Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) candidate Steve Lorteau (supplied photo)
Are you worried about climate change? Do your concerns predict your purchasing choices and opinions?
When it comes to framing climate policy, emotions matter, says Steve Lorteau, a doctoral candidate in environmental law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
“Climate policy, like other policy areas, are shaped by psychological factors,” he says. “Psychologists have long held that people form preferences based on emotions, not just robot-like calculations.”
“There’s a long tradition of legal scholars going to other fields to gain insights about the law. A classic example is if you think organ donation is a good thing, you tweak the law to make organ donation the default rather than an opt-in system.”
In a recent paper in Energy Policy, Lorteau and his co-authors in sociology and psychology from the University of British Columbia, Université de Montréal, University of Ottawa and Université de Saint-Boniface, undertook a meta-analysis on the link between climate concerns and worries and opinions about energy sources based on data from over 85,000 participants in 36 countries. The studies asked questions such as, “Are you concerned about climate change?” or “Are you worried about climate change?” The studies also asked participants questions about how they view different energy sources, such as support for wind, oil and gas and nuclear.
“At first, we expected that if you are concerned about climate change, you would support renewable energy like wind and solar and oppose coal, oil, and gas to the same degree. But that’s not what we found,” says Lorteau. “We found that people with concerns and worries about climate change supported renewables, but also found these emotional response only translate into a slight opposition to fossil fuels because people really like the status quo.
“Most people consider, how am I going to gas my car if there are no fossil fuels? How am I going to heat my home?”
Lorteau says because of this, policymakers need to consider how people view energy and climate policy questions, since emotional aspects will shape how they view change. This point builds upon Faculty of Law Professor Brenda Cossman’s earlier work on how climate anxiety can lead people away from the political process.
“In terms of a policy outcome, people don’t want to be inconvenienced. They seem to think that we can solve climate change by just adding more renewables to the mix while keeping the same baseline of fossil fuels, which is not the consensus among climate scientists.”
The analysis also found that climate concerns and worries were not associated with nuclear energy support or opposition. Lorteau says that support for nuclear energy tends to be context-dependent, as questions can be asked in a biased way. “Do you support zero emissions nuclear energy?” or, “You would you support a nuclear facility next door to you?” This resulted in an equal opposition and support, he says.
“Some countries rely heavily on nuclear energy, France being an example, and in those countries, I think some acceptance that nuclear energy is accepted and part of the status quo versus memories of where nuclear energy goes wrong and so those concerns become more salient,” he says.
For his doctoral research, Lorteau is focused on zoning laws in Canada and the U.S. and how people are concerned about being a loser when it comes to environmental policy change. He says zoning laws preserve and protect the status quo of property owners while not evaluating the potential gains that can happen in society, especially when it comes to environmental initiatives.
He says the concept of winners and losers when it comes to policy decisions is a big theme of University Professor Emeritus Michael J. Treblicock’s groundbreaking research, and an influence on his own,
"If the policy losers are powerful enough, have a legitimate claim or feel aggrieved, change won’t happen.”
“How do you bring environmentalism into a space that is so biased against it in big ways? You need to consider emotions, and the potential losers of a policy transition, to understand what their complaints are.”
Emotions may matter more than facts in shaping individual support for renewable energy, new study shows: The Conversation
