“Broad support for climate protection and renewable energies”

Renewables are the most positively received energy sources for Germans, while the country’s population largely rejects higher electricity prices and taxes on fossil sources, according to a four-country cross-national survey by Cardiff University, Climate Outreach, and others, which was presented by klimafakten.de* in Berlin. Other findings:

• With 16 percent of German respondents saying they do not believe in climate change, Germans are most sceptical among the four countries surveyed (United Kingdom, France, Norway). “That surprised me,” said Ortwin Renn, scientific director of IASS, who was also involved in the study.
• Only 24 percent of German respondents believe that the vast majority of scientists (80 percent or more) agree that climate change is happening and that humans are largely causing it, compared to 30 percent in the UK, 33 percent in France and 35 percent in Norway. The actual number is 97 percent, according to several studies, klimafakten.de says in a press release. “Not even every third German knows that climate scientists are very, very sure and agree very, very much,” said klimafakten.de director Carel Mohn.
• 35 percent of German respondents trust local governments “quite a bit/very much” to transform the energy system towards the use of cleaner forms of energy, the highest trust in any institution in any of the four countries.

The complete survey results are available in English here, and a press release in German here.

Find a Guardian article on the study in English here.

*Like the Clean Energy Wire, klimafakten.de is a project funded by Stiftung Mercator and the European Climate Foundation.