"Nuclear power makes individualists see green."

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University Law School has just completed a new study entitled, Making Sense of - and Making Progress In - the American Culture War of Fact. Among the topics addressed in the study was public acceptance of nuclear energy, and some of the findings like this one caught my eye ...

"Cultural individualists who are told that nuclear power will reduce greenhouse gas emissions are more likely to accept that global warming is caused by humans and is a serious threat than those who are told that restrictive anti-pollution regulations are necessary," said [Dan] Kahan [Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

"The reason is that anti-pollution regulations threaten the values of people who like commerce, whereas nuclear power strikes those same people as a good idea."

Said Kahan, "Nuclear power makes individualists see green."

Sounds like something we've been saying for quite a while now. To download the entire paper, click here.

Comments

GRLCowan said…

Collectivists seem to be a dog that is wagged by its oil- and gas-tax-collecting tail; or anyway, the tail says it still can wag the dog, just as the similarly fossil fuel beholden part of the individualist electorate said none of its electors believed in man-caused global warming.

Now they seem to be saying its electors don't believe man is causing global warming, and one should not be deceived on this point by recent election results. Desperate mendacity, in both parallel cases, I think.

October 1, 2007 at 1:05 PM

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