President Obama is in Paris today urging the government leaders gathered at the COP21 conference to take action to stop climate change.
But a new ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests that back home in the US, Americans are becoming less concerned about the warming planet. They're also becoming far less interested in government intervention. While 63 percent of Americans polled say climate change is a serious problem, that's a 6 point drop from the same poll conducted just a year-and-a-half ago. Meanwhile, 36 percent of people say climate change is not a serious problem at all, a 7 point increase from the previous poll.
Most striking, however, is the finding that just 47 percent of people polled say that government should be doing more to combat climate change. During the Bush administration, that figure hovered around 70 percent.
This is hardly type of progress Obama has been pushing for as he works to make climate action a key issue of his second term. Earlier this year, Obama presented his Clean Power Plan to drastically reduce carbon emissions by 2030. And in September, he made history as the first US President to travel to the Arctic, a trip that was meant to showcase the already obvious impact climate change has had in the region.
And yet, despite—or perhaps, because of—this unprecedented attention on the issue, climate change deniers are only becoming more convinced of their views, a symptom, no doubt, of the country's increasingly polarized politics. While eight out of ten Democrats polled view climate change as a serious problem, only 43 percent of Republicans say the same. And just 22 percent of Republicans believe government should do more to keep climate change under control.
Numbers like this could have important implications for the 2016 election season. On the Republican side, it's a signal that the party rhetoric about climate change as an issue the private sector needs to solve is working. For Democratic candidates, who have been far more vocal about government intervention, it could force the issue into the background as they attempt to win over moderates.
