Oil and Gas Poll Finds 83% of Consumers Worldwide Concerned About Climate Change

March 12th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

A new industry poll published in E&P, the world’s leading publication for oil and gas professionals, reveals that worldwide concern about climate and economic risks from fossil fuels is very high.

These are quite different results from a Gallup poll on a reduction in climate concerns widely publicized yesterday, showing that conservatives’ belief that climate change is occurring has dropped a full 20 points in the last year to just 30%, obscuring a relatively minor rise of 2% as liberals concern levels rose to 74%.

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The threat to the climate is a great concern globally at 83%, with 76% of respondents worrying about future fossil energy shortages. The rising cost of fossil fuels is the biggest worry overall with 90% of the 9,000 respondents in 22 countries.

A large majority of the respondents support more government intervention to build more renewable energy to solve climate change and reduce the cost of extracted energy.

To solve these issues, 85% say that more government control and intervention is required to address energy challenges.

Of three choices as to how that could be achieved, and able to pick two of the three options, 51% most preferred that “governments should provide incentives for new technologies”, and 41% preferred governments should literally pick winners and losers – “make investment decisions regarding the development of sources of low-carbon energy.”

Globally, only 22% trust that the energy companies will take actions to address these energy challenges in the absence of government intervention, with stark differences between nations that already do have highly regulated energy markets like Japan, India and China, (who had distrust levels below 10%), and unregulated nations like the Australia, the US and the UK, where the level of distrust runs at over 46%.

For this energy survey, the leading business consulting firm globally; Accenture questioned 1,500 people in North America, 3,502 in Western Europe, and at least 500 in each of Australia, Japan, China, India, South Korea, the Middle East, Brazil and Mexico representative of the general population as a whole in terms of age, gender, and socio-economic conditions – except the 500 in developing countries, who were only representative of the urban population.

Image: Accenture: Charting Energy’s Future (PDF)

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