Public Attitudes Toward Risk Tradeoffs in Energy Policy Choices. Final Report

摘要

The emphasis that will be placed on each of a number of energy policy alternatives will be determined by the tradeoffs among many factors. Important among these factors are public preferences for different levels of power availability and risk to health and safety. Also important in determining support for energy alternatives is public perception of the consequences of those policies. To assess public perception and evaluation of these factors, a number of respondents were selected to answer questions about these issues. Respondents' judgements of the acceptability of thirty-six hypothetical energy policies were analyzed using two complementary methods, discriminant analysis and judgement analysis. The first method is a statistical procedure that examines how well task variables discriminate among groups of respondents. The second method is a procedure which is used to construct models that describe the judgement processes used by respondents. Results of the discriminant analysis showed that differences among respondents' judgements were strongly related to the TECH dimension but only weakly affected by RISK and PA. On the TECH dimension, antinuclear respondents indicated relative acceptance of conservation and solar and relative rejection of nuclear and coal. Although pronuclear respondents showed slightly greater support of nuclear and coal than conservation and solar. The six clusters differed most strongly on nuclear, followed by conservation and solar, then coal. The PA dimension had more effect on the judgements of pronuclear respondents than on the judgements of antinuclear respondents. The analysis of the data indicated that the judgements of pro- and antinuclear respondents were better fit by separate models. The antinuclear respondents placed a slightly greater weight on the more RISK part of the RISK dimension relative to the PA dimension. (ERA citation 06:002416)