climate change was a useful indicator of whether respondents were willing to pay to reduce emissions.
Suggestive of the possible political implications of the polling data, the UNFCCC secretariat (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) issued a report in September 2021 that indicated that the combined updated Paris Accord pledges fall short of what it will take to meet the goals of the Paris Accords. Specifically, even with the updated pledges, projected GHG emissions in 2030 are only about 0.5% lower than in 2010, which is far lower than what it would take to limit global warming to below two °C (UNFCCC Secretariat, 2021a). The COP26 meetings that were held in November of 2021 have done little to improve the prospects that the goals of the 2015 Paris Accords will be met. The United States did announce its good intentions, but climate deniers will most likely make those goals very difficult to achieve. The conference faced other challenges including objections to phasing out coal. While the conference made progress in the areas of carbon markets and finance, the fact remains that there is a significant emissions gap (UNFCCC Secretariat, 2021b).