However, relatively few Americans engage in political actionsto limit global warming, such as signing petitions, volunteering, or contacting government officials. While majorities think that global warming should be a high government priority and support various climate policies, there is a discrepancy between the public’s attitudes about climate action and their behaviors or actions that support it. Research that offers insights into this “attitude-behavior gap” can identify opportunities to reduce the gap and thereby strengthen both public and political will. In this analysis, we investigate the attitude-behavior gap on political climate action using the six most recent waves of our Climate Change in the American Mindsurveys spanning 2021-2023 (n = 6,190 U.S. adults). We focus on four political actions: (1) signing a petition about global warming, either online or in person; (2) donating money to an organization working on global warming; (3) volunteering time to an organization working on global warming; and (4) writing letters, emailing, or phoning government officials about global warming. Respondents were asked about their willingness to engage in each of the behaviors and, separately, how many times they had done them over the prior 12 months. We compare the gap between willingness to engage versus self-reported behavior across all four actions, and explore differences between Americans who are willing and active and those who are willing but inactive.                             

RESULTS......Many Americans say they “definitely” or “probably” would engage in political climate action if someone they like and respect asked them to. These actions include signing a petition about global warming, either online or in person (51%), donating money to an organization working on global warming (31%), volunteering time to an organization working on global warming (29%), or contacting government officials about global warming (28%). However, fewer Americans report engaging in these behaviors at least “once” in the prior 12 months (signing a petition, 16%; donating money, 13%; volunteering, 6%; contacting government officials, 8%). We find that Americans who are the most willing to engage in each climate action are also the most likely to actually do so. For instance, among the people who say they “definitely” would donate money to an organization working on global warming, 56% report donating money at least “once” in the past 12 months, while 40% report “never” doing so. By contrast, among those who say they “probably” would donate money, only 23% report donating money at least “once” over the past 12 months, while most (71%) report “never” doing so. However, there are gaps even among the people who are most willing to act. For each of the other three actions, half or more Americans who say they “definitely” or “probably” would do the specific behavior in question say they have “never” done it over the past 12 months. To understand the factors that may contribute to the attitude-behavior gap on climate action, we focused on the 30% of Americans who say they “definitely would” engage in at least one of the four behaviors. Half of this group (i.e., 15% of Americans) report doing at least one of the behaviors “once” or more often in the past 12 months (“Definitely willing and active”), while the other half have not (“Definitely willing but inactive”). We compared these groups to all other Americans and explored differences in communication behaviors, perceptions of social norms, and collective efficacy beliefs.....and there's much more                https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/attitude-behavior-gap/?sfmc_id=6532a6e825b3640666d005d3&skey_id=7a51910293749398eff22b8bf795b4f5ed4d3ebff046adf7c9ebf33811a9eca8&utm_id=34846702&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NLTR-Email-List-Boiling%20Point&utm_term=Newsletter%20-%20Boiling%20Point

Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You. The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024. New Yorker 3-14-2024 Susan B. Glasser I'm sure you had better things to do on Saturday evening than watch Donald Trump rant for nearly two hours to an audience of cheering fans in Rome, Georgia. His speech was rambling, unhinged, vituperative, and oh-so-revealing. In his first rally since effectively clinching the Republican Presidential nomination, Trump made what amounted to his response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. It’s hard to imagine a better or more pointed contrast with the vision that, two days earlier, the President had laid out for America. And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.  Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”                                                                                                                Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was hismockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.                                                                                                                       And yet there was the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, writing this week in the Wall Street Journal that it was Biden who had “lowered himself with shortsighted and counterproductive blows” in his State of the Union speech. Trump’s entire campaign is a study in grotesque slander, but Rove did not even mention Trump’s Georgia rally while sanctimoniously tut-tutting about Biden. And I don’t mean to single out Rove; it was hard to find any right-leaning commentators who did otherwise. This many years into the Trump phenomenon, they’ve figured out that the best way to deal with Trump’s excesses is simply to pretend they do not exist. Hanging over both speeches was the increasingly burning question of performance, as the country is now forced to choose between two aging leaders aspiring to remain in the White House well into their eighties. Trump has arguably lowered the bar for Biden, with his constant insults aimed at the President’s age and capacity, and Biden managed to clear it, turning his State of the Union into an affirmation—for fretting Democratic partisans, at least—that he has the vigor and fight to keep going in the job, The general election has now begun, and Trump, as of this writing, is the favorite. In the next few months, the Biden campaign and its allies plan to spend close to a billion dollars attempting to persuade Americans not to make the historic mistake of electing Trump twice. My thought is a simpler and definitely cheaper one: watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away         https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/i-listened-to-trumps-rambling-unhinged-vituperative-georgia-rally-and-so-should-you?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_News_Politics_031424&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5e2bb2c62a077c05ea0a9723&cndid=59734366&hasha=284acdf0ea1b080a3966b6c47b8c38c0&hashb=a4ccd8de508e6a2ad52eb405268d00c48cb0e5a6&hashc=7a51910293749398eff22b8bf795b4f5ed4d3ebff046adf7c9ebf33811a9eca8&esrc=subscribe-page&utm_term=TNY_NewsPolitics

