Rachael Shwom

Support for Climate Change Policy: Social Psychological and Social Structural Influences.

Abstract  We investigated preferences for climate change mitigation policies and factors contributing to higher levels of policy support. The sample was comprised of 316 Michigan and Virginia residents, all of whom completed mail surveys. Of the eight policies proposed to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, respondents overwhelmingly indicated they would not support a gas tax, while support was highest for shifting subsidies away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy strategies. With the exception of taxes on gasoline and “gas guzzlers,” a majority of respondents supported all other mitigation policies. Multivariate analyses revealed that greater trust in environmentalists and less trust in industry, greater recognition of the consequences of climate change, higher income, being black, and older age were predictive of greater policy support. Personal values (e.g., altruism), future orientation, and political affiliation were strong predictors of policy support but only indirectly via worldviews and environmental beliefs.

Understanding Public Opinion on Climate Change: A Call for Research

There is strong scientific consensus concerning the reality of anthropogenic climate change (CC) and its potential consequences.1 However, increased confidence among scientists has not translated into a public consensus within the United States.2 Indeed, numerous polls indicate a decline in public acceptance of CC over the past two to three years (although some polls show a slight uptick since mid-2010). For example, Gallup Polls, trends for which appear in the figure here, show substantial declines from 2008 to 2010 in the percentages of Americans believing that global warming is already occurring (61 percent to 50 percent); that it is due more to human activities than natural changes (58 percent to 50 percent); and that most scientists believe it is occurring (65 percent to 52 percent).3 Even prior to the recent decline in Americans’ acceptance of CC, cross-national surveys consistently found that the U.S. public was less likely to believe that CC is occurring and poses a problem than do citizens in most other wealthy nations.4 This uniquely high level of skepticism and the recent decline in public acceptance of CC are a challenge to the scientific community and call for increased examination of the factors influencing public opinion on CC. Although UNDERSTANDING PUBLIC Opinion on Climate Change:

Understanding Factors That Influence Stakeholder Trust of Natural Resource Science and Institutions

Building trust between resource users and natural resource institutions is essential when creating conservation policies that rely on stakeholders to be effective. Trust can enable the public and agencies to engage in cooperative behaviors toward shared goals and address shared problems. Despite the increasing attention that trust has received recently in the environmental management literature, the influence that individual cognitive and behavioral factors may play in influencing levels of trust in resource management institutions, and their associated scientific assessments, remains unclear. This paper uses the case of fisheries management in the northeast to explore the relationships between an individual’s knowledge of the resource, perceptions of resource health, and participatory experience on levels of trust. Using survey data collected from 244 avid recreational anglers in the Northeast U.S., we test these relationships using structural equation modeling. Results indicate that participation in fisheries management is associated with increased trust across all aspects of fisheries management. In addition, higher ratings of resource health by anglers are associated with higher levels of trust of state and regional institutions, but not federal institutions or scientific methods.

A middle range theorization of energy politics: the struggle for energy efficient appliances

Treadmill of production (TOP) theory and ecological modernization theory (EMT) are adapted to a middle-range theorization of energy politics, specifying the conditions that each theory would best apply to struggles over the energy system. It is hypothesized that EMT will prevail when there are high levels of public awareness of an issue, a record of past regulation, a threat of future regulation, and disunity of the business class; and that TOP power relations are more likely to prevail are low public consciousness, absence of past regulation, low threat of future regulation, and high levels of business unity. The usefulness of this contextualized approach is explored using a historical qualitative case study of the struggle in the United States to implement national mandatory and voluntary definitions of energy efficiency for home appliances. The implications of the findings are discussed in light of efforts to transform energy systems.

An interdisciplinary assessment of climate engineering strategies

Mitigating further anthropogenic changes to the global climate will require reducing greenhouse-gas emissions ( abatement ), or else removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and/or diminishing solar input ( climate engineering ). Here, we develop and apply criteria to measure technical, economic, ecological, institutional, and ethical dimensions of, and public acceptance for, climate engineering strategies; provide a relative rating for each dimension; and offer a new interdisciplinary framework for comparing abatement and climate engineering options. While abatement remains the most desirable policy, certain climate engineering strategies, including forest and soil management for carbon sequestration, merit broad-scale application. Other proposed strategies, such as biochar production and geological carbon capture and storage, are rated somewhat lower, but deserve further research and development. Iron fertilization of the oceans and solar radiation management, although cost-effective, received the lowest ratings on most criteria. We conclude that although abatement should remain the central climate-change response, some low-risk, cost-effective climate engineering approaches should be applied as complements. The framework presented here aims to guide and prioritize further research and analysis, leading to improvements in climate engineering strategies.

