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“A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is ‘among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.’” 33
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    A significant majority of Americans still think climate change is a serious problem, but it’s true that it has declined. The Pew polls are quite interesting in that they’re international polls, and they show that internationally there’s very strong concern. The United States is not totally off the spectrum, but it’s close to the edge. Concern in the United States is notably less than in comparable countries. And the drop that Klein is describing is exactly what they report. It’s very hard to doubt that that’s connected with the propaganda campaign that has been quite openly conducted.
    In fact, a couple of years ago, right after the insurance company victories on the health reform bill, so-called Obamacare, there was a report in the New York Times about leaders of the American Petroleum Institute and other business groups looking to the victory in the health care campaign as a model to undermine concern about global warming. 34 In the Republican presidential debates, for example, even to mention global warming would be to commit political suicide.
    Some of the candidates have remarkable positions on climate change. Take Ron Paul. He appeals to a lot of progressives. He said on Fox, “The greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming.” 35 He doesn’t provide any argument or  evidence as to why he disregards the scientific consensus—just, I say so, period. With that attitude, you really are approaching the edge.
    And, in fact, actions are being taken to implement those views. A sign of the shift in the nature of elite discourse in recent years is that the Republicans in Congress are now trying to dismantle the few environmental regulations and controls that do exist, which were instituted under Nixon. Nixon would look like a radical today, Dwight Eisenhower like a super radical.

7
Learning How to Discover
    C AMBRIDGE , M ASSACHUSETTS (M AY 15, 2012)
    It’s been more than five decades since you first wrote about universal grammar, the idea of an inborn capacity in every human brain that allows a child to learn language. What are some of the more recent developments in the field?
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    Well, that gets technical, but there’s very exciting work going on refining the proposed principles of universal grammar. The concept is widely misunderstood in the media and in public discussions. Universal grammar is something different: it is not a set of universal observations about language. In fact, there are interesting generalizations about language that are worth studying, but universal grammar is the study of the genetic basis for language, the genetic basis of the language faculty. There can’t be any serious doubt that something like that exists. Otherwise an infant couldn’t reflexively acquire language from whatever complex data is around. So that’s not controversial. The only question is what the genetic basis of the language faculty is.
    Here there are some things that we can be pretty confident about. For one thing, it doesn’t appear that there’s any detectable variation among humans. They all seem to have the same capacity. There are individual differences, as there are with everything, but no real group differences—except maybe way at the margins. So that means, for example, if an infant from a Papua New Guinea tribe