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" The party line is that the average citizen of today&amp;#039;s Internet Age, with his or her\u00A0goldfish attention span, is not equipped to deal with climate change. It&amp;#039;s too complex. The consequences of inaction are too far removed from the present. The cause and effect is not evidently clear. The crisis lacks the cattle-prod immediacy of a terrorist attack or a hurricane or a financial crash. X Internet Person spends his or her\u00A0days hopped up on cat gifs and reality TV until it&amp;#039;s too late to demand action to stop the existential crisis facing humanity. But recently, attitudes have shifted in a way that&amp;#039;s significant and encouraging. A Pew Research report in January found that 60 percent of Americans prioritized developing alternative energy over expanding fossil fuel production, while just 30 percent went the other way. Sixty-four percent favored stricter emissions restrictions on power plants. Fifty-six percent said that stricter policies are worth the economic cost, and 71 percent said the &amp;quot;country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.&amp;quot; While Americans seem to have accepted there&amp;#039;s a problem and it&amp;#039;s worth addressing, though, they&amp;#039;re still coming up short on how to do that. Because, as new research shows, they don&amp;#039;t really get how this whole thing is shaking out politically. Take this question, for instance:  Which of the two political parties do you think would support this proposal to power America with 50 percent clean energy by 2030 and 100 percent clean energy by 2050? Democrats 47 Republicans 10 Both 20 Neither 9 Don&amp;#039;t know 14  Taken together, as The Washington Post notes, that means more than half of respondents thought Republicans would support a clean energy initiative or didn&amp;#039;t know either way. Considering that the Republican presidential frontrunner says climate change is a hoax, the candidate in second place compared &amp;quot;global warming alarmists&amp;quot; to flat-earthers, only eight of 17 candidates would definitively say that climate change was real and man-made, and none suggested any plan of action, this is a real problem. That&amp;#039;s not to mention that Republicans in Congress have attempted to block nearly every Obama administration initiative to combat climate change, including the Paris accords. That less than half think Democrats are more likely to support action presents a real messaging problem for the party. (Or, perhaps more accurately, a messaging failure up to this point.) Some of it could be down to the generalized both-sides-are-the-same feeling that gave rise to\u00A0various outsider campaigns this cycle, but the onus still falls on the party actually planning on doing something to get the word out. That&amp;#039;s doubly true since, considering the overall state-of-play, there might be some votes in it for them. Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist and big-time Democratic donor who commissioned the research, is out to do just that. He&amp;#039;s pledged to spend at least $70 million promoting action on the issue this year. But a bigger question remains: How many people vote\u00A0on this\u00A0issue in the first place? [H/T: The Washington Post] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a43192/climate-change-voting/>