Energy Values Lab

Each December my colleagues and I travel to DC or somewhere far warmer like San Francisco or San Diego to meet and discuss the state of risk communication research.  One of the enduring foci of these meetings is climate change, and more specifically how we should go about communicating the risks of climate change and measuring people’s knowledge and perception of the same.  Disclaimer: we all fly in planes, some of us quite a distance, which is not especially climate-change friendly.

Ignoring our own behavior for a moment though, one of the most important–and disturbing–findings consistently coming out of this research is that communicating the risks of climate change rarely leads to a more informed or pro-active public.  Were this the case, we’d be well on our way to a carbon-neutral–or hold your breath, carbon-negative–energy system.  Sadly, neither of these appear to be anything but an environmentalist’s dream, and with the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., a dream that may become a fireable offense.

Some studies have even reported an inverse relationship between climate-change knowledge and concern (and pro-environmental behavior), i.e., the more people know about it the less concerned (and less action) they report!  How could this be?  Well, without writing an entire book on the matter, here are some interesting propositions.  Troy Campbell from Oregon University and Aaron Kay at Duke suggest it may be something called ‘solution aversion.’ Put simply, individuals may deny the existence of a problem because they fear the solution more than the problem itself.  Imagine yourself a coal miner in western Kentucky for a moment; simply believing in climate change might put your own job–and your relationships with colleagues and friends–in far more jeopardy than the results of climate change.

And according to Dan Kahan, those relationships may be the key.  Our beliefs are often important signals of loyalty to key peer groups and these relationships can lead us to process information differently–often in ways thought “incorrect” by scientists, a phenomena Kahan and others refer to as motivated reasoning.  How do we overcome motivated reasoning?  Simple.  We disconnect facts from identity.  Unfortunately the phenomena of “identity politics” is at an all-time high, and disconnecting facts from identity will likely prove as difficult as is separating facts from values.  Spoiler alert: facts can never be separate from values, and according to Dan Sarewitz, knowing more of the former often just reinforces the latter anyway.

So, if people’s beliefs, or reported beliefs–and the two may rarely be the same (at this year’s meeting Nic Pidgeon and Christina Demski presented provocative research examining the measures we use regarding climate-change related beliefs, make sure to bother them both for more information)– are more a function of their relationships or professional status than people’s “true” knowledge, how do we go about raising concern or encouraging pro-environmental behavior?

One way would be for environmentalists, (liberal) politicians, and–perhaps most of all–academics to acknowledge that significantly mitigating emissions and addressing climate change risk requires real, and in some cases downright terrible, trade-offs.  Bottom line: there will be losers.  If it helps, imagine the scene in There Will Be Blood where Daniel Day Lewis murders Paul Dano with a bowling pin; this is the fate I imagine many of the losers fear.  Addressing climate change risk is simply not on the whole a win-win.  Surely, there are more discrete win-win’s available–Joe Arvai at the University of Michigan spends a great deal of time searching them out–and if we think honestly about the earth’s future inhabitants, mitigating emissions seems far less costly and far more beneficial than is currently discussed.  And yes, the world’s mega-rich can certainly afford to lose quite a bit before they’d even notice any loss.  But, for men and women alive today and who are already struggling from paycheck to paycheck, arguing that mitigating emissions is critically important is simply duplicitous and ineffective.

This is especially so because many of those losers will be individuals that have long been ignored by progressive policies and the forces of globalization: think again of our coal-mining friend in western KY.  Ignoring these individuals is what cost liberals the 2016 election, and this ignorance is what will continue to slow any real movement on climate change.  Case in point, the enduring argument that switching to renewables will create thousands of green jobs.  Surely it would, but these jobs would be as unattainable for our friend in western KY as high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley are today.  A single mom of two with a high school diploma is not going to be designing wind turbines, and we all know it.

Is honesty enough?  Of course not.  Supporting–and god forbid elevating–people that have more to lose than to gain requires tough decisions, creative policy measures, and likely a redistribution of resources–and I don’t just mean from the Koch brothers.  Yep, you and I need to chip in too.  And you might be critical of this post as offering little in the way of such measures, and you wouldn’t be wrong.  Solutions are tough.  So much so that they can kill beliefs.  All I’m asking for is a bit of honesty regarding them.  We can’t create, compare and decide upon honest solutions if we ignore they’re even necessary.

