As one follow-up to yesterday’s rant about efforts afoot in DC to gut the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to do its job on behalf of American families, I give you more polling data compiled by Center for American Progress (CAP) that shows that Americans really do want the EPA to keep up the good work protecting us from dangerous, unhealthy pollution.
Here are the big takeaways (all this is pretty much verbatim from the CAP report–a must-read—about why everybody, Latinos, in particular, should—and do—care about the EPA):
“Americans are not buying the conservative and big polluter arguments against the EPA.” A bipartisan poll found that “likely voters support the Clean Air Act and have sharply different opinions than the Members of Congress who are working to limit EPA’s authority to update and enforce air pollution standards, including on carbon dioxide.”
And, as CAP reports, “Latinos in particular display strong convictions to strengthen rules and regulations on dangerous greenhouse gasses and pollution—both of which the EPA regulates.”
A 2010 poll conducted by the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change found that the overwhelming majority of Latino voters in Florida (76 percent) and Nevada (74 percent), and about two out of three voters in Colorado (64 percent), consider global warming very or somewhat serious. Greenhouse gases, which are linked as a harmful pollutant and the source of global warming, are also regulated by the EPA.
A similar poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 87 percent of Latino voters believe the government should regulate emissions. They are the most likely racial/ethnic group to express this view.
Finally, a 2010 poll by the University of Southern California found that 75 percent of Latinos said they worry a great deal about air pollution compared with only 31 percent of whites. And 85 percent of Latinos said they worry a great or a fair amount about soil and water contamination from toxic waste.
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