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The Monmouth University poll, conducted on April 18-22 shows a 10-point decline in Americans who says climate change is a “very serious” problem, falling from 56 percent in September 2021 to 46 percent in April.


The idea is that opinions have evolved because other situations changed in the background of this, from 2021.

Maybe so.

I agree a LOT of stuff was not normal in September 2020.  But the poll dates from 2021.

I will say Sept 2021 felt fairly normal even here in CA. By summer 2021 we had taken an overnight trip to San Diego and then a vacation to Seattle, so obviously we were willing to get on an airplane for non-work reasons. 

However when Omicron hit in Nov 2021, it threw everyone for a bit of a loop. We didn't all know it was going to be so mild when cases started spiking like crazy. 

But the entire point was that outside events might be coloring how people responded to the two polls over a two-year gap. Someone who is worried about outside things, such as inflation, two wars, the coming election, etc, might not be thinking as much about climate change and even if they rationally believe the problem is as serious as they believed two years ago, may not say "very serious" when a pollster asks them because they're preoccupied with other stuff right now. 

And as I mentioned in my response to badge, the current poll was listed as only 808 participants with a +/- 4.1% margin of accuracy, which is pretty wide. Especially since they tried to dive deeper into the sub-demographics of the polling group and track changes within young people vs older people, which probably has an even wider margin of accuracy as the sample sizes of the sub-demographics are smaller. 

It suggests an interesting possible trend, that's all.

The world’s largest direct air capture plant is set to open in Iceland this week, a potentially significant development in the fledgling carbon dioxide removal industry’s quest to lower global temperatures.

Designed by the pioneering Swiss startup Climeworks, the so-called Mammoth plant would use fans, filters, piping and geothermal energy to permanently remove up to 36,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. That’s nine times the annual removal capacity of Orca, another Climeworks facility that is currently the world’s largest operating direct air capture plant.

Despite the technological achievement, Mammoth would only be able to remove less than 1 percent of the annual emissions of a typical coal-fired power plant, according to EPA data. But it is poised to be at least the second commercial facility that could pull tens of thousands of tons of carbon from the air annually, with much larger plants in development.


“It’s a signal of growth for the carbon removal ecosystem,” Ben Rubin, executive director of the Carbon Business Council, said of Mammoth’s planned debut Wednesday. The trade association represents more than 100 carbon management startups, but Climeworks, one of the industry’s most established players, is not a member of the council.

The new plant is opening as the planet continues to blow past heat records, with 10 consecutive months through March setting all-time highs. To avoid catastrophic temperature increases, scientists have determined that the world needs to both slash heat-trapping emissions while also massively scaling up deployments of carbon dioxide removal facilities.

Buyers from the private and public sectors have stepped in to create demand for such plants. Microsoft on Tuesday inked a record-setting 3.3-million-metric-ton agreement with Stockholm Exergi, a Swedish firm that would remove carbon by burning biomass for energy while capturing and storing the emissions. Last month, Denmark’s energy agency awarded contracts to three firms that have promised to collectively remove over 1.1 million metric tons of carbon from the air.

Meanwhile in the U.S., a biomass burial facility run by Graphyte — likely the world’s largest operating carbon removal plant — is on pace to scrub 15,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere in 2024. The company plans to increase the removal capacity of that Pine Bluff, Arkansas, plant next year to 50,000 metric tons.