The influence of extractive activities on public support for renewable energy policy

Public Preferences in a Shifting Energy Future: Comparing Public Views of Eight Energy Sources in North America’s Pacific Northwest

“…We found evidence suggesting that respondents from the same county/districts felt somewhat similarly toward the various energy sources, though our model did not account for what specific local factors might be responsible for this. Previous work has found that local significance of energy industries can favorably influence residents' perceptions of those energy sources, and even unfavorable influence their perception of new or different energy sources [72,87,89,92]. In this study, we found that perceived local economic importance of energy industries was related to all energy types except nuclear, though we caution that our measure was based on respondent perception.…”

“…Using mixed effects modeling (also known as multilevel modeling) allowed us to account for possible unobserved heterogeneity at different spatial levels (known as random effects), in this case, county (or Canadian district) and state (or Canadian province). A mixed effects modeling approach helps account for similarities (if there are any) between respondents living in the same county/district or state/province [118] and is an increasingly common approach for analyzing spatially-dependent survey data [72,92,[119][120][121][122][123]. We used ordinal logistic regression modeling instead of ordinary least squares linear regression modeling because our dependent variables were categorical and not normally distributed (Supplementary Materials).…”

“…While global warming views are clearly relevant, it is not common practice to include this variable in the analyses of public energy preferences [55,70]. Past work with climate views included has found that believing that global warming is caused mostly by humans is significant for renewable energy support in some studies, but not in others [45,71,72], and that the public does consider emissions when weighing energy preferences [71]. Additionally, general environmental views have been found to influence energy preferences [4,5,10,73,74], though this is also not consistently measured across studies.…”

“…In general, renewable energy has been found to be less divisive along partisan lines than fossil fuels, though this can be context-dependent [78]. In fact, renewable energy facilities have received strong support in politically conservative places [52,72,[79][80][81] and tepid and/or hostile receptions in politically liberal areas, even from self-identified environmentalists [82,83].…”

“…In terms of "place" factors, geographic and contextual factors influence public views about different energies. Spatial variation in public energy attitudes has been found relating to the prominence of energy industries in the local/regional economy [72,87], perceptions about the economic and/or cultural significance of those industries [88][89][90][91], and individuals' distance from sites of energy extraction or production [92][93][94][95]. Generally, the literature has shown that proximity has a positive effect, that is, individuals living closer to sites of energy extraction and production are more supportive, though this relationship may not hold for proposed (as opposed to existing facilities) or renewable energy technologies and causality is unclear (i.e., does support precede or follow development?).…”