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This week’s headlines:

Gallup Polls Show More Americans Don’t Believe in Global Warming

National Bike Summit Takes DC

Greenpeace Gorillas Nestle!

Bad News Polar Bears

To Buy Green Products or To Steal Them?

The Details:

Gallup Polls Show More Americans Don’t Believe in Global Warming

Two new polls released by Gallup this week show that not only are Americans growing less concerned about the environment, but a record number of them believe Global Warming is exaggerated. An astonishing 41% of Americans believe this.

Gallup’s website claims, “This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.”

So where is this doubt coming from? According to Gallup, Republicans are in first place. A whopping 66% of Republicans believe Global Warming is exaggerated. Independents are not far behind, with 44% of them doubting the impact. Only 20% of Democrats believe Global Warming to be exaggerated.

A second poll by Gallup asked Americans to rate their amount of concern with 8 environmental issues including global warming, loss of tropical rain forests, and various types of water and air pollution. Not surprisingly, the pollution or contamination of drinking water ranked as the highest concern. But what concern came in dead last? Global Warming. Only 28% of Americans surveyed say they “worry a great deal” about Global Warming.

National Bike Summit Takes DC

Last week we reported that Google had added a bike path feature to Google Maps. There’s one group of folks who are particularly tickled about that – the League of American Bicyclists. Their 10th annual National Bike Summit was held from March 9 to 12 in Washington D.C. this year, with over 700 cycling advocates participating.The goal was to jumpstart national bike advocacy and raise awareness of bicycling as an alternative to driving.

In a surprise appearance at the conclusion of the event, United States Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood made an appearance, ending the summit with a pledge to make cycling concerns a priority.

Greenpeace Gorillas Nestle!

Treehugger reports: In a victory for the advocacy group Greenpeace, their European members have managed to persuade Nestle to drop Indonesian palm oil producer Sinar Mas Group because of their “continued expansion into rain forests and “critical orangutan habitat.” Their campaign focuses on Kit Kat. While it’s just one of the plethora of chocolate bars Americans enjoy, it happens to be the most popular chocolate bar in Europe.

Palm oil plantations are being expanded everywhere, killing off the habitats for many animals including orangutans. So Greenpeace posted a disturbing ad on YouTube depicting a man chomping down on an orange fur-covered Kit Kat, oozing blood and creating the sound of snapping bones.

It barely got any views before Nestle had it pulled from the site. Outraged, Greenpeace posted the ad to Vimeo and made a big stink about how Nestle was trying to silence them via social media outlets like Twitter.

We’ll never know how much exposure the ad might have seen if it had just stayed up on YouTube. But the response once people knew the ad had been taken down by Nestle (AKA The Man), caused the chocolate company to issue the following statement a scant few hours later:

“We share the deep concern about the serious environmental threat to rain forests and peat fields in South East Asia caused by the planting of palm oil plantations.”

Nestlé has also committed to using only Certified Sustainable Palm Oil by 2015.

Check out the Greenpeace ad.

Bad News Polar Bears

The Huffington Post reports that a proposed ban on polar bear trade failed to pass at the UN’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species on March 18. The proposal was made by the United States and was rejected by Canada, Norway and Greenland among others.

The U.S. concerns are that the sale of polar bears skins is compounding the loss of the animals’ sea ice habitat due to climate change. There are projections that the bear’s numbers, which are estimated at 20,000 to 25,000, could decline by two-thirds by 2050 due to habitat loss in the Arctic.

The opposition said the threat from trade was minimal and the hunting done by Aboriginal communities was critical to their economies.

In May 2008, the U.S. classified the polar bear as a threatened species, the first with its survival at risk due to global warming.

To Buy Green Products or To Steal Them?

The Guardian UK reported on March 15 about a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science, claiming that people who buy green products are more likely to steal! The study, entitled “Do Green Products Make Us Better People” was done by Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, who argue that “green products do not necessarily make for better people”.

The study finds that when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of green products, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.

Essentially, people who spend their money in the right ways feel a sense of entitlement to steal or at the very least, to take more than their fair share when they can. Those  study participants who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products.

When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it, they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Then, when participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves what they won on the computer game, the greens were six times more likely to steal than regular people.