Daily Score Blog

The economy is top of mind for everybody as we count down to Election Day in the US. But perhaps the connection between high energy prices and energy (and climate) policy has become more solidified in voters’ minds.

That's hard to say for sure. But polling from mid-October does show that nearly two out of three undecided voters say that the presidential candidates' positions on global warming will influence their vote come Election Day. The national survey was conducted by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities and Knowledge Networks.

The poll found that a total of 62 percent of undecided voters, 64 percent of John McCain supporters and 75 percent of Barack Obama supporters, say that that global warming is one of several significant issues that will influence their vote next month.

Both candidates have stressed the importance of dealing with climate change. And both have advocated for cap and trade policy as a solution (though they differ on the details of such a policy). In the race to earn undecided voters’ trust on the issue of global warming, the two candidates are in a dead heat. Fifty percent of undecided voters trust John McCain as a source of information about global warming and 51 percent trust Barack Obama.

Surprisingly, 45 percent of McCain supporters distrust John McCain as a source of information about global warming, while only 15 percent of Obama supporters distrust their candidate on the issue. This may be due in part to a partisan divide on climate change wherein McCain’s views are actually quite moderate.

The results come from a nationally representative survey of 2,189 American adults, age 18 and older. The sample was weighted to correspond with Census Bureau parameters for the United States. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percent, with 95 percent confidence. The survey was designed by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities and conducted October 8 through October 14 by Knowledge Networks, using an online research panel of American adults.

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, gas prices have fallen back from the phenomenal highs of last summer.  The immediate cause has been the economic crisis. When credit markets seized up, some companies that wanted to buy oil simply couldn't get the cash.  And perhaps more importantly, the economic slowdown has decreased projections for oil demand.  Markets that seemed tight are now looser than they've been in a while.

But those changes are just on the demand side.  On the supply side, though, little has changed.  If anything, the outlook for oil supplies is somewhat more pessimistic than it was a few years back.  Take a look, for example, at this recent survey of petroleum geologists (pdf link), that was conducted at a recent professional convention and reported in the journal of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists.  Three out of five petroleum geologists surveyed believed that global oil production would "peak" within 10 years.  See below: