Introduction to the special issue “Trust, mistrust, distrust, and trust-building in the nuclear sector: historical and comparative experience from Europe”

Studies on the relationship between religious attitudes and attitudes towards climate change and other environmental issues have tended to focus on the United States. While there is good reason to expect such a relationship to exist, our understanding of it is limited first and foremost by the limited number of country-comparative studies. This study aims to reduce this gap by investigating how trust in the Church and evaluations of Pope Francis affect the views of Latin Americans on anthropogenic climate change. Our study is based on data from the 2017 Latinobarómetro with 13,472 respondents based in 18 Latin American countries. Our findings reveal that Roman Catholics are less likely to believe in manmade climate change as compared to evangelical Christians and respondents belonging to no or any other denomination. We obtain the same negative relationship between trust in the (Catholic) Church and belief in anthropogenic climate change. However, favourable assessments of Pope Francis have a positive effect, and this assessment also has a positive moderating effect on the impact of trust in the Church on the outcome variable. These findings have important implications for climate policies, as they suggest that the public demand for climate action might increase if the Roman Catholic Church in their regional dioceses, rather than mostly the Pope, were to take and communicate a more coherent, affirmative position on climate change.

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“We are a nuclear community”: The Ethical, Political Economic, and Social Relations of Canadian Nuclear Waste Siting

Bell

2024

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Nuclear waste poses unique challenges that transcend everyday temporalities and shape socio‐political and economic relations across temporal, spatial, and epistemic dimensions. This paper draws from ethnographic research in Canada, to understand how the political economy, power relations, and ethical landscapes of a specific “nuclear community” inform perception and engagement with a “community‐driven” process to permanently store high‐level radioactive waste. The local nuclear industry has effectively fostered deep political economic and cultural ties to the community, resulting in a sense of nuclear pride within an exclusive and cohesive nuclear community in Bruce County. This paper examines what it means to be a nuclear community, the ways in which people identify with being a nuclear community, and how this identification shapes the ethical landscapes that inform how local communities in the Bruce region engage with the nuclear waste siting process.

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Introduction to the special issue “Trust, mistrust, distrust, and trust-building in the nuclear sector: historical and comparative experience from Europe”

Cited by 3 publications

References 68 publications

The Social License to Operate Across the Energy Industry: Lessons for Low-Carbon Energy from Oil and Gas

The Social License to Operate Across the Energy Industry: Lessons for Low-Carbon Energy from Oil and Gas

Pope Francis the Roman Catholic Church and citizen attitudes towards climate change in Latin America

“We are a nuclear community”: The Ethical, Political Economic, and Social Relations of Canadian Nuclear Waste Siting

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