UAlbany News Podcast

Climate Change Pt. 1 with Brian Greenhill: Policy That Persuades

Episode Summary

Policymakers take one of two approaches when addressing the risks of climate change: adaptation and mitigation. On this episode, Brian Greenhill provides insight into how the two approaches can have a more symbiotic relationship when it comes to convincing the public to take action against global warming. Greenhill is an associate professor of political science at UAlbany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.

Episode Notes

Policymakers take one of two approaches when addressing the risks of climate change: adaptation and mitigation. On this episode, Brian Greenhill provides insight into how the two perspectives can have a more symbiotic relationship when it comes to convincing the public to take action against global warming. Greenhill is an associate professor of political science at UAlbany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.

The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.

Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews. This show is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Radio Public, Spotify, iHeart Radio and TuneIn.

Episode Transcription

Sarah O.:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll.

Sarah O.:
The United Nation's landmark report on climate change issued in October, warns of mass food shortages, widespread wildfires, and a catastrophic loss of coral reefs as soon as 2040. With me today is Brian Greenhill, an associate professor of political science and UAlbany's Rockefeller College. His research focuses on the politics of climate change and public persuasion.

Newscaster:
Climate change warnings often seemed far off and hard to imagine, but not today. This morning the UN's climate change panel released what its author's claim as the most important climate change report ever published, and they're telling us that we need "rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society."

Sarah O.:
Brian, policymakers take one of two approaches when addressing the risks of climate change. Can you break down for us the argument for each side?

Brian Greenhill:
Okay. So most of the discussion about the impact of climate change focuses on what we call mitigation strategies, which means efforts to try to reduce the extent of the problem. And so far as we're reducing the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere, which will then in turn reduce the extent to which the atmosphere warms up and results in climate change. So these kinds of preventive strategies are what we call mitigation because it doesn't stop the problem entirely, but it will at least make the problem less acute than it's going to be.

Brian Greenhill:
The second set of approaches that we talk about are what are called adaptation approaches, which is about getting human society to adapt to the fact that we're living in the world with a changing climate. So we're going to see ... As a result of higher average temperatures, we're going to see rising sea levels, more flooding. We're going to see more extreme weather events like hurricanes and wild fires. And so part of what we have to do as a human society is just adapt to these changes.

Sarah O.:
Okay. Now, how do these positions critique or perhaps attempt to undercut the countervailing view?

Brian Greenhill:
So within the environmental community, there's been a lot of hesitance to address or to encourage people to embrace adaptation measures. Because the worry is that if you get people to start adapting to climate change rather than trying to mitigate it, they will then feel that perhaps climate change is some more manageable kind of problem. I mean of course we want people to think of this as being a problem that they can and should take action to try to solve, but we want the focus mainly to be on trying to kind of mitigate the larger problem in the first place.

Brian Greenhill:
In other words, we want the focus to be on trying to keep the rising global temperatures from rising too far. And the understandable concern on the part of many environmental advocates has been that if you shift the discussion to focusing instead on the issue of adaptation and how do we kind of adapting and get used to living in the warming world, then people will start to become somewhat complacent about dealing with the fact that we do need to actually stop this problem from potentially becoming more ... Or potentially catastrophic in years to come.

Sarah O.:
Well, you said, adapting is not solving the problem and that's not the only approach we should take.

Brian Greenhill:
That's right. I mean you can think of it as almost like the difference between prevention and the cure. I mean we all know it's much better to say prevent some disease or something bad outcome than to just have to cure it or deal with it once you already have the disease.

Brian Greenhill:
When it comes to dealing with climate change, there's still obviously a lot we can do with regard to prevention. In this case, what we call mitigation, but at the same time where ... You know, as we've seen with extreme weather events just in the past 5 or 10 years that climate change has already arrived. It's here, we're having to deal with it. And whether we like it or not, we're having to take all these steps towards adapting to it.

Brian Greenhill:
But the kind of interesting policy question then is whether taking these steps or having this public discussion about taking these steps to adapt to it is going to, in some ways, kind of discourage people from thinking more long term about doing things to slow down the rise of global temperatures in the way that will have an impact on our children or grandchildren's generation.

Sarah O.:
Okay. Now, I know that your research demonstrates that these two approaches you've been explaining can actually have a more symbiotic relationship. So what guidance can you offer to policymakers and environmental activists in how we talk about the consequences of climate change in the US?

Brian Greenhill:
Sure. So the key takeaway really from our research has been that we need to shy away from discussing adaptation. That policy makers should certainly be encouraging people in taking ... We really need to take a very aggressive position with regard to mitigation. But at the same time, we can discuss adaptation efforts. And to be honest, we should really consider kind of encouraging people to think about these adaptation efforts because our results suggest that not only does adaptation not have that negative consequence of discouraging people from thinking about mitigation, but it might actually help make the problem seem more kind of realistic to them or makes them kind of more motivated to do something about it. So the two can actually go hand in hand as you suggested.

