Poll: Legislators, Arizonans at odds on climate change

• More than 70 percent of Ariz. residents believe government should limit greenhouse gases%2C poll says.
• Sierra Club gives most state legislators and Gov. Ducey poor grades on the environment.
• Drought makes it critical that state take action%2C a prominent UA scientist involved in study says.

Arizona's Legislature is at odds with its constituents over climate change, according to a poll released Monday.

A substantial majority of Arizona residents believe that humans are partially to blame for the world's rising temperature and that the government should do something about it, the study by the University of Arizona and Stanford University found.

But the Legislature this year eliminated some avenues for conservation and sent 10 resolutions to Congress that were deemed anti-environmental by the Sierra Club. One of those urged Congress to reject emissions reductions for power plants.

To the contrary, more than 70 percent of Arizona residents believe the government should limit greenhouse gases emitted by businesses, according to the university study.

UA and Stanford researchers launched the survey to understand public opinion in a region they call a hotspot for climate change. The Southwest is weathering a drought — with no end in sight — that threatens to weaken Colorado River flows and throw consumers into a shortage.

The region also is warming up faster than anywhere else in the country, said UA professor Jonathan Overpeck, one of the study's authors.

About three-quarters of respondents considered global warming a serious problem for Arizona and the globe and expect it will hurt future generations if nothing is done.

The study also found:

• 78 percent of Arizonans favor federal tax breaks to produce more water, wind and solar power electricity;

• 70 percent favor government mandates or tax breaks to encourage building cars that use less gasoline; and

• 55 percent said the government should require power plants to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions and 26 percent said the government should encourage lower emissions with tax breaks.

Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter, said the state Legislature has moved in the opposite direction.

The Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter gave all but one Republican in the Senate and House failing grades in its annual report card released this month. Most Democratic members received an A or A+.

Gov. Doug Ducey received a D. Ducey recently came under fire for saying he was skeptical that humans have caused climate change.

Spokesperson Daniel Scarpinato said Friday the governor's office would not comment until it could review a copy of the report, which was embargoed until Monday. The Republic obtained an early copy of the study.

Seventy-eight percent of survey respondents said they think humans have at least partly caused global warming.

"The legislators not only are not stepping up to do what is necessary, they are getting in the way," Bahr said.

The Sierra Club's report card cited a law prohibiting cities from requiring businesses to measure and report their energy consumption, as well as prohibiting plastic-bag bans.

Other new laws from this session assert the state's right to construct highways over public lands and create a study committee to examine processes needed to take ownership of some federal lands.

Resolutions sent to Congress by the Legislature this session included one asking congressional members to oppose the designation of a Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument, which would extend protection against mining or other development to more lands surrounding the canyon. Another asked the EPA not to tighten ozone quality standards.

State Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said major environmental regulations would cost rate-payers too much money and damage the economy.

Thirty percent of survey respondents said they thought U.S. government actions to reduce global warming would hurt the Arizona economy; 23 percent said Arizona government actions would hurt the state economy.

Kavanagh opposes the Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument because it would curtail a possible energy source: uranium mining.

He said he wasn't surprised the study's respondents said they would favor environmental regulations because they weren't given a specific price tag for such changes.

In order to guide policy, he said, a survey would have to ask precisely how much respondents were willing to pay for environmental changes.

Jon Krosnick, the Stanford University professor who designed the climate-change poll, said Kavanagh raised a valid point because a respondent's answer could change depending on the price tag.

The UA-Stanford study prefaced those questions by saying "each of these changes would increase the amount of money that you pay for the things you buy."

Krosnick conducted surveys nationwide that gauge Americans' willingness to pay to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. He found that, on average, American households are willing to pay $141 each year, which is in line with EPA estimates for the actual cost to launch reduction policies.

The EPA estimated in 2010 that the cost to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by about 85 percent by 2050 would cost between $79 to $146 per year, per household, in 2005 dollars. Account for inflation, and that's $110 to $204 today, according to Krosnick's research.

Krosnick said he would expect Arizona residents to give similar answers because their responses to the UA-Stanford study were similar to his polling on climate change opinion on a national scale.

For the Arizona poll, 803 randomly selected adult residents were called during November and December and asked dozens of questions about their views on climate change. The team used industry-standard weighting methods to obtain results representative of the state's demographics.

About 80 percent of the survey respondents said they were registered to vote and about 45 percent of them said they base their votes on the climate-change issue. When researchers broke out statistics solely for the registered voters, they found no major differences compared with the entire sample size.

Kavanagh said major environmental regulations would impact poor people and working families.

"We'll really be in a hot spot if half the population can't afford to have air-conditioning," he said.

Overpeck, the professor with UA's Institute of the Environment, called that argument a red herring. Arizona could become a leader in solar and wind energy, which would create revenue if exported, said Overpeck, who was part of a team that won a Nobel Prize in 2007.

The 15-year drought gripping the Southwest is more likely to become a megadrought as temperatures rise, Overpeck said. The Southwest has weathered long droughts, but record-high temperatures make this one different, as all of nature's forces are competing for moisture, he said.

Warmer weather brings a longer growing season, which means plants need more water. At the same time, the atmosphere seeks more moisture when the air is hot. Thus, the atmosphere will suck more moisture from plants, rivers and snow the hotter it gets.

That includes the Colorado River and the snow pack it depends on for watershed. With high temperatures, even if the Rockies accumulate decent snowfall, less and less water will make it to the river because the atmosphere will turn the snow to water vapor, Overpeck said.

Cue the Colorado River shortage that Western states anticipate within the next few years.

The Bureau of Reclamation expects the river to lose about 8.5 percent of its flow by the middle of the century. Overpeck said his research shows the river could lose up to about 20 percent by then.

Arizona will continue to feel the effects of climate change more intensely than other, cooler regions of the country. Residents will notice more record-high temperatures, a diminished water supply, increased wildfires and dust in the air, Overpeck said.

Seventy-five percent of the survey respondents said they expect the world's temperature to rise slowly over the next 100 years if nothing is done.

Bahr said there is a clear disconnect between Arizona residents and their legislators on climate change.

"We far too frequently make it to headlines with the late-night comedy clubs and a lot of that is deserved, from our leaders. But I do think that it's not fair to say that those leaders represent Arizona," she said. "We're supposed to have a representative government but we don't."