More to come…

This December Robyn Wilson, Christian Beaudrie and I traveled to San Diego to report on a decision support framework we’re building to help organic farmers make ecological weed management decisions. This tool uses as its foundation mental models research done by Sarah Zwickle and the SDM principles that my colleagues and I rely on to improve complex, value-laden decisions.

Last spring, I traveled to New Orleans to meet with decision-makers and discuss efforts to manage the city’s sea-level rise and storm surge risks.  This followed a trip to interview residents and build a “values-informed” mental model, ViMM, which depicts their values as a function of specific climate risk factors and management strategies.  Our paper describing this model is now out in Risk Analysis, and the abstract is below.

We used the mental models research method to generate a conceptual map of how Midwest farmers use knowledge, experience, and individual perceptions of weed-related risk to make weed management decisions. We discovered that Midwest farmer knowledge of ecological weed management practices is robust, and that the difficult trade-offs farmers make regarding cultivation, cover crops, and soil health determine what weed management practices they use. Midwest farmers balance the risks of cultivation and implementation of cover crops with their valuable benefits to soil health and weed suppression. Developing a decision support tool that provides a baseline of scientific evidence and that offers flexibility based on farmers’ experiences and values will clarify these trade-offs and guide effective decision-making.

Facilitating Ecological Weed Management Decisions by Assessing Risk-Benefit Tradeoffs

Decision support for developing energy strategies

In an effort to reduce “carbon pollution” as well as prepare the U.S. for the impacts of climate change, President Obama’s 2013 Climate Action Plan calls for changes to be made to the nation’s energy system. In addition to focusing on alternative portfolios of different fuels and power-generation technologies, researchers and advisory panels have urged that changes to the nation’s energy system be based on a decision-making framework that incorporates stakeholders and accounts for real-world resource, supply, and demand constraints. To date, research and development on such a framework have proven elusive. The research reported here describes the development and test of a potential decision support framework that combines elements from structured decision-making (SDM) with portfolio analysis, methods that have been used independently to elicit preferences in complex decision contexts. This hybrid framework aimed to (1) provide necessary background information to users regarding the development of coupled climate-energy strategies; (2) account for users’ values and objectives; (3) allow for the construction of bespoke energy portfolios bounded by real-world supply and demand constraints; and (4) provide a more rigorous basis for addressing trade-offs. Results show that this framework was user-friendly, led to significant increases in users’ knowledge about energy systems and, importantly, led to more internally consistent decisions. For these reasons, this framework may serve as a suitable template for supporting decisions about energy transitions in the United States and abroad.

Decision support framework for developing regional energy strategies

Decisions about energy in developing communities are challenging from a technical standpoint, and because of the unique characteristics that typify them, e.g. limited infrastructure and government budgets, complex social and political arrangements, and economic vulnerability. Against the backdrop of these challenges, the government of Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT) is attempting to reform the region’s energy system. This paper provides insights from the decision sciences, stemming from our work on the NWT’s energy planning process, about how to structure decisions about energy development and delivery so as to effectively meet a range of stakeholders’ objectives in a transparent and inclusive manner.

Structuring decisions about energy in developing communities: an example from Canada’s north

This article presents research aimed at developing and testing an online, multistakeholder decision-aiding framework for informing multiattribute risk management choices associated with energy development and climate change. The framework was designed to provide necessary background information and facilitate internally consistent choices, or choices that are in line with users’ prioritized objectives. In order to test different components of the decision-aiding framework, a six-part, 2 × 2 × 2 factorial experiment was conducted, yielding eight treatment scenarios. The three factors included: (1) whether or not users could construct their own alternatives; (2) the level of detail regarding the composition of alternatives users would evaluate; and (3) the way in which a final choice between users’ own constructed (or highest-ranked) portfolio and an internally consistent portfolio was presented. Participants’ self-reports revealed the framework was easy to use and providing an opportunity to develop one’s own risk-management alternatives (Factor 1) led to the highest knowledge gains. Empirical measures showed the internal consistency of users’ decisions across all treatments to be lower than expected and confirmed that providing information about alternatives’ composition (Factor 2) resulted in the least internally consistent choices. At the same time, those users who did not develop their own alternatives and were not shown detailed information about the composition of alternatives believed their choices to be the most internally consistent. These results raise concerns about how the amount of information provided and the ability to construct alternatives may inversely affect users’ real and perceived internal consistency.

Expanding the Reach of Participatory Risk Management: Testing an Online Decision-Aiding Framework for Informing Internally Consistent Choices