Environment: An Enduring Concern

In 1965 George Gallup presented a list of ten national problems to a representative sample of the general public and asked which three should get the most attention from government in the next year or two.

"Reducing pollution of air and water" was chosen by a mere 17 percent of the sample, placing it ninth, just behind "improving highway safety" and a few percentage points above "beautifying America."

Five years later Gallup repeated this exercise. The poll took place in late April 1970, just after Earth Day. This time reducing pollution was chosen by 53 percent of the public, placing it in second place, only three percentage points behind "reducing the amount of crime." Numerous other polls in 1969 and 1970 confirmed the rise to prominence in the public's consciousness of the environment as a major social problem. It was reported that these data did not pass unnoticed at the White House.

Since 1970, however, a number of strong environmental protection laws have been passed, billions have been spent on pollution control, and the energy crisis, stagflation, and unemployment have been added to the nation's crowded agenda of problems. A president who has been called an environmentalist now inhabits the White House. How has public support for environmental protection fared in recent years?

Not the biggest problem. One component of an RFF study of the environmental movement has been a review of the results of the past decade of public opinion polling. Special attention has been given to surveys that repeat the same question over the years. Despite the fact that the pollsters do not repeat the same questions as often or as regularly as researchers would prefer (Gallup apparently has not repeated the question described earlier since 1970), it is possible to construct a reasonably coherent picture of the public's valuation of environmental goods. The general conclusion is that support for environmental protection was not a mere flash in the pan occasioned by media attention and the lamentations of the doomsdayers. To be sure, "pollution/ecology" has largely disappeared from the list of "biggest" problems that are suggested in response to open-ended questions asked by pollsters, and there has been a recent slackening of public support for increased spending on environmental programs. But what has happened, and this is confirmed by numerous polls over the years which directly query respondents on environmental issues and trade-offs, is that the environment has apparently joined education and health as an enduring public concern, with little sign of any significant backlash to date.

Both the Gallup and Harris polls occasionally break from their habit of asking respondents to choose among preset answers and ask people to volunteer what they consider to be "the two or three biggest problems facing people like yourself which you would like to see the next president (Congress) do something about?" (Harris's wording; Gallup only asks for one "most important problem.") Figure 1 shows the trend for the times that Harris has reported these data since 1970. The "pollution/ecology" category shows a sharp dropoff following 1970. The reason for this appears to be the rising importance of other issues and the tendency of answers to this type of question to reflect the issues which dominate the press and television news; with the exception of the occasional oil spill, environmental issues have not received prominent media exposure since 1972.

Air and water pollution. These Harris data and various 1976 and 1977 Gallup polls show clearly that environmental problems are not the sort of thing that many people volunteer as the biggest or most important problem facing them today. In 1977 most people tend to mention the high cost of living and un-employment in this regard. When asked directly about environmental matters, however, a strong and even increasing level of public concern is revealed. This is so even though the public also believes that progress is being made in reducing air and water pollution. (This is true of almost six out of ten people in the latest Harris poll on this topic in 1976.)

The key data here come from a series of Harris surveys between 1973 and late 1976. In 1973, 34 percent of the public said they considered air pollution to be a "very serious" problem. Four polls later, in the fall of 1976, the response had almost doubled to 66 percent. An increase of this magnitude over a relatively short time is not commonplace for questions of this type in national polls. Opinions on water pollution showed a parallel trend, the "very serious" responses increasing from 40 to 67 percent.

Air and water pollution are key components of the quality of life issue which Louis Harris predicts will become a major source of public discontent in the next few years. In recent years he consistently found 40 percent or more respondents saying that the quality of life in America has grown worse compared with ten years earlier. In 1976 when he asked his respondents to evaluate twelve issues as to their importance in making the quality of life better in the United States, curbing air and water pollution ranked second and seventh in impor-tance. When the respondents were asked to name the two or three of these items which were "most important to them personally," air and water pollution jumped up to first and third place, respectively, with "achieving quality education for children" in second place.

These findings help to explain why a large percentage of the public feels that government is spending too little on "improving and protecting the environment." This finding has been documented in an annual series of surveys by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) of the University of Chicago and by three Gallup polls conducted for Potomac Associates. In the 1977 survey, 47 percent of the sample said that we're spending "too little" money on "improving and protecting the environment," an impressive figure considering the vast increase in state and federal expenditures for pollution control over the previous five years. Out of the eleven programs evaluated in this study, only four were ahead of the environment in the percent who thought they were underfunded. Of considerable interest is the low percentage of people who believed that we are spending "too much" on environmental protection. In 1977, 11 percent held this view, a rise of only 4 percentage points from the 1973 level of 7 percent. Thirty-four percent of the 1977 sample believed the level of expenditure to be "about right."

Willingness to pay. It may be one thing to desire increased government spending to combat pollution and another thing to be willing to pay increased taxes for this purpose. Two national telephone surveys, in 1975 and 1977, by the Opinion Research Corporation suggest that most people are willing to pay the price. Asked whether they think it is more important to pay higher prices for goods and services and higher taxes to protect the environment, or to pay lower water prices but have more air and pollution, 68 percent opted for paying higher prices (up from 60 percent in 1975). In the same survey 55 percent subscribed to the strong statement that "protecting the environment is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing improvements must be made regardless of cost" (emphasis in original). Only 19 percent chose the alternative that "it already costs more than it is worth."

When faced with a straight tradeoff between pollution control and other goods such as jobs, industrial growth, and energy production, the data are less conclusive though only two out of five respondents put jobs first. The 1977 Opinion Research Corporation poll asked the following tradeoff question: "In order to really cut down pollution from the current levels, some companies may have to reduce their growth, meaning less production and fewer jobs. Do you think now it is more important to greatly reduce air or water pollution, or more important to expand industrial production and jobs?" Despite the strong wording of the question, 29 percent chose the pollution reduction option (for nonwhites it was 36 percent; in the age group 18-29, 39 percent; and for college educated persons, 43 percent), and 18 percent said both are important, for a total of 47 percent. A sizable minority of 42 percent chose to expand industrial production and jobs. The rest were undecided.

However strongly the public may feel about environmental protection, the Opinion Research Corporation survey shows that only a minority (30 percent) is willing to subscribe to an extreme position that "there should be no pollution of any kind at all; the environment should be essentially pollution free" (emphasis in original). Furthermore, the public is willing to accept compromises that appear to be reasonable. A CBS News-New York Times national poll (summer 1977) found that the public was willing to accept more strip mining (by two to one) and laxer air pollution laws (48-41 percent) to produce more coal. When faced with a direct tradeoff, however, by a five to three margin those polled thought it was more important to protect the environment than to produce more energy.

The public is not extremist but, as the Opinion Research Corporation said in its Report to Management (February 1977), "it would be foolish for anyone to conclude that the public is less than adamant about environmental quality."