Sarah O.:
That's really interesting what your survey found. Can you talk a little bit more about how you and your colleagues went about this, and what specifically were you assessing, and who did you talk to to get these answers?

Brian Greenhill:
Sure. Okay. So what we did was an actual controlled experiment, which people are certainly very familiar with in the natural sciences or the physical sciences. But in the social sciences, it's probably less familiar to most people. And what's interesting about this is that we can actually do a study where we expose people, expose different respondents to different types of information. This is often done in the context of what we call a survey-based experiment, where we're asking participants to take part in some kind of survey questionnaire. But the interesting kind of experimental twist in all of this is that rather than asking everyone to take the same survey, we're asking people to take slightly different variations of that survey where we are manipulating some particular variable of interest.

Brian Greenhill:
So for instance, it's often used to test like say the impact that different framing strategies have on a political candidate's message where you can say, let's deliver the same message but coach it in one set of terms, and then we'll give the same message to another group of people coached in a slightly different set of terms, and we'll see if there's any difference between these two groups.

Brian Greenhill:
So it's really kind of analogous to what say, medical researchers do when they look at the difference between a group of patients taking an actual active drug and the group of patients taking a placebo drug. So we can try out the same things with regard to messaging on an issue like climate change and see if there's a difference.

Brian Greenhill:
So that's the kind of larger kind of context in which this kind of research is taking place. And so what we were doing for the purposes of this study was trying to ask people about their level of support for a typical strategy that's used to try to mitigate climate change. And in this case, the strategy that we were discussing was a gas tax or an increase in the federal gas tax to basically put a price on carbon and discourage people from using so much gas in their vehicles. And as a result, helping to reduce the amount of carbon dioxides being released into the atmosphere. And on the longterm, reducing the extent of global warming.

Sarah O.:
Okay. So I know you've kind of previewed the answer already, but can you talk about the most surprising finding of what specifically you found?

Brian Greenhill:
Sure. So what we ended up doing then in the experimental design here was to try to vary the way in which we presented the cost of inaction to the respondents. So for one group of people, we told them, you know, if we do ... We said to them climate change is a problem. We asked them to read what was this kind of fake newspaper article basically saying, discussing what were very kind of generic things, saying that the transportation sector is responsible for about a third of the contribution that our country is making to climate change. And that scientists are therefore proposing that we adopt a higher gas tax in order to try to combat that. And then we asked people how much more would you be willing to pay per gallon of gas in order to combat this problem? And so in one scenario we presented them with just kind of the start outline here and saying, if we fail to act then we're likely to face some kind of environmental catastrophe in the years to come.

Brian Greenhill:
In the other experimental conditions, we did things like telling people that if we fail to act then the world will continue to get hotter and as a result, we'll be likely to have to pay more in other ways. For example, we'll have to pay a higher monthly electricity bill as a result of the fact that there'll be greater strain put on the electric grid as a result of higher demands for air conditioning in extreme temperatures, and things like that. So we wanted to see really if there is a difference between people who were just presented with this kind of, you know, you better do something or else it's going to be-

Sarah O.:
Philosophical almost.

Brian Greenhill:
Sure. That there's this problem out there that we need to do something to solve that we can't see it just now, but there's going to be a catastrophe if we don't do something about it, as opposed to people in the experimental situations who were told we need to do something about this now or else in the coming years, you are going to have to pay more for your electricity bill or for your food bill or something like that. And what we ended up finding was that rather than discouraging people from supporting the gas tax, which in this case is the mitigation strategy, it's actually made them more likely to support it.

Sarah O.:
I feel like that's a positive result that people can be persuaded to take action when they can see these very immediate consequences. And so it's not just this abstract problem. And you spoke to us on gasoline tax as a successful mitigation strategy, do you have others that would likely be just as effective?

Brian Greenhill:
Sure. So in our study, we only looked at the gas tax. And so we were certainly careful to point out certain in our discussion that this finding, although it's intriguing, it's certainly not the last word on the debate about the possible trade off between adaptation and mitigation. So other ways, other kinds of costs that people are likely to incur that may have a different impact on their willingness to support mitigation efforts. And of course paying more for gas is just one. We have one policy in which we may try to deal with with climate change. There are certainly many others that you can think of. And so I think this is like an exciting area of research for other scholars to look at how asking people about different kinds of potential costs they may have to pay might make them more or less likely to support efforts to tackle climate change.

Sarah O.:
Now looking at those other variables, is that how you would say future political scientists should build on these discoveries or can you point to something that might be next in this line of research?

