Public Opinion and Climate Policy
March 12th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
I have long argued that public opinion on climate policy is sufficiently robust to allow for action to take place — the key question being, what action? A new poll out from Gallup shows that the public — across the political spectrum — is increasingly viewing media representations of climate science to be exaggerated.
These numbers do say something about how the public views the hyper-charged debate over climate change, and many observers will see them as having some relevance to climate policy. More important is the fact that public concern about climate cahnge has been remarkably stable over time, as shown by the following Gallup graph.
Rather than seeing public opinion as a something to move as a prerequisite to action on certain climate policies, perhaps it is time for the experts to instead shape climate policies to fit the realities of public opinion. To paraphrase Walter Lippmann, the goal of politics is not to get everyone to think alike, but rather, to get people who think differently to act alike.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Heaven save us from the ravages of “experts”. Experts already ruined the economy. Until experts learn some humility and begin to recognize their inherent human limitations, we’ll all be better off without their “help”.
March 12th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Those are nice even numbers for believing AWG is exaggerated. Democrats, independents, and Republicans are 22, 44, and 66.
A mathematically pure way to create policy that matches public opinion would be to have independents pay twice as much carbon tax as Republicans and Democrats pay three times as much.
Or, just maybe, mathematical purity and public policy don’t play together.
And yes I know this comment is redundant to stan’s.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Any kind of carbon tax proposal will send these numbers soaring. The public will see it as an excuse for a tax grab.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Looking at the Gallup blog, I find two things really striking:
On question 19, the fraction of people who think global warming will never happen is way up, but still small (16%); it would seem that a great majority still believes in the idea of warming, even if they’re not particularly worried about it.
On question 13, global warming concern is well below concern for “maintenance of the nation’s supply of fresh water for household needs,” which is hardly threatened. It’s also interesting that concern for warming is lower than for extinction and deforestation, even though it would contribute to both.
Re 1 – There were economic bubbles long before there were expert economic policy advisers. The current wreck of the economy looks to me like a decidedly distributed, political, unregulated phenomenon.
Re 2 – Even if there’s such a thing as a mathematically pure policy, there’s nothing mathematically pure about pricing proportional to beliefs. That would be like charging people who believe that goats eat grass more to graze their herd on the common than those who don’t. An economically efficient and libertarian approach would be to allocate property rights in the atmosphere and hold a two-sided Vickrey auction among individuals to determine the price of emissions. The outcome would look quite different from your proposal. Such a setup could probably be crafted such that those who are concerned pay a small insurance premium, which those who aren’t are liable for the outcome. The trouble is the same as with portfolio insurance and CDS: if the right tail downside comes true, the deniers are unlikely to have the resources to compensate the alarmists.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
tomfid,
If the alarmists dire predictions are true then we are toast and we should be investing heavily in adaptation – not mitigation.
The problem that alarmists have is they are trying to claim that the problem is serious enough to require a radical restructuring of society but not serious enough to have crossed the point of no return.
What this means is the alarmists will be wrong no matter what happens. i.e. if it is as bad as predicted then resources spent on mitigation would have been better spent on adaption. If it is not as bad as predicted then resources spent on migitation were wasted.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I wonder what role the timing of the poll has on the results. While certainly polling in July or August would produce results biased by hot summers, it seems equally as plausible that this years numbers have been influenced by a colder winter with some significant snow events.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
The funny thing is that local, renewable energy is a good thing for a variety of reasons.
You are employing local people
Decentralized is less easily threatened than centralized
We would not have to go to war with other countries to get fuel.
Oddly, the solutions probably have more support because they solve many real-world already observed problems. So you don’t need to think that climate change is the worst problem to be supportive of many climate change helping energy solutions.
March 13th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Raven, surely the problem is that they are not saying in any concrete way that we have to restructure society?
They are saying something even more inconsistent and incomprehensible: that the problem is so acute and so urgent that unless dramatic results are delivered in the very near future, human civilization on earth will vanish in a catastrophe.
But when confronted with the suggestion that in that case, maybe we should right now do things which will have a major immediate impact on energy use and emissions, and given a list of candidates, which all necessarily have to involve large scale social change, they reject them all and start talking about how we should, as individuals, maybe eat less red meat and put wind turbines in our gardens and drive hybrids. None of which are even remotely on a scale to make a dent in a problem of the size and urgency they allege is facing us. Even if there was any chance that everyone would do it.
There seems to be a truly crazed idea about that individual action can replace social programs on this issue.
Its totally baffling. The sort of analogy that springs to mind is that a hurricane is forecast to land. It is forecast to be of hitherto unseen force, if forecasts are right, there will not be one stone left on another two weeks from now. So people say, if that is so, maybe the government should mandate evacuation into inland shelters and get the agencies going on doing it?
