"Pew survey finds US public ranks economy as highest priority policy issue, global warming as lowest"....okay, on the count of three - 1, 2, 3, DUUHHHHHHHHHH. Apparently Obama didn't get the memo - too busy crafting empty speeches filled with feel good sounding rhetoric to be a real leader.

It takes time for a nation of 300+ million to develop awareness and understand the underlying forces responsible for the:

1. severely busted national economy.
2. lost of many million jobs.
3. multiple effects on national security and terrorism.
4. increasing trade and budget deficits.
5. negative effects of under-regulated lobbies, speculators and banks etc.
6. negative effects of unfair taxes, subsidies and hand outs.
7. long term effects on education, social security, health care etc.

As long as the above major issues are not understood, the general public is not in a position to offer a learned opinion on the other questions asked.

Hello HarveyD,
Time is what we are rapidly running out of.

The number of Republicans rating the budget deficit as a top priority has spiked to 84% from 68% a year ago and just 42% five years ago.

The Republicans' shameless cynicism was perfectly captured by Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2002 proclaimed, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Not, that is, if a Republican is in the White House. But when Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office and the $1.2 trillion deficit George W. Bush left for him there, the GOP quickly changed its tune. While the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under President Bush, House Minority Leader John Boehner decried the $787 billion emergency economic recovery spending as "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment."

Meanwhile, those of us who during the Reagan years said "deficits DO matter" are also the ones telling you now (as then) "AGW is a real problem that we have to solve." We were right then and the data says we are right now, so the smart thing to do is to go with the side with a proven track-record of getting it right; http://www.blogforarizona.com/blog/2010/07/why-elections-matter-the-economy-always-does-better-under-democrats.html

Bush added $6 TRILLION to the national debt. Republican Senator Gramm from Texas added the provision in a 1999 law that said CDO/CDS which created the sub prime melt down would be regulated by NO ONE.

The Banking Queen in 2005: Housing Bubble? What Housing Bubble?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW5qKYfqALE

The public need to realize that continued global warming will destroy the economy by turning semi-arid areas into wastelands and deserts, sea water will overrun low-lying coastal areas, and the combination of droughts and floods will wreak tens of billions of dollars of economic damages yearly.

On the other hand, the move toward renewable energy will bring tens of millions of new jobs to the local economy everywhere, and will keep them working, due to the fact that renewable energy collectors are labor-intensive to maintain. Job created that can't be out-sourced.

Sometimes learning the hard way will be the only way the public will learn. As more record heat and drought and flooding will wreak havoc on the USA and China and Australia and elsewhere in the coming years, people will pay more attention to the dangers of Climate Change! Fortunately, we will soon if not already have the technology to deploy renewable energy at competitive costs to fossil fuels.

At a situation like this the most sensible thing to do is to restart federal research on Thorium fueled Molten Salt Reactors. This is a direct play on energy security, but it also fights greenhouse gas in the long term.

The US military can act as early adopters and run a number of power plants until the private sector takes over.

Maybe the public view will change once we have energy security.

The (R) party seems to want more debt and war, that is what we have gotten from them the last 30 years with trickle down borrow and waste.

TexasDesert, I had the same idea of the military operating nuclear reactors to deal with security fears. Then the Ft. Hood shootings occurred, and I realized that there really isn't any such thing as perfect security. However, the fact that Americans spend as much on the military as the rest of the world put together indicates that we can't grasp that concept.

Then came Fukushima, and well, if the Army can't secure a base full of tanks in Texas and the Japanese can't get their engineering right, it really is hopeless.

HarveyD, all budget deficits are not equal, just as all government dollars are not equal. We had staggering budget deficits during WW2, yet the country became less unequal and grew like crazy. We raised taxes on the rich sky-high for 25 years to pay for 4 years of war, and sold war bonds to the lower classes. The poor got repaid and bought houses and cars, the rich were starved of cash to blow on stock and real estate bubbles. Reagan chose to finance the last phase of the Cold War in the opposite way that FDR funded WW2, and got opposite results. Furthermore, WW2 war production created mass employment while the goods were well-built and cheap (P-51 fighter = $50,000 in WW2 $). Today's Military-Industrial complex produces fewer and fewer jobs to create smaller lots of ever more esoteric and questionable weapons that don't seem to win the wars we now choose to fight. So the modern deficit produces very different results than the 1945 deficit.