This election season is full of head-fakes, muddle, and flip-floppery.\u00a0 None more so than the heated rhetoric that surrounds environmental regulations.<\/p>\n
As we reported this week, the Republican Party has moved away from environmental policies<\/a>, even abandoning strategies for cleaning up pollution that conservatives used to champion.<\/p>\n The Chamber of Commerce and other conservative groups have argued that regulation is a major roadblock preventing a new wave of prosperity and innovation.<\/p>\n If you listen to most media accounts, you would think that Americans are sick and tired of burdensome environmental rules.<\/p>\n This rhetoric often swirls here in the North Country, with some groups and local government leaders calling for the Adirondack Park Agency to be eliminated, or its regulatory powers significantly weakened.<\/p>\n I describe all this as political head-fakery because there’s a lot of evidence that Americans are pretty eager and devoted environmentalists — and they want their government to reflect those values.<\/p>\n Here are the facts:<\/p>\n According to a study released this week by the Washington Post and Kaiser-Harvard Foundation<\/a>, 84% of Americans are comfortable with the amount of environmental regulation we have now — or want more regulation.<\/p>\n Surprising right?\u00a0 But this will surprise you even more:\u00a0 56% of tea party activists, a clear majority, feel the same way.<\/p>\n That’s right:\u00a0 Even most tea partiers want strict environmental regulations and they want the government to enforce them.<\/p>\n This one data point alone might not be meaningful, but last month the widely respected Pew survey<\/a> found much the same thing.<\/p>\n By a wide margin, Americans favor tougher laws and regulations to protect the environment.\u00a0 Eight-in-ten (81%) favor greater protections, while just 14% oppose them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here again a surprising statistic:\u00a0 A whopping 73% of Republicans favor stronger environmental laws.<\/p>\n But maybe those numbers hide some uncomfortable truths about our willingness to make sacrifices in order to make environmental gains?<\/p>\n