Now an insurance lawyer in Carrizo Springs, Tex., he said he was concerned about global warming.
“It's obviously happening, the flooding, the record droughts,” said Mr. Padilla, who agrees with the science that human activities are the leading cause of climate change. “And all this affects poor people harder. The jobs are more based on weather. And when there are hurricanes, when there is flooding, who gets hit the worst? The people on the poor side of town.”
Mr. Padilla's concern is echoed by other Hispanics across the country, according to a poll conducted last month by The New York Times, Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future. The survey, in which Mr. Padilla was a respondent, found that Hispanics are far more likely than whites to view global warming as a problem that affects them personally. It also found that they are far more likely to support policies, such as taxes and regulations on greenhouse gas pollution, aimed at curbing it.
The findings in the poll could have significant implications for the 2016 presidential campaign as both parties seek to win votes from Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the population, particularly in states like Florida and Colorado that will be influential in determining the outcome of the election. The poll also shows the challenge for the potential Republican presidential candidates — including two Hispanics — many of whom question or deny the science of human-caused climate change.
Among Hispanic respondents to the poll, 54 percent rated global warming as extremely or very important to them personally, compared with 37 percent of whites. Sixty-seven percent of Hispanics said they would be hurt personally to some degree if nothing was done to reduce global warming, compared with half of whites.
And 63 percent of Hispanics said the federal government should act broadly to address global warming, compared with 49 percent of whites.
To be sure, more Hispanics than whites identify as Democrats, and Democrats are more likely than Republicans and independents to say that the government should fight climate change. In the poll, 48 percent of Hispanics identified as Democrats, 31 percent as independents and 15 percent as Republicans. Among whites, 23 percent identified as Democrats, 41 percent as independents and 27 percent as Republicans.
Over all, the findings of the poll run contrary to a longstanding view in politics that the environment is largely a concern of affluent, white liberals. Experts say that climate change is growing rapidly as a concern for Hispanics, who are likely to be more physically and economically vulnerable to the effects of global warming, such as more extreme droughts and floods, lower crop yields, and hotter temperatures.
“There's a stereotype that Latinos are not aware of or concerned about these issues,” said Gabriel Sanchez, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico and director of research at Latino Decisions, a survey firm focused on the Hispanic population. “But Latinos are actually among the most concerned about the environment, particularly global warming.”
One reason, Mr. Sanchez and others said, is that Hispanics often live in areas where they are directly exposed to pollution, such as neighborhoods near highways and power plants.
Hispanics typically rate immigration, education and employment in the top tier of the policy issues on which they vote, but the poll is the latest in a growing body of data showing that Hispanics also care intensely about environmental issues.
A 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 76 percent of Hispanics agreed that the earth had been warming, and 59 percent attributed that warming to human activity. By comparison, 62 percent of whites agreed that the earth had been warming, and 41 percent attributed that to human activity.
A 2014 study in the scientific journal PLOS One found that nationally, nonwhite minorities were exposed to concentrations of the toxic pollutant nitrogen dioxide that were 38 percent higher than what whites faced. Nitrogen dioxide is linked to respiratory illness and, like planet-warming carbon dioxide, is spewed from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks. While it is not directly linked to global warming, populations that experience high levels of exposure to it are likely to be more supportive of pollution regulation in general, Mr. Sanchez said.
Tony Vazquez of San Jose, Calif., a poll respondent and a former truck driver who now makes nickel plates for car parts, said in a follow-up interview that he would support policies such as national taxes on greenhouse gas pollution, even if that raised the cost of gasoline and electricity from fossil fuels.
“Where I live, you don't know what you're breathing — smog and pollution from refineries, ships, diesel trucks,” Mr. Vazquez said. “You're breathing it all. They need to do something about air pollution.”
Hispanics are also more likely to be concerned about the impact of global warming outside the United States, Latino researchers say, particularly in Latin America, Mexico and the Caribbean. Stronger droughts and storms there can lead to flooding or shortages of food and water, but people and governments may not be equipped to handle that.
President Obama has proposed spending $3 billion on a global Green Climate Fund intended to help poor countries adapt to the effects of climate change, but Republicans in Congress have been sharply critical of that plan. In contrast, two-thirds of Hispanics in the poll said the United States government should give money to poor countries to help them reduce the damage caused by global warming. Two-thirds of whites said the United States should not provide the money.
The result, Mr. Sanchez and other researchers said, is that politicians should be wary of dismissing the issue of climate change. “The most important thing is that candidates have to think about the Latino population as complex,” Mr. Sanchez said. Although immigration remains the most critical issue, “to ignore the environment is to ignore something that a large section of the Latino population sees as important.”
Source: Published originally on The New York Times as Climate Change Is of Growing Personal Concern to U.S. Hispanics, Poll Finds byCoral Davenport, February 9, 2015.