The headline couldn’t have been more celebratory: “A huge majority of Americans support regulating carbon from power plants. And they’re even willing to pay for it.”
 
Uh-huh.
 
Here’s the key question: “What if that significantly lowered greenhouse gases but raised your monthly energy expenses by 20 dollars a month – in that case do you think the government should or should not limit the release of greenhouse gases?”
 
Note that figure: $20/month, equals $240 per year. But the real cost on electricity bills alone is likely to be multiples higher. There’s no mention of reduced number of jobs or higher prices of everything we make with electricity (which is practically everything).
 
Note also the neat psychological trick. First you pose three questions to which positive answers are likely (granted the MSM’s constant drumbeat about global warming and its false claim that 97% of climate scientists agree) and lead naturally to a positive answer to the fourth. But if the poll had begun with “Would you be willing to pay an extra $20 per month for energy as a consequence of the government’s requiring significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions?” more would likely have said “No” and then have tailored their answers to the other questions to fit with that answer. (Nobody likes to admit he’s just contradicted himself.)
 
Way back when I was a teenager, I used to go door to door, and sometimes make phone calls, for the Field Poll, a highly professional organization at the time, and I learned a few of the tricks of the trade. This WaPo/ABC  poll is worthless except as a club in the hands of supporters of Obama’s policy. It doesn’t tell respondents that the impact on future temperatures of achieving the 30% reduction in existing power plant CO2 emissions will be indiscernible. It doesn’t tell them about the offsetting benefits of rising CO2—increased plant (including crop) growth.
 
Can you imagine how responses might have differed had the poll begun with something like this?
 

Scientists estimate that CO2 added to the atmosphere has made plants all over the earth grow more, and that this includes adding about $3.2 trillion worth of crop production from 1950 to 2011 and is projected to add about $9.8 trillion to crop production from now to 2050. With that in mind, would you be willing to pay an extra $20 per month for energy as a consequence of the government’s requiring significantly lower CO2 emissions from existing power plants, knowing that achieving that reduction would have no discernible impact on future global temperature?

Now, I admit, that question is prejudicially worded in the direction opposite WaPo/ABC’s. But that’s just the point. If you load the dice in a poll, you can get whatever results you please.
 
The likelihood of a scientifically valid poll on this question by WaPo and ABC News is about zero. A truly professional polling organization like Gallup might do a better job—especially (possibly only) if it were blind to who was paying for the poll.
 
Substituting popular vote for rational argument as a way of settling scientific, and even political, arguments is just one part of the widespread abandonment of reason—reason based in the rational Creator who made us rational beings in His image and called us to exercise godly dominion over His rational earth (Genesis 1:27–28).