Could Gore's Nobel switch on energy-saving bulbs in US minds?

October 13, (AFP)

US former vice president Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize has highlighted the urgency of tackling climate change, but experts are divided over whether it will spur Americans to mend their energy-unfriendly ways.

"Al Gore winning the Nobel prize is not the kind of triggering event that is going to motivate Americans to change behaviour en masse," Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies told AFP.

"But it is part of the steady drip, drip, drip that has brought a sea change in public opinion on climate change in the past couple of years," he said.

A study published last month by Yale showed that 62 percent of Americans feel "immediate and drastic action" is needed to reduce global warming, and that half were very worried about climate change. But only 19 percent thought it posed a risk to themselves and their families.

"That sense of immediacy in time has definitely shifted - a few years ago, Americans thought climate change would impact people in 50 to 100 years, if ever - but what hasn't shifted so much is Americans' feeling that they are personally at risk," Leiserowitz said.

Few Americans live in a home without an electricity-gluttonous clothes dryer, air conditioning, dishwashers and washing machines, and a family car.

"I often ask why people here don't use clothes lines, but where I live, clothes lines are banned because they are said to be unsightly," Kevin Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), told AFP. "I am trying to convince the authorities in Colorado that clothes lines are environmentally beautiful," he said.

Trenberth was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Change reports by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel with Gore.

The United States is the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide emissions, 30 percent of which come from automobiles, said Trenberth, a New Zealand native.

"We could cut emissions in half in the US. The main way to make change happen relates to the pocketbook," he said. The Yale University poll showed that 85 percent of Americans support a requirement for car manufacturers to make more fuel-efficient vehicles, even if it would add 500 dollars to the price of a new car.