The myth of the young green adult

Young people are not more likely to be ‘green’ than their elders, they are less – in defiance of popular perception – just like right wing people conserve energy just as much as the left, despite the perception that they care less about conservation.

Millennials, young adults who grew up with the global warming discussion and calls to “reduce, reuse, recycle”, list the environment among their top concerns – but they seem to mean it should be a concern for other people.

Instead, young Americans of today are individually less interested in the environment and in conservation than those of 40 and 20 years ago. They are also less civic-minded in general. The results were from an analysis of 9 million young adults in the years 1966 to 2009; the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study of high school seniors, conducted continuously since 1975, and the American Freshman survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute of entering college students done since 1966.