The Daily Background

A recent Harris Interactive poll that has gotten literally zero coverage in the United States asked respondents in five European countries, plus the those here in United States whether they thought that corporations should be taxed in accordance to the amount of pollution they create.

The results are quite something. 82% of Americans think that the more a big corporation pollutes, the more it should be taxed. Writes the International Herald Tribune, a European affiliate of The New York Times:

“It is extremely significant that so many people want action taken on climate change and that they want costs attached to it,” said Kirsty Hamilton, a London-based international policy expert on climate change.

Respondents in all six countries also strongly agreed that politicians were not doing enough to address the challenge of global warming.

In the United States, which has angered Europeans by refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gases, only 14 percent of those surveyed said they felt politicians were doing enough to address global warming, while 75 percent said they did not.

The IHT also noted that upon being asked who was to blame for global warming, “respondents blamed themselves along with industrialists and politicians. Between 54 and 61 percent in the six countries said that industry, governments and people in general were all responsible.”

It’s pretty outstanding that only 19% of Americans don’t think that corporations that pollute a lot should be taxed accordingly. 81% of us want to tax corporations more if they pollute more? I guess we’re all tax-and-spend liberals now.

Although Harris does both telephone and online polls, this one was done online, probably due to the prohibitive cost of doing it internationally otherwise, but the sample size was normal (6,576 respondents spread across 6 countries is pretty good when normal sample sizes are just over 1,000 for single countries).

One thing that’s worth keeping in mind however, is that although it’s only now being reported on (abroad at least– I have yet to see a US report on it), the poll is that the poll was conducted earlier this month, around the same time the IPCC issued their most unequivocal report yet about global warming, and so it was in the news at the time.

Filed under: Environment Related, Z-TDB Blog