Public Yawns At Climate Change - Environment and Energy

This does look bleak for enviro-types, but I'm not sure it's entirely surprising. Back in 2006, recall, we had the hubbub around Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and, later, the release of the fourth IPCC report on climate change (which garnered shockingly little press coverage, considering how significant a document it was). That was the high-water mark of public awareness about the science of climate change, and, sure enough, even Rasmussen's loopy poll found that most Americans believed that humans were heating up the planet. But in the ensuing years, climate coverage—to the extent that there was any—quickly leaped away from the topic of what was causing rising temperatures, and moved on to the question of what we should do about it.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) on global "warming" - NPR

The Ohio lawmaker has criticized parts of the Democrats' proposed stimulus plan, including a provision that would direct $400 million to NASA to study global warming.

"Remember, the goal of the stimulus package is to preserve jobs and help create new jobs in America," Boehner said. "And I don't know how giving NASA $400 million to study global warming is going to meet the goals."

Besides, he said, money has already been allocated to the CIA to study global warming.

Although most House members "think that climate change is a serious issue that needs to be addressed," Boehner said the best way to do that remains in doubt.

"We've never gotten into the debate and the discussion about the consequences of trying to deal with it, and how expensive it will be and the changes it will make to our society," Boehner said. "And the fact that if we don't have our industrial partners around the world engage with us, what does that mean in terms of job loss in the U.S.?"

Asked if he thinks global warming is going to be a central issue of 2009, Boehner said he does.

"We're going to have debates," he said. "We're going to start to see policy proposals; we've had a lot of discussion. But there hasn't really been any serious policy proposals laid on the table. There really hasn't been the challenge of different ideas. I think that's likely to start this year."