Apr 15, 2020 - Energy & Environment
New polling shows an immense partisan divide on the threat of climate change, one that contrasts sharply with widespread agreement on the risks of spreading infectious disease.
What they found: Check out the chart above, showing some of the results from Pew Research Center polling conducted March 3–29.
- The pollsters asked about various threats and charted the partisan gap in the responses. The chart shows global climate change as having the widest gap in response, alongside the very narrow divide on infectious disease.
- The margin of error (MOE) for the party-specific findings is plus-or-minus 5.5% for Democrats and 5.6% for Republicans.
The intrigue: Another finding is that young people are less worried about a bunch of different threats than their older peers, with one big exception — climate change.
What they did: Pew asked three age groupings about cyberattacks, Russia, terrorism, infectious diseases and more.
- On climate change, 71% of people from age 18–29 say global climate change is a "major threat," compared to 62% of people age 30–49 and 54% of people over 50.
- It's the only topic among 10 polled where the younger group sees a higher risk level than the oldest, though the difference is close on a couple others.
Of note: They did not provide MOE data for the age-grouped questions.
Go deeper: America's incomplete coronavirus shutdown