Oh really? Check out “contingent valuation”. What people say they are content to pay (in the future) and what people are really willing to pay are often not the same thing.
The average U.S. citizen is willing to pay 13 percent more for electricity in support of a national clean-energy standard (NCES), according to Yale and Harvard researchers in Nature Climate Change.
Americans, on average, are willing to pay $162 per year in higher electricity bills to support a national standard requiring that 80 percent of the energy be “clean,” or not derived from fossil fuels. Support was lower for a national standard among nonwhites, older individuals and Republicans.
In addition, the results suggest that the Obama Administration’s proposal for a national standard that would expand the definition of clean energy to include natural gas and would require 80 percent clean energy by 2035 could pass both chambers of Congress if it increased average electricity rates by no more than 5 percent.
Matthew Kotchen, a co-author of the study and associate professor of environmental economics and policy at Yale, said many observers believe that a national clean-energy standard as the only politically feasible alternative to a national energy-climate policy given the diminished prospect for passage of a national cap-and-trade program to control greenhouse-gas emissions and the relatively weak provisions of the EPA’s proposed carbon pollution standard.
“Our aim in this research was to investigate how politically feasible an NCES really is from both an economics and political science perspective,” he said.
The authors conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,010 U.S. citizens between April 23 and May 12. Respondents were asked whether they would support or oppose an NCES, with the goal of 80 percent clean energy by 2035.
They didn’t ask me.
Maybe I’m _above_ average.
$162 PER YEAR? 13% MORE?
That’s nothing. No chance of getting to 80% at that rate of increase. Try several-fold higher costs (or more) to get anywhere near 80%.
I don’t want to pay $1.62 a year more.
Even if you include natural gas – a really stupid use of natural gas, but then we’re talking enviro-morons here – any standard which gets 80% of electricity from “clean” sources is going to raise rates a lot more than 5%, and even a lot more than13%, assuming that you’re presently paying less than $1,000 a year for electricity. Any 80% clean energy standard is likely to raise electric rates but 100%, possibly closer to 200%. Try selling that in a small Midwestern town of mostly retired, or nearly retired, folks.
“Clean energy has become an increasingly important priority in the United States.”
Nope.
Adding “clean” energy for only $162 a year is easy. You just shutoff all the other energy.