Sammy's Dot

I’m going to venture a wild guess, here: if you’re a psychologist, or a psychology student, terms like collectivist and individualist are very, very familiar. (So familiar you may be sick of hearing about the explanatory power of these concepts. So familiar that it seems like everything is being divided up into these two categories.) If you’re not into psychology, you can probably still make an accurate stab at what the two terms mean, but might not guess that they actually do seem to be useful ways to categorize (and explain!) our values and beliefs and behaviours. Since I was a psychology student, and I’m very interested in why different people behave in different ways when it comes to environmental problems, I was really fascinated to hear about the work that Donald Braman has been doing, along with Dan Kahan and a number of colleagues. (Kahan looks to be the principal investigator and I’m citing it as such, but I first heard of it listening to an interview with Braman in the course of an Ideas podcast.)

Their paper on the results of the Second National Risk and Culture Study, publicly available (in PDF format) from The Social Science Research Network, reviews several areas of public policy in which people’s willingness to accept seemingly objective facts turned out to be strongly associated with their cultural orientation.

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Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time laying out my objections to Jeffrey Sachs’ views on the use of technical solutions to our ever-growing need for energy. His support for carbon capture and sequestration, in order to allow us to exploit energy sources like coal, is especially irritating. There are two main reasons for this. First, the technology is unproven and has some significant barriers (for example, where will we put all of those megatons of carbon?). Second, focusing on a technical solution that may or may not work can siphon resources away from actions that will be effective, such as reducing our energy needs by improving home heating efficiency.

However, it’s nice not to be alone in one’s opinions. Not surprisingly, the Pembina Institute has a section of their website devoted to CCS:

Canadian federal and provincial governments have high expectations for carbon capture and storage technology as a tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, key questions about carbon capture and storage have yet to be resolved.

The Pembina isn’t out and out against CCS, but they do acknowledge the problem of ensuring that we allocate adequate resources to other emissions reduction strategies.

The page is not new, but contains a wealth of material on the subject, with a focus on the Canadian context. Worth following for updates.

The Canadian government is doing a poor job of representing our country at the UN climate change conference in Poznan: dishonesty seems to be our specialty. According to the Toronto Star:

Michael Martin, Canada’s ambassador for climate change and the country’s chief negotiator at the conference, denies obstructionism, saying Canada is playing a constructive role.

Michael Martin apparently has an idiosyncratic definition of “constructive”.

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