Congress and the next president would be advised to lean green, based on the results of a new poll that finds Western voters strongly support a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from cars and trucks, increased spending on mass transit and a shift away from oil as a transportation fuel.

The environmental advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, perhaps best-known for its role as a nuclear safety watchdog, polled 2,003 voters in New Mexico and six other western states July 19-23, just as crude oil was starting to retreat from record high prices and gasoline prices were starting to drop. Nine out of 10 of those polled said it is critical for the United States to end its dependence on oil, 95 percent said the government should act now to avoid future energy crises and 89 percent said they were concerned that the country has no plan for transitioning to fuels other than oil.

Paying for that transition to new fuel wasn’t so popular, however. Only 44 percent of respondents said they would pay 20 to 50 cents more per gallon of gasoline to fund research on energy efficiency and alternative fuels. New Mexico was the only state where a majority said it would support such a tax, and that was 51 percent.

The margin of error for the full poll, conducted by David Binder Research, was 2.2 percent; for New Mexico it was 6.2 percent.

While voters weren’t too keen on paying more themselves, nearly two-thirds of respondents (63 percent) supported a tax on oil companies to help fund mass transportation. In New Mexico, which is both an oil producer and an investor in mass transit, 68 percent supported new fees on oil companies to make mass transit "inexpensive, convenient, safe, and fast."

The poll was conducted in the seven states that, along with four Canadian provinces, constitute the Western Climate Initiative. The coalition formed to develop a regional plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions because the federal governments have refused to act. A draft plan for the reduction plan released this week focuses mainly on power plants and factories. Transportation sources, while constituting some 40 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions in the West, aren’t addressed in the plan until 2015.

Voters, however, told pollsters they want transportation industry emissions cut, too. Eighty-four percent of respondents said transportation sources should be required to reduce their greenhouse-gas pollution along with power plants and factories, and 88 percent said automakers should be required to produce more efficient cars that pollute less and use less gasoline.

With the West seen by both major parties as a potential key to the White House in November, the poll suggests that Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama could go further in their energy proposals and perhaps draw in voters who may not have made up their minds about the election but clearly know what they want in energy policy.