Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Are the children our future on climate change?


The phrase, "the children are our future," always sounds like a little bit of a cop-out to me.  Whenever adults have a problem that they're unwilling or unable to solve, they toss it off to the next generation with this handy phrase.  Well, a new study, Do Millennials See Climate Change as More Than Just a Meme?, states that tossing climate change solutions off to the next generation is a pretty bad plan.    By repeating research conducted about 10 years ago, researchers demonstrate these four important findings about millennials' attitudes toward climate change:
  • "Overall, Millennials demonstrate similar or less engagement on global warming than older generations. 
  • Millennials are less likely to discuss global warming with their friends and family than the older generations (p. 4) 
  • Belief in global warming (p. 8), its importance (p. 5), and perceived efficacy in addressing the problem (p. 12) are no greater among Millennials than any other generation
  • Liberal Millennials are less likely than liberals of other generations to have thought a lot about global warming before taking the survey (p. 15) and less likely to believe that people in the U.S. are being harmed now by global warming (p. 17)"
(Kuppa, S. (2018). Do Millennials See Climate Change as More Than Just a Meme?. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University, Energy Policy and Climate Program)







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