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Environmental Issues In The 2008 Presidential Elections

Environmental Issues in the 2008 Presidential Election Although it surely wasn’t the most prominent issue voters were concerned with when they cast their ballots for the next President of the United States,the environment is undeniably an issue of increasing concern to the citizens of our nation. One of the main issues concerning the environment that arose during this election would have to be global climate change. Global warming has become a household term in the last decade or so and it is more or less evident that more people are becoming concerned with this phenomenon each year. Even so, it still remains one of the least important issues U.S. voters are concerned with. An interesting poll put out by PEW that I discovered while conducting research for this paper (illustrated below as Figure 1) shows the environment and global warming as the two least important issues Republicans were concerned with in this election. Other important environmental issues that arose during the election include drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), increasing fuel efficiency, and offshore drilling. As I mentioned earlier, the most pertinent environmental issues voters in this election were concerned with would probably have to be global warming. Although as I hinted on earlier it was the least important issue at the bottom of the list for republicans in the PEW poll I came across, it was still the only environmental issue that the poll even mentioned. Because it was so seemingly unimportant to Republican voters, John McCain typically took a neutral stand when asked where he stood on the issue. Barack Obama on the other hand repeatedly acknowledged that he believed human activities were contributing to the rise in atmospheric Co2 and thus contributing to global warming. In an article titled "Barack Obama's Plan to Make America a Global Energy Leader" on his official website Obama states, “Global warming is real, is happening now and is the result of human...