And the reply is, oh no, we should all start filling sandbags, and stop denying the forecast.
As you contemplate this chasm between problem diagnosed and remedial action recommended, you notice the movement’s extraordinary emphasis on states of mind. The activities are all directed to obtaining belief, or at least public assent, and not action. People who question the hypothesis are called deniers, have their personal motivation questioned, are accused of having associations with bodies thought wicked. There is however no such emphasis on people who oppose particular social programs designed to reduce emissions sufficiently, because there are no such programs.
If you talk about this on committed sites, you’ll find a tirade of accusations that you are a denialist motivated by desire to continue your high-carbon lifestyle. Never mind that your lifestyle may be as low carbon as an individual can get it, never mind that the accusers may every day be driving around the freeway systems of the highest per capital energy consumption culture on the planet. Never mind that they on average quite certainly eat many times the red meat you do. This is about states of mind, you have questioned the group social consensus, and so must be reproved as an heretic or unbeliever.
It must be possible that the predictions of doom are scientifically valid. But the movement is conducting itself like a faith based religion, not a political movement with concrete aims which will remedy the scientific diagnosis. And this, if the predictions are valid, is going to lead to exactly the catastrophe they predict. If the movement is right about the problem, their behaviour is definitely part of that problem, its not part of the solution, because the only remedy to the problem is large scale social change and immediate dramatic reductions in energy use, which they not only do not support, but actively oppose.
Roger is absolutely right to be studying this, its a fascinating and disturbing real time example of the interplay between science and policy. And between belief based movements and political action programs.
March 13th, 2009 at 2:14 am
Should climate policies fit public opinion or scientific evidence?
How the public thinks about climate change is clearly out of synch with how the majority of scientists think about the problem. (see eg http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1978 where the media is partly blamed for this divergence)
I agree that for policies to be in synch with public opinion, they should already be much stronger than is currently the case. But even such policies may not go far enough to ward off potentially disastrous climate change in the future. That poses a very difficult dilemma, and to solve it requires that public and scientific opinion start converging.
Both scientists and media need to step up to the plate to achieve this needed convergence. The scientist’s role in this is very tricky, since they have to balance different ways of communicating (see http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/catch-22/). The journalist’s role is also tricky, because without full knowledge of the science they can easily get stuck in creating a false balance and thus painting a biased view of the science. (see e.g. the latest controversy involving Revkin – Will – Gore – Tobis)
Bart
March 13th, 2009 at 2:31 am
The poll questions imply that global warming is a bad thing. A less biased poll would ask is global warming good or bad.
Which is preferable global cooling or global warming?
Is it possible for humans to control the climate?
Is the rapid increase in plant life a good thing?
I believe rising CO2 is a great benefit to the biosphere and the overwhelming majority of life on the planet. This point of view is virtually non-existent in the debate. The whole debate over CO2 is a farce. It is a modern witch hunt. Lots of very smart people are thinking and acting very stupid. That’s what happens when you mix politics and religion with science.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:37 am
Asking how serious people think a problem is without associating a cost with it isn’t really that useful. Talking about benefits without costs doesn’t tell you much.
A better question would be what percentage of your current income would you be prepared to forego to resolve problem X?
March 13th, 2009 at 5:24 am
Re#10 – Things do not always boil down to a simple dollar based cost analysis. Imagine for instance if every parent was asked how much of their money they would give to save their child, most would likely say everything they had. Now, how about a friends child, or neighbors child, or a nameless child across the country or world? The value in each case would likely diminish to the individual, but is the true value of each of the children really any different.
Because we all place different values on things like roads, jails, healthcare, etc. we end up living in situations where we accept to some level that societal value of issues may be different than our own and in the case of the US elect our leaders accordingly. The reality is that CO2 is a global issue as it has a long enough atmospheric life span that what you do at point at impacts (you can use the box model here to estimate CO2 residence time in atmosphere – http://www.as.harvard.edu/ctm/publications/jacobbook/bookchap3.pdf). So at some point we have to count on those we entrust with making decisions beyond our personal realm to make wise judgments on the societal costs.
I actually found the most useful part of the poll to be the rating of environmental issues in question 13. It is interesting to see how people rate things that are tangible and real in the current time line and have personal effect, like pollution in water, compared to items that are not as easy to see the direct connection to their own lives, like rain forests, extinction, global warming. And the one question that pollsters avoid, because it does not always fit their quantitative nature, is ‘why’?
March 19th, 2009 at 9:36 am
[...] Aliyah Chronicles created an interesting post today on Public Opinion and Climate PolicyHere’s a short outline…important is the fact that public concern about climate cahnge has been remarkably stable over time, as shown by the following Gallup graph. [...]