Nonprofit-Business Partnering Dynamics in the Energy Efficiency Field

What explains differentiation in a nonprofit’s organizational practices around partnering with businesses? I propose that attendance at events plays a role. To explore this, I identify a network of energy and environmental nonprofit organizations and the events that brought them together to influence appliance energy efficiency from 1994 to 2006. Using network analysis to identify cohesive subgroups, I find that over time, organizations become more likely to choose one type of event over another suggesting niche development occurred in the field. I also find that, controlling for previous efforts with businesses, funding, and mission, organizations that belonged to a cohesive subgroup of organizations brought together by an annual event promoting cooperative market approaches from 2001 to 2006 were five times more likely than those nonprofits in other subgroups to partner with business. This research has implications for understanding the creation of new events and its impact on organizational practices.

Improving Coastal Storm Evacuation Messages

AbstractEvacuation before severe coastal storms is a critical tool for keeping coastal residents safe. Effective messaging of evacuations could help save lives, but there is little evidence-based guidance on the advantages or disadvantages of specific messaging. Ideally, evacuation messages would convince those most at risk to evacuate and those who do not need to evacuate to stay in their homes. Using an online survey of 1716 coastal residents in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, this study randomly assigned respondents to message conditions in each of two hypothetical storm scenarios. Results from the first scenario indicate that those who saw mandatory evacuation messages had higher evacuation intentions than those who saw advisory messages, and both of those messages resulted in slightly higher evacuation intentions than voluntary evacuation messages. However, voluntary messages resulted in lower evacuation intentions for those that did not live in evacuation zones compared to those who did live ...

Friend or foe? Why US energy efficiency nonprofits collaborate with business and government

Relations between business, government, and environmental nonprofits have changed significantly over the past two decades. The energy efficiency field in the United States exemplifies these shifts. While in the past their interactions were usually adversarial, today many in these sectors collaborate in running a gamut of energy efficiency programs focused on changing household and business use of energy. This paper offers a unique glimpse into how and why these partnerships have evolved. We analyze sixteen interviews with individuals that have upper-level decision-making experience at 11 different US energy efficiency nonprofit organizations. Our data provide support for a number of organizational factors theorized in the literature to influence nonprofits’ decision to partner with business to achieve their goals. However, most decisive were a series of legislative wins and losses which forced both sides to negotiate face to face, changing intergroup perceptions and ultimately leading to more cooperative relationships over the long term.

Development of the Partner’s Treatment of Animals Scale

ABSTRACT Although studies of the relationship between animal abuse and intimate partner violence have proliferated in recent years, building upon previous work and making cross-study comparisons have been rendered difficult by the utilization of differing operationalizations of animal maltreatment within this literature. This paper aims to mitigate this problem by introducing and detailing a scale of animal maltreatment by romantic partners, developed and tested with a sample of 55 women in domestic violence shelters who self-identified as victims of intimate partner violence. The Partner’s Treatment of Animals Scale (PTAS) is comprised of five scales (emotional animal abuse, threats to harm animals, animal neglect, physical animal abuse, and severe physical animal abuse) that have strong demonstrated reliability. The construction of the scales is presented in this paper, and recommendations are made for employing the PTAS in subsequent studies.

Public Participation and Norm Formation for Risky Technology: Adaptive Governance of Solar-Radiation Management

As the international community comes to grips with climate destabilization, it has begun to evaluate potentially risky technologies, such as geoengineering, to mitigate the effects of warming. The geoengineering technology known as solar-radiation management ( SRM ) poses many risks. There is also great uncertainty about whether society will decide to deploy SRM in the future. Managing these risks and uncertainties requires adaptive governance that will be responsive to new knowledge and changing social systems. We analyse the dimensions of public participation and norm-formation mechanisms of current SRM -related legal regimes and governance proposals. We find that there is a need for the social sciences, including legal and governance scholars, to engage with the theoretical and pragmatic challenges of engaging diverse and vulnerable publics fairly and efficiently.