WaPo: Growing Number of Americans See Warming as Leading Threat

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902527.html

Growing Number of Americans See Warming as Leading Threat
Most Want U.S. to Act, but There Is No Consensus on How

By Juliet Eilperin and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 20, 2007; Page A20

A third of Americans say global warming ranks as the world's single largest environmental problem, double the number who gave it top ranking last year, a nationwide poll shows.

In the new poll, conducted jointly by The Washington Post, ABC News and Stanford University, most of those surveyed said that climate change is real and that they want the federal government to do more about it. But the survey also shows there is little public agreement about the policies the United States should adopt to address it.

The findings come weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government has the right to regulate carbon dioxide, the largest contributor to human-caused warming. Congress is pressing to enact limits on all greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change, but it remains unclear how soon the House or the Senate could pass such legislation.

According to the poll, seven in 10 Americans want more federal action on global warming, and about half of those surveyed think the government should do "much more" than it is doing now.

By a 40-point margin, the public trusts congressional Democrats more than it trusts President Bush to handle global warming. More than nine in 10 Democrats in the poll said they trusted their party's leaders over Bush on the issue, as did 54 percent of independents and one in five Republicans.

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