Wake Up The Candidates: Americans Are Scared Of Global Warming

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Hey, it’s working. The long slumber is coming to an end. A Yale University survey found 40 percent of Americans will only vote for a presidential candidate who has a strong sense of urgency on the global warming problem.

“One of the most surprising findings was the growing sense of urgency,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and the study’s principal investigator. “Nearly half of Americans now believe that global warming is either already having dangerous impacts on people around the world or will in the next 10 years—a 20-percentage-point increase since 2004. These results indicate a sea change in public opinion.”

The survey’s findings reveals that 62% of Americans believe life on earth will continue without major disruptions only if society takes immediate and drastic action to reduce global warming; 68% support a new international treaty requiring the U.S. to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide 90% by 2050; 85% support forcing automakers to increase the fuel efficiency of cars, trucks and SUVs to 35 miles per gallon, even if it meant a new car would cost up to $500 more; 82% support requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if it cost the average household an extra $100 a year; 50% say they are personally worried—15 percent say a great deal—about global warming.

We heard about Leiserowitz’s 2004 survey in MoJo’s The Thirteenth Tipping Point. Well, it seems to be tipping, at last. Somebody set the alarm and wake up Washington.—Julia Whitty is Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent. You can read from her new book, “The Fragile Edge,” and other writings, here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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