Public perceptions and governance of controversial technologies to tackle climate change: nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, wind, and geoengineering

Abstract

The role carbon emissions play in contributing to climate change makes clear the necessity for a global reconsideration of current modes of energy production. In recent years, as concerns over the threats of climate change (CC) have become more acute, four technologies have notably risen to the forefront of academic and public discourse: nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS), wind power, and geoengineering. The particular interest of these four approaches lies in the fact that they reflect both energy production and climate control technologies, are often socially controversial, and present complex challenges of governance. Nuclear and wind power both deserve an important place among the variety of low‐carbon energy options. In countries where public acceptance is evaluated, although, support for nuclear energy appears to be conditional upon simultaneous development of other renewable energies alongside a feasible plan to address the disposal of nuclear waste. The Fukushima accident sharply increased public concern about the safety and vulnerability of nuclear reactors. While wind power receives general public support, issues of accommodation can arise when it comes to siting wind farms. Persistent dependency upon carbon‐producing energy has made favorable the option of CCS. However, in addition to technical and geological factors, social resistance to the placement of carbon storage units remains a key obstacle. Geoengineering offers the technological capacity to directly act on the climate should levels of atmospheric CO2 become dangerously high. Public perception regarding the risk of climate change can be labile, and the alternatives reviewed here share the characteristic that their technical and political dimensions are intertwined. The variety of options for combining and implementing these technologies, coupled with the inherently time‐sensitive nature of CC, underscore the complexity of the endeavor. In order to bridge these various levels of analysis and decision making, and to better understand and integrate people's involvement, exercises in risk governance could be developed at both the national and international levels. WIREs Clim Change 2011 2 712–727 DOI: 10.1002/wcc.134This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Social Amplification/Attenuation of Climate Risks The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Policies, Instruments, Lifestyles, Behavior

Towards a better understanding of people’s responses to renewable energy technologies: Insights from Social Representations Theory

“…First, it also materializes specific technological innovations (Bauer, 1995), devised in order to perform that task. While the use of renewable sources for the generation of energy, such as wind or water, is already a very old practice (Poumadère, Bertoldo, & Samadi, 2011), the design, size, and embeddedness at different geographical scales of current infrastructures for the generation of electricity or heat from those sources, namely within centralised models of electricity systems, are new and unfamiliar to most individuals and groups (Poumadère et al, 2011). These new 9 artefacts are being deployed in specific historical and societal contexts, in which different representations co-exist about energy, space and place, landscape, citizenship and so forth, and where particular individuals and groups will thus attribute distinct meanings to the same technologies (Pinch & Bijker, 1987).…”

Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance

“…Fourthly, it is assumed that new institutional arrangements for the proper regulation of geoengineering can in principle be built on existing international instruments used to regulate transboundary issues, and more generally can be accommodated within the structures of democratic national and international governance (see discussion in Virgoe, 2 2009). Fifthly, it is assumed that survey, qualitative and public engagement research can help clarify public attitudes to solar radiation management (see Ipsos-MORI, 2010;Leiserowitz et al, 2010;Mercer et al, 2011;Parkhill and Pidgeon, 2011;Pidgeon et al, 2012;Poumadere et al, 2011;Spence et al, 2010), and that the main role of such research should be to incorporate value-based considerations about geoengineering into decision-making (see Corner et al, 2012 for a review). Notwithstanding the importance of such research, what has been insufficiently explored is how public engagement methods can be used to explore the kinds of world that solar radiation management techniques might bring into being, and thereby to critically explore the assumptions that underpin governance debates around this technology.…”

Questioning the technological fix to climate change – Lay sense-making of geoengineering in Sweden

“…The first is primarily quantitative and maps public opinions or perceptions. A few surveys have estimated lay knowledge or perceptions of GE (NERC, 2010;Kahan et al, 2012;Pidgeon et al, 2012;Merk et al, 2014;Wright et al, 2014; see also Poumadere et al, 2011), finding that only a few per cent of respondents had heard of GE and that even fewer knew about its basic principles. A survey of public perceptions of GE in the US, the UK and Canada found that only 8% of respondents were somewhat familiar with GE (Mercer et al, 2011).…”