If you think politicians are out of touch, you鈥檙e right. The American public would pay extra to get green electricity, but partisan politics means their elected representatives still won鈥檛 legislate for it.
In his January 2011 State of the Union address, Barack Obama called for a national clean energy standard (NCES) that would see 80 per cent of the country鈥檚 electricity produced from clean sources by 2035.
To find out whether Americans supported this, of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and colleagues surveyed 1010 US citizens.
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On average, people were in favour of Obama鈥檚 clean energy standard provided it added no more than 13 per cent to their annual electricity bills. A 2007 poll for 快猫短视频 drew similar conclusions.
Kotchen used the survey data to simulate how the current US Senate and House of Representatives would vote on different versions of an NCES bill, assuming each representative votes based on his average constituent.
Here the results were very different. The team found that the bill would only pass both houses if it added no more than 5 per cent to electricity bills.
That鈥檚 because the number of Democrats and Republicans in Congress are not directly proportional to the political persuasions of the districts they represent ( DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1527).
鈥淭here is public support but it鈥檚 difficult to mobilise votes to make it happen,鈥� Kotchen says.
Before last year鈥檚 mid-term elections there were more Democrats in both houses, and Kotchen鈥檚 data suggest the NCES could have passed even if it boosted electricity bills by 13 per cent. 鈥淚f people really care about this, changing the balance of the houses makes a big difference,鈥� he says.
