Australian environmental polling consistently finds young people to be greener than old people, but according to an article in Monday’s Education Age Australian 15 year olds deserve a place on the NIMBY list.

Drawing on results from the 2006 OECD PISA survey, the article says that

only one in 10 Australian teens strongly support the regulation of factory emissions that could lead to product price rises, less than a quarter strongly supported emission checks on vehicles as a condition of use and one in seven strongly supported cutting back on unnecessary use of electrical appliances.

But on looking at the OECD report, the key word in that paragraph is ‘strongly’. It lists agree or strongly agree in a single figure, and on that Australian 15 year olds start to look less NIMBYish. The one in ten wanting regulation of factory emissions increases to five in 10 when those who just agree, rather than strongly agree, are included (this is less than the 69% OECD average, but the question wording is vague in not specifying what the emissions are). Nine in ten want emissions checks on vehicles, and six in 10 claim to be disturbed by the waste of electricity in applicances.

Eight in 10 favour electricity being being produced from renewable sources, even if this increases the price.
Continue reading “Australian teens not so NIMBY as The Age suggests” →

The polls on whether the financial crisis means that the ETS should be delayed constistently find a significant minority in favour. Two polls last month came up with 22% and 30% in favour of a delay. A Galaxy poll in today’s News Ltd tabloids puts the constituency for postponing at 25%.

However, the polls are contradicting each other on what the rest of the voters want. The first of the polls, from the Climate Institute, was too poorly presented to know what people thought. The Newspoll found 30% for a delay and 21% against an ETS at all, creating a slim majority of 51% opposed to a 2010 start date. But in the Galaxy poll there was no option given for rejecting an ETS, and instead 21% went for ‘introduce sooner’, which when combined with the 41% preferring the orignal timetable creates 62% support for 2010 or earlier implementation.

These results appear highly sensitive to the options being offered, so it’s not clear what the voters really want. Given their confessed ignorance on this issue, that’s perhaps not surprising.

Today’s Newpoll finds opinion on climate change action rather more affected by the financial crisis than the Climate Institute’s poll last week suggested.

While the Climate Institute found 22% agreeing that the financial crisis meant that action on climate change should be delayed, Newspoll found 30% supporting a delay. On top of that 21% of respondents were against a carbon pollution reduction scheme, nearly double the 11% opposition Newspoll found in response to a differently-worded question back in July. Wtith 5% uncommitted, if Newspoll is right only a minority – 44% – now supports the government’s scheme of a 2010 implementation of an ETS.

The poor presentation of the Climate Change Institute results makes it difficult to fully analyse the reasons for the very different conclusions the polls reach. But Newspoll’s question on delay pointed out that energy ‘may become more expensive’, a better question in balancing the competing considerations, and so more likely to approximate the ‘real world’ reactions to an ETS.

Not for the first time, inadequate presentation of a Climate Institute survey makes it hard to interpret the results.

Their latest online Auspoll survey asks the important question of whether people believe that ‘turmoil in financial markets’ means that government ‘should delay action on climate change’. The results are agree 22%, disagree 36%, and ‘no real opinion’ 16%. What the other 26% thought is not explained, though it may be that they have dropped the ‘strongly agree’ from the table. If that’s the case, 62% disagree.

The 22% matches the approximately one in five in other polling who favour a strategic approach to climate change abatement which is dependent on general conditions.

As media reports of today’s release of the annual Lowy Institute opinion survey noted, the masses may want climate change stopped as a general principle, but there isn’t much that they are prepared to personally do about it. They may not deny the reality of climate change, but they do deny any seriously responsibility for it.

When asked how much they were prepared to pay extra on their monthly electricity bill to help solve climate change, a fifth of Lowy’s respondents wouldn’t pay anything, 32% would pay $10 or less, 20% would pay $11 to $20, and just 19% would pay $21 or more. Those refusing to pay anything is down on the 28% in marginal seats last November according to a Climate Institute survey, but perhaps if the mortgage-belt nature of many marginals were taken into account there would be no real difference between the polls.

Perhaps the more interesting aspect of Lowy’s survey was that climate change had slipped as a foreign policy goal from 75% rating it as very important last year to 66% this year, though global warming as a critical threat to Australia’s interests is more stable at 66% also, down only 2% on the year.

Economic issues seem to be driving this change, with the biggest increase in foreign policy goals being ‘strengthening the Australian economy’, up from 60% to 70%. But given that respondents could if they wanted class every issue as ‘very important’ the drop in ‘tackling climate change’ seems significant.

Perhaps the public is getting bored of the daily prediction of disaster. I may have missed later ads in the government’s climate change advertising campaign (I spent most of the month in Japan), but what I saw before I left was just repeating the same old messages any non-comatose person has already heard hundreds of times before. Something different has to be said to regain attention, such as how much all this is really going to cost Australian consumers.

We still don’t have any polling on what global impact the Australian public believes our proposed emissions trading scheme would have, but this morning’s Newspoll does explore opinion on the strategic issue of whether Australia should act alone or wait for other countries.

While a clear majority – 61% – say we should act even if other countries do not, 36% either think we should wait or don’t believe we should have an emissions training scheme at all.

This fits a common pattern in polling on this subject of the massive majorities believing in climate change (at least mid-80s) shrinking when it comes to any specific action.

The medium and long-term politics of climate change policy continue to remain hard to predict.