I found the Harris Poll. 1001 registered voters randomly dialed. Here is the question asked (among others): Canada has over 170 Billion barrels of oil underground. A pipeline – the Keystone XL pipeline – has been proposed to help bring more of that Canadian oil into the U.S. for use in American refineries. Do you [ROTATE: support/oppose] or [ROTATE: oppose/support] the building of the Keystone XL pipeline?
I think it's interesting that the study showed most papers took no position on AGW. This flies in the face of dumb ass arguments like "follow the money". Many people have asserted that climate scientists are out to prove AGW to get grant funding or to take down the American economy. Scientists just want to understand the climate better.
So they're the second worst way of discovering public opinion. Good enough. The pipeline? I think it transports oil from point A to point B.
hoojacks, I actually respect you and your posts quite a bit, but find these recent ones to be out of the ordinary. If you would say that the EPA or Dept. of Interior decided it was in the best interests of The People, polls be damned, I couldn't argue. If you would say Obama was throwing some red meat to his ecology constituents, I wouldn't argue. I just really find it odd that someone could assert (that means without supporting evidence) that the people want some policy when the polls clearly show otherwise. As far as PR goes, the administration has virtually the entire media machinery plus the bully pulpit plus hundreds of congress people plus countless cabinet members and other appointees to get their side out. Like I said, the debate is public, the ideas that make sense to most people, framed best as each side can for their cause, win. On top of all the machinery available to both sides, the govt. is so vast that if they used every dollar of last year's deficit to buy oil stocks, the govt. would own outright the top five oil companies in the world: Exxon Mobil, Petro China, Chevron, Petrobas, and BP. It's hard to argue they don't have the money to hire whoever they want to get their word out as well. Peace
I'll just go ahead and bring in your post from the other thread. No, I think they answered the yes or no question to the best of their ability. The question is, do they know what they're talking about? The only information we know they got about the pipeline is from the poll.
Sorry, it was one of the polls. I looked about about 6 of them all showed roughly the same level of support, regardless of who paid for the poll to be performed. Even the GREEN pages at HuffPost agree with me. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/03/keystone-xl-pipeline-poll-2013_n_3009120.html And if you can't trust the polls, who do you trust? Should we appoint a king?
I don't disagree that polls show that people do or do not think a certain way. I can even admit the validity of the king of the voodoo sciences, statistics (that which gives polls any merit). But 1000 random people representing the whole of the nation? Color me skeptical. So how to discover public opinion? I'm much more for academic study. But that of course takes time. It all depends on why you need the information. To muster just enough political support in order to push through a controversial construction project? Polls work great for that. Longitudinal sociological research, not so much. I just don't see why these obviously very complex issues have to be boiled down to dialing random phone numbers and feeding the results into an algorithm. There are real people (and animals, but they don't count obviously) that this project would have negative effects on. But, 650 out of 1000 random people dialed "yes" so the project must go forth?
I guess you don't like my links, but I'm going to give you one anyway. Statistically, polling slightly over 1000 people gets you a margin of error of +/- 3%. As if you polled the entire population. So take that 80% figure or 66% figure or whatever and subtract 3% and you get 63% best case in your favor. I showed you the question they asked so you can judge for yourself if it somehow influenced the person to answer one way or another. http://www.stats.org/faq_margin.htm I'm in California, far away from the pipeline. Yet because I am taxed to pay for the welfare and food stamps for people who live right where that pipeline should be built, I really should have a say. Right? Like I said a few posts ago, you argued that the people don't want the pipeline. They do by any objective measure. But the will of the people isn't in question here. The administration has done everything it can to delay or cancel the project, and it looks to me like for no good reason. So when the administration or congress has this kind of power over many $billions of economic activity, why shouldn't those who can (are willing to) make this infrastructure project happen (at their own expense!, take the risk and make the profit), lobby the administration to come to their senses?
