Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Majority Support Paris Climate Agreement

A Washington Post-ABC News poll found Americans, by a 56-31 margin, want the U.S. to stay in the pollution-cutting pact. Another poll found 61 percent, counter to Trump, want the EPA's powers strengthened or preserved.

Donald Trump prepares to take office this week with an overwhelming majority of Americans saying in a new poll they don’t want him to carry out his campaign pledge to “withdraw” the U.S. from the international Paris Climate Agreement.

Fifty-six percent oppose withdrawal from the agreement, which was endorsed by 195 nations in 2015 and aims to shift humanity’s production of energy sharply away from fossil fuels, according to the Washington Post-ABC News poll, published today.

Thirty-one percent back Trump’s promise to get the U.S. out of the pollution-cutting agreement.

After his election, Trump said he has “an open mind” on the Paris Climate Agreement.

A Reuters-Ipsos poll, also released today, found 61 percent of Americans want the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency either “strengthened or expanded” (39 percent) or to “remain the same” (22 percent).

That finding stands in stark contrast to Trump’s pledges during his campaign to cut back on environmental regulation and his nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, an arch-foe of the EPA and often aligned with Texas officials in anti-EPA lawsuits, as the EPA’s top official.

Trump has derided as “a hoax” the finding, endorsed by the vast majority of climate scientists, that climate change is mainly a manmade phenomenon. During his campaign, he promised to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, an EPA initiative that is the major element of the United States’ pledge under the Paris Climate Agreement for reducing emissions of climate-disrupting carbon dioxide. He also promised to revive the flagging U.S. coal industry, a major source of carbon pollution.

The Post-ABC poll’s finding of strong (56-31 percent) overall public opposition to withdrawing from the Paris accord percent was accompanied by these party-identification results:

Seventy-two percent of Democrats opposed withdrawing from the agreement, while 18 percent were in favor.

Republicans were nearly evenly split, supporting Trump’s withdrawal pledge by just 44-42 percent.

Fifty-six percent of independents opposed pulling out of the Paris pact and 33 percent were in favor.

Earth's 2016 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and NOAA. This makes 2016 the third year in a row to set a new record for global average surface temperatures. Read on at Science Daily

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