Economy and environment

We are living through a financial crisis greater than any we've seen since the great depression. I suppose that is shouldn't surprise us, then, that for the first time in almost a quarter of a century¹ more Americans think the economy should be given priority, even at the expense of the environment, than the reverse (Gallup). Not surprising, I suppose, but still depressing.

But take a closer at that graph to the left. (Click on it to see a larger image if you need to.) Notice that the dark green line corresponding to giving the environment priory even at the expense of the economy was running at more than 60% until 2001. So while the crossing lines is an interesting event, it's more important that the two lines have been relatively close for the last eight years. Perhaps even more significantly, fewer than half of respondents favored giving the environment priority starting in 2008. I'm not a social scientist or a professional pollster, but those observations make me doubt this claim by Gallup:

The reason for this shift in priorities almost certainly has to do with the current economic recession. The findings reflect many recent Gallup results showing how primary the economy is in Americans' minds, and help document the fact of life that in times of economic stress, the public can be persuaded to put off or ignore environmental concerns if need be in order to rejuvenate the economy.

Or rather that claim seems to explain only the very recent, small shift in attitude. Maybe the much larger shift in attitude from 1998-2003 is related to bursting of the dot-com bubble. If so, then the shift in attitudes away from favoring the environment is likely to get a lot worse over the next couple of years.