Cheap and Clean
How Americans Think about Energy in the Age of Global Warming
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- $54.99
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- $54.99
Publisher Description
How Americans make energy choices, why they think locally (not globally), and how this can shape U.S. energy and climate change policy.
How do Americans think about energy? Is the debate over fossil fuels highly partisan and ideological? Does public opinion about fossil fuels and alternative energies divide along the fault between red states and blue states? And how much do concerns about climate change weigh on their opinions? In Cheap and Clean, Stephen Ansolabehere and David Konisky show that Americans are more pragmatic than ideological in their opinions about energy alternatives, more unified than divided about their main concerns, and more local than global in their approach to energy.
Drawing on extensive surveys they designed and conducted over the course of a decade (in conjunction with MIT's Energy Initiative), Ansolabehere and Konisky report that beliefs about the costs and environmental harms associated with particular fuels drive public opinions about energy. People approach energy choices as consumers, and what is most important to them is simply that energy be cheap and clean. Most of us want energy at low economic cost and with little social cost (that is, minimal health risk from pollution). The authors also find that although environmental concerns weigh heavily in people's energy preferences, these concerns are local and not global. Worries about global warming are less pressing to most than worries about their own city's smog and toxic waste. With this in mind, Ansolabehere and Konisky argue for policies that target both local pollutants and carbon emissions (the main source of global warming). The local and immediate nature of people's energy concerns can be the starting point for a new approach to energy and climate change policy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ansolabehere (The End of Inequality) professor of government at Harvard, and Konisky (Superfund's Future), professor of public policy at Georgetown, guide readers to a single conclusion in this rigorous study of the nation's attitudes toward our energy supply. The authors base their work on a decade-long series of surveys that convincingly demonstrate that American citizens have a clear preference for energy that is both cheap and clean, regardless of its source. They further show that concerns over reducing local pollution outweigh price considerations. After they have driven home the first two points, the authors turn to policy implications for attempts at abating climate change. Americans, although concerned about local environmental harms are, as it turns out, unwilling to pay "substantially higher energy prices in order to substantially reduce carbon emissions." Yet, what Americans may support and Californians have already supported is legislation pitched as pollution control. In-depth statistical analyses make it clear that this work is intended for policy wonks, academics, and others who work on these issues at a high level, but it should nonetheless prove to be an important contribution to the ongoing debate over energy and environmental policy.
