Americans favor slightly higher bills to fight warming, poll says

WASHINGTON — Most Americans are willing to pay a little more each month to fight global warming — but only a tiny bit, according to a new poll. Still, environmental policy experts hail that as a hopeful sign.

Seventy-one percent want the federal government to do something about global warming, including 6 percent who think the government should act even though they are not sure that climate change is happening, according to a poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.

And those polled said they’d be willing to foot a little of that cost in higher electric bills.

If the cost of fighting climate change is only an additional $1 a month, 57 percent of Americans said they would support that. But as that fee goes up, support for it plummets. At $10 a month, 39 percent were in favor and 61 percent opposed. At $20 a month, the public is more than 2-to-1 against it. And only 1-in-5 would support $50 a month.

“I feel we need to make small sacrifices — and money is a small sacrifice — to make life better for future generations, “ said Sarah Griffin, a 63-year-old retired teacher in central Pennsylvania.

Greg Davis, a 27-year-old post-graduate student in Columbus, Ohio, agreed: “It’s far more important to protect the environment than to save money. I think that’s true for businesses as well as individuals.”

That a majority is willing to pay more is a new phenomenon, said Tom Dietz, professor of sociology and environmental science and policy at Michigan State University.

“While the amounts may seem small, the willingness to take action, even if there are some out-of-pocket costs, is encouraging,” Dietz said in an email.

Dana Fisher, director of the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland, said it’s noteworthy that a majority was “willing to pay at all,” and added that the levels of support for $10 a month and $20 a month are significant.

But so was the opposition to higher costs.

James Osadzinski, 52 of Rockford, Ill., said simply: “I have a set budget. I don’t have the money,” while for 26-year-old nurse Marina Shertzer of Pensacola, Fla., it doesn’t make sense because she doesn’t see climate change as a threat, but something cyclical and normal.

Of those polled, 77 percent said climate change is happening, 13 percent weren’t sure, and 10 percent said it wasn’t happening.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,096 adults was conducted Aug. 11-14, and the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.