Just In Time For 'Earth Hour': Americans Care Less Than Ever About Globaloney

March 26th, 2009 3:57 PM

SmokestacksGallup has issued two polls in the past couple of weeks showing that the reality is breaking through the non-stop, years-long propaganda blitz known properly known as the Great Global Warming Hoax (characterized by me since January 2007 as globaloney):

  • On March 11, the pollster told us that "Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated." That's up from 30% three years ago.
  • On March 19, we were informed that "For the first time in Gallup's 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent." And it's a 51-42 rout, a 27-point swing from 55-37 the other way just two years ago. Since globaloney is the main environmental justification for slowing (really stopping) economy growth, this result is a good proxy for increased rejection of the enviro kool-aid.

Now there's a third. Yesterday, Gallup told us that not only is globaloney increasing not believed and not more important than economic growth, it's the least important environmental issue we face. You have to look past its "clever" title and subhead to get to what should be the lede, but the glum news for Saturday's Earth Hour participants is there (bolds after title are mine):

Water Pollution Americans’ Top Green Concern
Worry about environmental problems has edged up since 2004

The folks behind World Water Day -- a largely U.N.-sponsored effort to focus attention on freshwater resource management, observed this past Sunday -- may be on to something. Pollution of drinking water is Americans' No. 1 environmental concern, with 59% saying they worry "a great deal" about the issue. That exceeds the 45% worried about air pollution, the 42% worried about the loss of tropical rain forests, and lower levels worried about extinction of species and global warming.

Extinction of plant and animal species and global warming are of great concern to just over a third of Americans. However, since more Americans express little to no worry about global warming than say this about extinction, global warming is clearly the environmental issue of least concern to them. In fact, global warming is the only issue for which more Americans say they have little to no concern than say they have a great deal of concern.

Media attention has been, as one would expect, virtually nil. A New York Times advanced search on "Gallup environment" (not in quotes) shows no primary results, only references to Times blogs on the right of the results. A Google News search on "Gallup warming" (again not in quotes) for March 25-26 comes back with four results. Only two besides the Gallup poll itself were directly relevant.

Americans' growing resistance to threatened globaloney mandates and Europeans' flat-out refusal to go along with them (a possible topic for another post, if it can be kept shorter than a book; the tide of European anti-globaloney news is almost overwhelming) continue to be among the most under-reported stories of the year.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.