US President Donald Trump's position on climate change has been in the spotlight again, after he criticised "prophets of doom" at the World Economic Forum in Davos. At the event, which had sustainability as its main theme, and activist Greta Thunberg as its star guest, Mr Trump dismissed "alarmists" who wanted to "control every aspect of our lives" - while also expressing the US's support for an initiative to plant one trillion trees. If you judge the president based on his words alone, his views on climate change appear contradictory - and confusing. He has called climate change "mythical", "nonexistent", or "an expensive hoax" - but also subsequently described it as a "serious subject" that is "very important to me". Still - if you sift through his multitude of tweets and statements, a number of themes emerge. In 2009, Mr Trump actually signed a full-page advert in the New York Times, along with dozens of other business leaders, expressing support for legislation combating climate change. "If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet," the statement said.  But in the years that followed, he took an opposite approach on Twitter, with more than 120 posts questioning or making light of climate change. In 2012, he famously said climate change was "created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive" - something he later claimed was a joke. So what does Trump actually believe? Commentators have suggested that Mr Trump tends to conflate climate change with environmentalism more generally. "He doesn't really understand what climate change is about," says Professor Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at the University of Columbia. Click on......Trump's speech fact-checked.........  What is climate change?........Where we are in seven charts.......and there's more      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51213003

CANADA- Ideology blocks renewable energy growth in Alberta   Ian Urquhart | Opinion | February 7th 2024   Unbeknownst to many, Canada and  the petro-province of Alberta.   — not OPEC — is far and away the largest source of imported oil to the United States. Canada exports nearly 4.5 million barrels of oil per day to the U.S., the vast majority from the oilsands of Alberta. In 2022, Canada poured more than four times the oil into American markets than all the Persian Gulf states combined. So, at COP28, the Alberta premier’s praise wasn’t for upping the global renewables game. It was reserved for the conference’s lukewarm recognition that burning fossil fuels causes global warming. Scorn accompanied this praise from Premier Danielle Smith. Federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault tried to toughen the fossil fuel language. For this, Smith portrayed him as treacherous, as a saboteur driven by “his misguided personal obsessions.” Taken together, these factors did nothing to shake Smith’s conviction that spectacular tarsands production growth must continue.  In spite of the direction set by Smith, Alberta has enjoyed spectacular growth of a different kind: renewable electricity generation. While Smith celebrated more barrels of more GHG emissions-intensive Alberta crude pouring into American gas tanks, the province’s electricity industry continued to write a much more positive climate story. In just six years, from 2015 to 2021, the province cut GHG emissions from electricity generation by 50 per cent. In 2022, Rystad Energy predicted this dramatic trend would continue. Alberta would overtake Ontario as Canada’s largest producer of utility-scale wind and solar power by 2025.   This generating capacity approximates what a refurbished Pickering nuclear plant will produce in Ontario.  Smith doesn’t care about Alberta becoming a green electricity leader. Last August, she stunned the renewable electricity industry by ordering the Alberta Utilities Commission to impose a moratorium until the end of February 2024 on all new approvals for utility-scale renewable energy power plants. Thirteen projects, promising to add 2.1 gigawatts of renewable electricity-generating capacity to the grid, were caught in the moratorium’s net. Second, Smith ordered the independent regulator to study whether the renewables boom was taking up too much prime agricultural land and whether it was damaging the grid’s reliability. This report, possibly with recommendations for regulatory changes, will not be delivered before March 29. The renewables industry was deservedly shocked at these moves. Prior to that astonishing announcement, a generation’s worth of Conservative government electricity policies served today’s renewables industry quite well.          https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/02/05/opinion/ideology-renewable-energy-growth-alberta