Climate quote of the day (and analysis)

"Can anyone honestly say that the head of an American household would not spend a dollar a day to safeguard the well being of his or her children?" Jackson asked the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Well, geezus, if you phrase it that way only a heartless son-of-a-gun would be against it ...

But the committee's top Republican Senator, James Inhofe, pointed to a July 1 poll by Rasmussen indicating that "56 percent of Americans are not willing to pay anything to fight global warming."

Oh.

So I used the google to try to find the Rasmussen poll and found this "Right-wing hack Rasmussen ...":

I've always been of the opinion that if there is an agency in charge of investigating fishy polling practices, said agency should delve into Rasmussen's weird, outlier polls that always seem to tell conservatives what they want to hear.

Now I don't know what to think!

So I pulled out my survey methods book, critically examined the Rasmussen survey questions and concluded that they aren't quite up to standards. In other words you couldn't use these to estimate the benefits of climate change mitigation for policy analysis.

But, if you did, you'd find that average annual willingness-to-pay is about $101 using the lower bound Turnbull (interpretation: while the median willingness-to-pay is less than $1, the lower bound mean is right about $100).

Further, studies that use more appropriate questions (more rigorous policy scenarios, explaining the benefits and costs, etc) might find that willingness-to-pay is, at least, a dollar a day. Here is one example: Berrens et al, JEEM, 2003.

Source: A dollar a day could keep climate change away.

Hat tip: CF