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America's Concern About the Environment Is at a Twenty-Year Low, Not that America's Concern Makes Much of a Difference

The crappy economy forced Americans to stop caring about the environment, but we have since done little about either.

Apparently, American concern about the environment is at a 20-year low. This once-robust concern, detailed in opinion polls, was evidently displaced by newer and more immediate concerns over the global financial crisis. There's no time to worry about "the environment," everyone knows, when "the economy" is in the crapper. But we can be assured of one thing; worry as we Americans may about this or that crisis, we have done nothing at all to address any of them.

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Here is Reuters detailing the latest poll:

Public concern about environmental issues hit a 20-year low last year, a poll showed, as worries about the aftermath of the global financial crisis overshadowed growing evidence of man-made climate change …

On average, 49 percent of people surveyed said climate change was a "very serious" concern and 50 percent said the same for biodiversity loss. The highest level of concern was about fresh water shortages, with 58 percent of people rating this as a "very serious" concern.

It is good to see that 58% percent of people were at least concerned about having enough fresh water to drink, for this reveals they are looking ahead. They probably live somewhere like Las Vegas or Phoenix, where there will be no fresh water in another 20 years, and where people will be forced to move out of the dry and crumbling ghost sprawl-towns in droves to places that are not wracked by constant climate change-powered droughts, places that weren't already super-arid and terrible places to build cities to begin with.

It is also good to see that nearly half of America feels that climate change is a very serious problem, because it demonstrates that nearly half of America is not full of idiots.

"Scientists report that evidence of environmental damage is stronger than ever but our data shows that economic crisis and a lack of political leadership mean that the public are starting to tune out," Doug Miller, chairman of GlobeScan, told Reuters. "Those who care about mobilizing public opinion on the environment need to find new messages in order to reinvigorate a stalled debate."

But most of all, I have never understood why we must treat "concern" as a zero sum game, both "we" as poll-respondants, and "we" the punditocracy and trend explicators. I, for example, found climate change to be a "very serious" concern before the crash of 2008. I was also concerned about "the environment." After 2008, I was also concerned about "the economy." But I did not stop caring about "the environment" thereafter. As a human, I find I am entirely capable of being concerned about two separate and well-documented "very serious" threats to my well-being.

Even if I were not capable of entertaining two separate concerns, it would not change the fact that neither global warming nor the injustices regularly perpetrated by Wall Street have been addressed in any significant way since we Americans have become concerned with either of them. No fraud-peddling, global economy-destroying bankers have been arrested, no legislation to reduce carbon emissions has been passed, no meaningful banking sector reforms have been instated, and no international climate treaties have been signed.

American concern, as it is measured by opinion polls, has resulted in extraordinarily few changes to American society, even if we tell pollsters that we are "very seriously" concerned indeed.