The 2013 Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy signed by the Governors of California, Oregon, and Washington and the Premier of British Columbia launched a broadly announced public commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through multiple strategies. Those strategies include the development and increased use of renewable energy sources. The initiative recognized that citizens are both a central component in abating greenhouse gas emissions with regard to their energy use behaviors, and are important participants in the public policymaking process at both state and local levels of government. The study reported here examines whether either support or opposition to state government leadership in the development of alternative energy technologies can be explained by environmental values as measured by the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP). The research results are based on mail surveys of randomly selected households conducted throughout Oregon and Washington in late 2009 and early 2010. Findings suggest that younger and more highly educated respondents are significantly more likely than older and less educated respondents to either support or strongly support government policies to promote bioenergy, wind, geothermal, and solar energy. Those respondents with higher NEP scores are also more supportive of government promotion of wind, geothermal, and solar technologies than are those with lower NEP scores. Support for wave energy does not show a statistical correlation with environmental values, maybe a reflection of this technology's nascent level of development. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of these findings for environmental management.
This study presents a systematic investigation of the level of job satisfaction among a national cross-section of early labor force participants in the public and private employment sectors in the late 1980s. While the conventional wisdom would suggest that there is a "crisis" in the level of job satisfaction among public sector employees—due to extensive "bureaucrat bashing" and the alienative internal dynamics of working within overly rigid and rule-bound organizations—the findings presented here suggest that public sector employees manifest sig nificantly higher levels of job satisfaction than their private sector counterparts. After control ling for a variety of background, personal, and situational factors, the higher level of public sector job satisfaction remains. The empirical evidence utilized in this study is from the National Longitudinal Survey's Youth Cohort.
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