March 14, 2014

Who Wants To Export Natural Gas?

My last post highlighted how over six months, support for exporting natural gas has increased as opposition decreased. Thirty-four percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “The U.S.

By Sheril Kirshenbaum

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

My last post highlighted how over six months, support for exporting natural gas has increased as opposition decreased. Thirty-four percent of Americans agreed with the statement, "The U.S. should permit the export of natural gas to other countries," while 30 percent disagreed and 36 percent were neutral. My guess is that most of the country is still not likely paying much attention.

Now let's dig deeper. The data collected is weighted to reflect U.S. census demographics so we can find out more about how opinion varies across the nation. Here's a look at those who agreed that we should export natural gas broken down by gender, income, and party affiliation:

Source: UT Energy Poll September 2013. Base: 2,144 All results based on weighted data. Methodology here.

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The first thing I notice is that support for exporting natural gas looks a lot like the data a cross broad energy issues. Women tend to be less engaged than men. High earners are more likely to follow energy topics closely compared to those earning less. And as a group, Libertarians are more likely to be watching energy issues than those from other political parties.

Right now it appears that the Americans who are most focused on energy topics are also more likely to support exporting natural gas. Still, it's important to note that this data was collected prior to the current situation in Ukraine. The latest poll results from March 2014 will be available in a few weeks, so we'll be able explore new data on public sentiment regarding natural gas--and many other critical energy topics--very soon!

This post originally appeared at Scientific American’s ‘Plugged In’

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