Our View: Costs cool public ardor to take on global warming

"Most Californians," the Reuters news service reports, "won't support the state's ambitious efforts to fight global warming if they lead to sharply higher energy costs."

In the abstract it's easy to support something that promises to improve life. However, polls showing public support to "curb global warming" rarely realistically connect the dots of supposed benefits with their real-life costs, even if costs are vaguely alluded to. When costs become real, there's less enthusiasm for "doing something" about a hypothetical threat, such as allegedly manmade climate catastrophe.

In June, a poll showed 79 percent of Californians believed global warming to be a serious threat to the economy and supported California's Global Warming Solutions law to reduce emissions. Substantially fewer, only 58 percent, took the next step and supported regulations if they would result in higher prices.

Since then, fuel prices have soared. Abstract higher prices became real. Now, a new poll shows 63 percent of registered California voters support reducing greenhouse gases, but less than half — 47 percent — when the question includes likely higher energy costs.

Certainly, there's wiggle room in both polls. To some extent they may even reflect pollsters' bias. The June poll was conducted by a self-described "non-partisan" group; the later poll by a researcher commissioned by a pro-business group.

Nevertheless, the disparity at the extremes is huge — 79 percent who viewed global warming as a threat compared to only 47 percent who would pay to combat the threat. We're confident support will steadily wane as costs increasingly are felt to roll back CO2 emissions as the law dictates by 25 percent by the year 2020.

Greenhouse gas emissions are inevitable byproducts of industrial, mobile societies. Touted alternative-energy substitutes can't be ramped up in a decade, if ever, and forced onto 36 million people's lives. But the costs of trying to force Californians into such repressed lifestyles and economic straightjackets while the state grows in population would be economically disastrous.

The public is cooling to global warming alarmism, partly because of rash predictions that haven't materialized, and partly as more people recognize global temperatures haven't increased for a decade, and the world's about as warm today as it was a century ago.

As motorists feel the pain at the pump and workers lose jobs because employers flee the state's exorbitant taxes and regulations, Californians increasingly will decide that mobility, employment and prosperity are worth emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere.