Leading green groups, including the National Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club, are embracing a pragmatic approach to advance climate mitigation efforts by refocusing public outreach efforts around the near-term health benefits associated with reducing reliance on coal-fired power plants and increasing vehicle fuel efficiency.

"We're going to talk a lot about the health implications of dirty air," Heather Taylor, director of NRDC's political arm told Politico.

That's a smart move, says climate change communication expert and American University professor Matthew Nisbet.

While efforts to tackle climate change will avoid potentially significant long-term damages, to secure broad public support, those efforts must be linked to more salient and immediate public concerns while delivering near-term benefits. As Nisbet explains:

"In a polarized America, if you are going to build support for candidates in the Midwest and other battleground states that will back legislation on climate change during the next Congress, you have to switch focus to emphasize public health and economic resilience, goals realized through incremental actions like eliminating coal plants and boosting fuel efficiency."

Nisbet's observations echo the recommendations outlined in Climate Pragmatism, a July 2011 report authored by an international group of 14 scholars and analysts representing a diverse range of political and ideological positions -- from the conservative American Enterprise Institute to moderate Democratic think tank Third Way and the liberal Breakthrough Institute.

Continue reading "Green Groups Embrace Climate Pragmatism" »

Seems it might be about as easy to convince someone global warming is fake by pointing to the serial nor'easters slamming the east coast as it is to persuade an individual that global warming is fact by placing them in a warm room, reports the NYT:

The study, by Jane Risen, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, and Clayton Critcher, a marketing professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that university students placed in a heated room expressed higher confidence that global warming was a proven fact than those placed in a neutral control room...

"These results suggest that the mere experience of heat influenced belief in global warming," the researchers wrote...

Liberals and conservatives were similarly influenced by the raised temperatures, and the effect was present even when attention was drawn to the temperature of the room.

Continue reading "Putting So-Called "Deniers" In the Hot Seat " »

David Ropeik brings to light a pragmatic point about the psychological challenges to new nuclear power deployment caused by fear of nuclear power:

But, as is often the case with risk perception, emotional filters, more than the facts, determine how afraid we are, or aren't.

Whether this is rational or irrational, right or wrong, is irrelevant. It is, inescapably, how it is. But we must recognize that our response to risk can pose a danger all by itself. Our fear of nuclear power has led to energy economics that favor coal and oil for electricity, at great cost to human and environmental health. Particulate pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of Europeans every year, and CO2 emissions fuel a potentially calamitous shift in global climate.

No amount of education or good communication can get around this. Subjective risk perception is hard-wired into our architecture and chemistry. What governments can do is to learn what psychological research has established: our perceptions, as real as they are and as much as they must be respected in a democracy, can create their own perils.
With that understanding, government risk assessment can account not only for the facts, but also for how we feel about them and how we behave. That way, we can reduce conflict over nuclear power and other risk issues, and foster wiser and more productive policies for public and environmental health.

Cross-posted from Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog

The Indian government's decision to partially rescind subsidies for petroleum, diesel and kerosene, and the associated public reaction provides us with a natural policy experiment to see how the Indian public might respond to a high price on carbon (see the news report above for how that experiment turns out).

Continue reading "How Might Indians React to a $30/tonne Carbon Tax" »

At Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin discusses why we should stop waiting for the "fog of misinformation and disinformation on climate" to dissipate from the public mindset and instead focus on the developing "energy consensus" that we need clean, cheap energy to meet the expanding energy needs of quickly growing global population.

As Revkin puts it:

Reflecting on lawmakers' struggles over climate bills through most of the last decade, it seems clear that insistence on comprehensive one-step legislation including firm, declining caps on emissions from the get-go -- before building confidence and momentum around the new direction -- is a path to nowhere...

Given the stasis in the Senate, even with the "external" costs of fossil fuels on glaring display in the Gulf of Mexico, it may be time to start listening more to those proposing this more stepwise route forward. Such an approach would better reflect an unbending reality: A quest for new energy choices that advance human lives while limiting conflict and climate risks will require sustained work by a generation or more -- not just one Congress or president.

The majority of Americans do believe that Earth's climate is warming and they want the government to take action, according to Stanford Professor Jon Krosnick and his Political Psychology Research Group, but they still don't want to pay higher taxes. These findings echo Breakthrough's own social values research demonstrating strong public support for large-scale federal investment in clean energy R&D and greater support for carbon limits when they are coupled with policies, like public investment, that make clean energy cheaper.

Krosnick writes in the New York Times:

Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business's emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent -- but 76 percent. Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power. And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent). Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.

Continue reading "Public Still Believes in Climate Change " »

Environmentalists have long sought to use the threat of catastrophic global warming to persuade the public to embrace a low-carbon economy. But recent events, including the tainting of some climate research, have shown the risks of trying to link energy policy to climate science.

In Yale e360.org, Ted and Michael make the case that the recent decline in the public's belief in global warming is partly due to apocalypse fatigue. Mobilizing the public around an abstract, distant and long-term issue like climate change is hard enough. What makes it even harder is when advocates of action engage in an apocalyptic and hyper-partisan discourse demanding changes to the American way of life. "Rather than galvanizing public demand for difficult and far-reaching action," they write, "apocalyptic visions of global warming disaster have led many Americans to question the science."

Update (12/7/2009): Citing Nordhaus and Shellenberger, The Christian Science Monitor has weighed in on "apocalypse fatigue" with a thoughtful piece discussing public attitudes towards climate change and the challenge of engaging the public in such an abstract but urgent problem.

Experts reason that, after years of warnings of future disaster and protracted negotiations to achieve a climate treaty, a sense of fatigue has set in. The worldwide recession also has people focused on keeping their jobs, if they even have one, and on keeping a roof over their heads. That may be one reason President Obama rarely talks about climate change itself but frequently mentions the "green" jobs that fighting it will create.

Some even argue that Gore - his Nobel Prize notwithstanding - is a poor standard-bearer for the cause because he is seen as a partisan politician...

In fact, the louder and more alarmed climate advocates become in these efforts, the more they polarize the issue, driving away a conservative or moderate for every liberal they recruit to the cause," argue Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in the article "Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change," written for Yale Environment 360 magazine, a publication of Yale University's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Just up today at Yale e360, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' latest op-ed tackles the issue of "apocalypse fatigue".

Make no mistake, despite the ever growing consensus that global warming is a human induced problem, roughly fifteen percent fewer Americans believe that this is the case when compared with polls from as recent as April 2008 (from 71% in Apr 08, to 56% in Oct 09). Many pollsters blame the polls themselves for being flawed, many blame the recession. To get the whole picture, Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue, one must examine the way the global apocalyptic narrative is being "sold" to us.

The truth is both simpler and more complicated. It is simpler in the sense that most Americans just aren't paying a whole lot of attention. Between being asked about things like whether they would provide CPR to save the life of a pet (most pet owners say yes ) or whether they would allow their child to be given the swine flu vaccine (a third of parents say no), pollsters occasionally get around to asking Americans what they think about global warming. When they do, Americans find a variety of ways to tell us that they don't think about it very much at all.

Three years after it seemed that "An Inconvenient Truth" had changed everything, it turns out that it didn't. The current Pew survey is the latest in a series of studies suggesting that Al Gore probably had a good deal more effect upon elite opinion than public opinion.

Public opinion about global warming, it turns out, has been remarkably stable for the better part of two decades, despite the recent decline in expressed public confidence in climate science.

Further:

What is arguably most remarkable about U.S. public opinion on global warming has been both its stability and its inelasticity in response to new developments, greater scientific understanding of the problem, and greater attention from both the media and politicians. Public opinion about global warming has remained largely unchanged through periods of intensive media attention and periods of neglect, good economic times and bad, the relatively activist Clinton years and the skeptical Bush years. And majorities of Americans have, at least in principle, consistently supported government action to do something about global warming even if they were not entirely sold that the science was settled, suggesting that public understanding and acceptance of climate science may not be a precondition for supporting action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The more complicated questions have to do with why. Why have Americans been so consistently supportive of action to address climate change yet so weakly committed? Why has two decades of education and advocacy about climate change had so little discernible impact on public opinion? And why, at the height of media coverage and publicity about global warming in the years after the release of Gore's movie, did confidence in climate science actually appear to decline?

Read the full story here at Yale Environment 360.

Media Coverage of Apocalypse Fatigue:

The Christian Science Monitor: "Global Warming, Why Public Concern Declines"

Download the PDF here.

Download the PDF here.

Download the PDF here.

Media elites and environmentalists are howling over Hillary Rodham Clinton's and John McCain's call to suspend the gasoline tax. While the gas tax "holiday" is certainly a crass pander to working-class swing voters who are more concerned about rising energy prices than global warming, it is also a powerful warning to groups that hope to deal with climate change by increasing the cost of electricity.

Read the full article...

Earlier this year, the Nathan Cummings Foundation commissioned a review of publicly available polling data that demonstrated a substantive problem for initiatives to increase the price of carbon: energy cost anxiety. Voters consistently rated energy costs as a higher concern than global warming, and resisted policies that would increase the cost of electricity and gasoline.

This survey jointly conducted by American Environics and EMC Research confirmed that analysis.

Download the PDF here.

Download the PDF here.

Download the PDF here.

For 20 years, corporations have used socialvalues research to reposition old brands and create new ones. These tools are now available to progressives seeking to take advantage of changing trends in social values.

Download the full PDF.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger famously declare environmentalism dead, igniting a firestorm of controversy. (PDF)