The environment is a non-issue for most Americans.
A Gallup national survey this month asked Americans what they thought was the most important problem facing the country. Global warming did not make the list of responses.
At the height of media attention for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," Pew asked Americans to rank a list of issues in order of importance; global warming ranked low in 2006 and even lower in 2007. But when the question is open-ended, as it was in this Gallup poll, so few responded "global warming" that it was statistically insignificant.
The environment is a non-issue for most Americans, and fear of global warming won't motivate voters in a time when the declining economy is on everyone's minds. This recent Gallup poll comes as no surprise -- and it reinforces the idea that continuing to pit the environment against the economy is a losing battle. If we want to win action on global warming, we are going to have to appeal to the issues that people are already concerned about.