Brian Greenhill:
I mean one thing that I'm especially interested in is the question of how the way in which we present people with the sense of kind of personal agency affects their willingness to combat climate change. And there's been some interesting research done by other scholars looking at how ways of framing climate change that incur a kind of feeling of helplessness in the part of people might actually make them less willing to support efforts to combat the problem.

Brian Greenhill:
This is one of the real challenges we face with climate change communication. Because obviously we want to convey to the public the gravity of the problem. I mean it's essential that people realize that it's not just that we're going to have slightly warmer summers or a few more wildfires or things that maybe in people's kind of perceptions seem to be maybe really bad, but nonetheless kind of survivable problems. But instead we need to really convey the fact that this is going to be potentially catastrophic. But on the same time, we don't want to make them think that it's so catastrophic that we may as well just kind of enjoy life while we can and then let someone else worry about the consequences 50 or 100 years from now. So there really is something we can do.

Brian Greenhill:
And so some kind of some experimental research using a similar framework has in the past found that priming people with these very kind of catastrophic fear inducing messages can actually make them less likely to do something to support it or to take action in the case of supporting these mitigation efforts. So what's a kind of interesting question that I think that emerges out of our research is the possibility that discussing adaptation matters not just because it's useful for people to be thinking realistically about these adaptation measures, but it's actually helping them in this more indirect way by sort of helping kind of ground the problem in this more kind of everyday reality. Thinking well, climate change is not just a problem that my children and grandchildren will have to face, but actually it's something that I'll be facing maybe as soon as this year in terms of my electricity bills.

Brian Greenhill:
And so perhaps giving them that sense of agency is helping to kind of take away some of these fears and making them less likely to just want to kind of bury their heads in the sand and not confront this as a pressing problem.

Sarah O.:
That's really interesting. Now, do you have any I guess final thoughts on how else we might battle this ignorance or apathy, this malaise regarding the future of our planet? Because as you've been speaking to, there is so much a stake and it's not just for our children, but it's for right now and in this lifetime. So anything else that you would want to share about being educated on the effects of climate change and how we can better persuade people to take action?

Brian Greenhill:
Sure. Yeah. So I mean obviously this is a major problem that we're dealing with, but as anyone who studies the topic will tell you, it's incredibly difficult to motivate people to really care about it because it's something that we can't see. It's something which when you just look at the numbers, when atmospheric scientists talk about the potentially catastrophic impact of a two-degree centigrade temperature rise, most people think, well, you know, who cares? The temperature fluctuates tens of degrees from one day to another. So why should that matter? Won't it kind of be nicer to have a slightly warmer climate? But instead we're trying to get people to care about this small change that actually will have these incredibly significant downstream consequences. And it's complicated by the fact that there's always going to be some degree of scientific uncertainty about any of these specific consequences that are projected. But what we can say with real certainty is that if we do nothing, there will be all sorts of bad things happening.

Brian Greenhill:
So we need to get people to care about it. We need to get people to kind of realize the magnitude of the problem and to start to invest in possible solutions. What's made things really difficult here in the US especially is that it has become so part of it has become so partisan in terms of the differences between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. I saw actually just in the news, just before coming here, that the Pew Research Organization did a survey or released the results of a survey yesterday asking Americans what particular issues they found to be very concerning. And it gives a breakdown between Democrats and Republicans for a bunch of different issues. And looking at the issue of climate change, if I remember correctly, 72% of Democrats say that they're very concerned about climate change, but only 11% of Republicans say they're very concerned about it.

Sarah O.:
Wow!

Brian Greenhill:
So that's kind of tragic that we've ended up in a place where this kind of scary reality that 97% or 98% of atmospheric scientists believe as something that humans are causing, and that we need to address is showing such a massive kind of partisan difference in support. And so unfortunately, I don't know what the right answer is in terms of trying to depoliticize it now that it's become kind of almost kind of poisoned by the party politics here. But certainly if we can find some way to move the US to the position that most other developed countries are in, whereby parties on both ends of the political spectrum are kind of in firm agreement about the reality of human-caused climate change and the need to take actions to stop that. So I don't have any great answers, but I definitely think this is a really important area of research for people to be working on in the coming years.

Sarah O.:
We can care more if we're looking at these variables.

Brian Greenhill:
Yes. I mean anything, anytime we see that some kind of intervention leads people to become more willing to support some efforts to mitigate climate changes is a good thing. Because no matter how small that effect is, it shows that we're doing something right. We're moving in that direction.

Sarah O.:
[inaudible 00:20:18] Brian, thank you so much for being here.

Brian Greenhill:
Thank you very much.

Sarah O.:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll, and that was Brian Greenhill, an associate professor of political science in UAlbany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.

Sarah O.:
You can let us know what you thought of the episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanynews.