A national carbon tax just may have some political life to it, if recent polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication is any indication:

Support for a revenue-neutral carbon tax is about 68 percent nationwide, with opposition at around 29 percent, the latest iteration of the Yale Climate Opinion Maps shows. The interactive maps combine large-scale surveys with demographic and election data for a model its creators say can reliably estimate public opinion down to the local level.

These findings probably won’t help the recent plan from a Republican congressman to tax carbon as a climate strategy, which is essentially dead-on-arrival. But it could signal long-term life for this policy goal, as Congress changes.

Of course, public support for a federal cap-and-trade program was also pretty good back in the 2000s (recall Newt Gingrich teaming up with Nancy Pelosi to support similar efforts to address climate change), before the fossil fuel industry launched a major public relations campaign against it.

But there were some interesting additional nuggets from the Yale research:

• Seventy-seven percent of American adults think carbon dioxide should be regulated as a pollutant, and 70 percent think environmental protection is more important than economic growth.

• Sixty-two percent of American adults think global warming is affecting the weather. Wyoming and West Virginia are the only states where that view is not held by most people.

Turns out coal-producing areas like Wyoming and West Virginia are the least prone to accept climate science. No surprise there, but still interesting to see how people’s jobs influence their ability to process facts.

In fact, the Salt Lake Tribune noted that the Yale research showed heavy climate denial in one local coal-dominated county:

Yet another point in support of Upton Sinclair’s famous observation: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”