A poll conducted by Thomson Reuters Foundation took a survey of 21 Republican college clubs across the U.S. and found a majority of members support climate action.
“When our generation is in power, we will take climate change much more seriously,” Grace Woodward, president of the Republican club at Davidson College in North Carolina, told Reuters. “Climate change is really real and really alarming.”
More than half those Young Republican clubs surveyed indicated their membership think climate change is happening and caused by human activity. About a quarter indicated mixed views on the issue and only three clubs said climate change does not come up with their membership.
“I think that there will be a big change in the (Republican) Party,” said Kent Haeffner, president of the Harvard University Republican Club. “Demographically, the `Trump coalition´ will not last. I think that the folks that are our age are going to have to reshape the party and take it in a different direction.”
Nick Frankowski, the chairman of Ohio State University’s College Republicans said “you’d be hard pressed to find someone who thought that climate change is not occurring at all.” He pointed to the “overwhelming” evidence, adding, “The biggest debate is, of course, what to do about it.”
A Pew report published a year earlier found that 52 percent of people aged 18 to 29 years saw global warming as a “very serious problem”, compared to only 38 percent of adults over 50 years old.
“We’ve grown up in sort of a globalized world where we’ve seen the impacts that global warming has,” Woodward added. “The people that are in power right now, for whatever reason, don’t have that same global view.”