That's how it's supposed to work, right? Extrapolate the results and it's "as if you polled the entire nation." I don't think it is. I think it's virtually impossible to poll a representative sample, especially not in 1000 people, as humans and what they think are infinitely more complex than the partisan lines that we are categorized in. This has been my opinion when people talk about public opinion polls in the Middle East as well. This is why I would advocate for academic research (laughable, I know) to investigate public opinion. I don't think so. Not by any objective measure, just the ones we have limited ourselves to. I have no fix for this. I am a unrealistic radical when it comes to politics. Corporations lobbying the government to get what they want isn't "the will of the people" either. It's the influence of a wealthy few. Imagine if the specific counties in which this pipeline would pass through got to vote yes or no on it... and the project would only green light if it was unanimous. Would it pass?
I know you're very wrong about the math behind polling. There isn't an extrapolation going on. The math is what it is. Accurate to +/- 3%. So accurate that lefties want to do a poll instead of an actual census as required by the constitution. I absolutely have a vested interest in low unemployment, high GDP, etc. they're already wanting to tax the rich more and more. It's not hard to see they'll be coming after you and me when that source of money is tapped. Thus people employed for the pipeline absolutely affects me. Corporations are mostly owned by institutions. Those would be 401K owned by working people. There's the pin that pops that bubble. Unanimous? That's an utterly ridiculous standard. How about we don't elect Obama unless the vote is unanimous - equally silly.
I'll be the first to admit that my math is never correct. I've been googling trying to find a layman's explanation of how polling 1000 people (assuming it's a perfect sample) can reliably represent 314 million. I'd appreciate if you could link me to an article. I don't think your slippery slope argument has much sway with the people this pipeline would actually affect, right now, today, in ways other than vague paranoia about "they're coming after me" next. How many of those "working people" get to decide what the lobbyists focus on in DC? So it wouldn't pass. Would you agree that some people have a legitimate reason to not want the XL pipeline built?
http://stats.stackexchange.com/ques...e-sample-size-when-polling-a-large-population One of the posts includes the detailed math. The rest are pretty good in layman's terms. What slippery slope argument? It's a slam dunk, 100% sure thing that I have a vested interest in the nation's GDP being higher, lower unemployment, etc. As long as I'm paying taxes, some of it pays for government's failures. Who cares? The whole point of a corporation is to socialize its purpose, risk, and reward. The lobbyists do what's good for the shareholders or the company goes under. How many working people got to decide about passing ObamaCare? LOL. Sure. There are people that think the end of the world will happen if the pipeline is built. No accounting for paranoia and other kinds of just "out there" thinking.
Oil and Gas companies combined spent a tad more than the Chamber of Commerce. http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2012&indexType=s Oil and Gas is the fifth ranked industry in Lobbying expenses. Not that much more than the entertainment industry, Internet companies, etc. The really big money bought us ObamaCare. http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i&showYear=2012
The metadata hasn't changed at all! You have to keep your eye on the ball. 1. We have had a prominent democrat flying around at will, using more carbon than any of us observers will in our life time, shouting like chicken little about Global Warming and then Climate Change. While buying Carbon Credit investments. 2. Then we have the messiah like leader of the democrats pushing more taxes on us observers. Carbon Taxes to prevent us from using energy (err, collect more for more justice). Have you ever seen a democrat that didn't want another tax? Man you need to know it takes a ton of tax to keep a 747 warm and ready to take you and yours off to the next destination without regard to the carbon foot print (or the deficit). A real messiah can't be constricted by concerns intended for common men. Nor should he be constrained by a pesky Bill of Rights amended to the Constitution, the oath of office to protect these things is easy to ignore for a messiah. All he need do is mention common sense. The Dinosaurs' are dead! Global Cooling probably did it, the result of the atmosphere full of debris after a super meteor strike. From what I read, it was much warmer in Dino's day than it is today. Heck, I guess it was warmer when the Vikings settled Greenland over a 1000 years ago. In the past few years enough ice has melted on Greenland to allow people to see some of the sites where Viking settlement once had real Vikings before the a cooling age froze them out.
