It was the first time the research agency had asked the question, but the results mirror a 2011 poll from the Brookings Institution. In that survey, about 70 percent of Americans said they agreed with the statement that fighting global warming by “adding materials to the atmosphere will cause more harm than good for the environment.”

The second bit of intriguing news comes from the poll’s dive into generational attitudes in the Republican party. Millennial Republicans are more likely to endorse centrist environmental positions than their Boomer or Gen X co-partisans, the study found.

More than a third of Millennial Republicans agree that the “Earth is warming mostly due to human activity,” as compared to 18 percent of Boomers and older generations. Almost 60 percent of young Republicans say that climate change is having “at least some effect on the United States,” and 45 percent see it active in their community. Nearly half of millennial Republicans say the government is doing too little to “reduce effects of climate change,” as compared to 27 percent of Boomer Republicans, the study found. (In comparison, 89 percent of Democrats say the government should do more.)

Republican Millennials Are More Likely to Endorse Environmental Positions Than Their Older Peers

This might seem like a promising sign for the environmentally concerned. It comes soon after a coalition of College Republican clubs endorsed a tax on carbon pollution. And it fits with a number of other polls that find young Republicans are more environmentally inclined than their predecessors.

But “it’s not clear that just because millennials are a little more liberal than other generations, that they’re going to stay that way,” said Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School. “It always looks like the upcoming generation is becoming more liberal—but if that’s the case, they must be getting more conservative as they get older.”

“I think that anyone who’s banking on Millennials being more liberal in their 40s or 50s might discover this is not exactly what pans out,” he told me. “What does Trump say? We’ll have to wait and see.”

And even if these shifts do hold—especially in the Republican party—it isn’t clear they would mean anything politically, he said. Climate change and the environment are low-priority issues for most voters, compared to the economy and national security. Americans don’t necessarily choose to vote for a party because of its environmental policy.

Or as Kahan put it: “A congressperson knows that if they don’t do what people want on an issue like this, then they’re not necessarily going to get punished.”

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