Rational irrationality and simulation in environmental politics: The example of climate change

Government and Opposition

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 146-166

  Humphrey, Mathew ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62449258504     PISSN: 0017257X     EISSN: 14777053     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-7053.2009.01280.x     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. An early version of this paper was presented at the International Centre for the Environment, University of Bath, 2007, and at the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy Annual Conference, University of Nottingham, 2008; a later version was presented at the Manchester Workshops in Political Thought, 2008 - my thanks to participants at all three events. My thanks also to the two anonymous referees, to Ingolfur Blühdorn and Chris Wallace for comments on a draft version of this article, and to Matthew Rendall for detailed feedback and discussion of various points.
2. See his Post-Ecologist Politics: Social Theory and the Abdication of the Ecologist Paradigm, London, Routledge, 2000;
3. 'Sustaining the Unsustainable: Symbolic Politics and the Politics of Simulation', Environmental Politics, 16 (2007), pp. 251-75;
4. 'Self-Experience in the Theme Park of Radical Action? Social Movements and Political Articulation in the Late-Modern Condition', European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (2006), pp. 23-42;
5. 'The Third Transformation of Democracy: On the Efficient Management of Late-Modern Complexity', in Ingolfur Blühdorn and Uwe Jun (eds), Economic Efficiency - Democratic Empowerment. Contested Modernization in Britain and Germany, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, pp. 299-331.
6. Ingolfur Blühdorn and Ian Welsh (eds), special issue of Environmental Politics, 'The Politics of Unsustainability: Eco-Politics in the Post Ecologist Era', 16: 2 (2007).
7. Bryan Caplan 'Rational Ignorance versus Rational Irrationality', Kyklos, 54 (2001), pp. 3-26.
8. See also His The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007.
9. Dale Jamieson, 'An American Paradox', Climatic Change, 77 (2006), pp. 97-102.
10. For example Irene Lorenzoni, Sophie Nicholson-Cole and Lorraine Whitmarsh, 'Barriers Perceived to Engaging with Climate Change Among the UK Public and Their Policy Implications', Global Environmental Change, 17 (2007), pp. 445-59.
11. Iain McLean, 'Climate Change and UK Politics, from Brynle Williams to Sir Nicholas Stern', available at http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/Politics/papers/ 2007/Climate.pdf.
12. Anthony Lieserowitz, 'Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values', Climatic Change, 77 (2006), p. 46;
13. John D. Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney, 'Understanding Public Complacency About Climate Change: Adults' Mental Models of Climate Change Violate Conservation of Matter', Climatic Change, 80 (2007), p. 214;
14. Nick F. Pidgeon, Irene Lorenzoni and Wouter Poortinga, 'Climate Change or Nuclear Power - No Thanks! A Quantitative Study of Public Perceptions and Risk Framing in Britain', Global Environmental Change, 18 (2008), pp. 69-85;
15. Lorenzoni, Cold and Whitmarsh, 'Barriers Perceived to Engaging with Climate Change'; Max H. Bazerman, 'Climate Change as a Predictable Surprise', Climatic Change, 77 (2006), p. 179;
16. S. Stephen Stradling, Julian Anable, Tracy Anderson and Alexandra Cronberg, 'Car Use and Climate Change: Do We Practise What We Preach?', in Alison Park et al. (eds), British Social Attitudes: the 24th Report, London, Sage, 2008, pp. 139-57.
17. See for example 'Green Tax Revolt: Britons "Will Not Foot the Bill to Save the Planet" ', Independent, 2 May 2008, available at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/green-tax-revolt- britons-will-not-foot-bill-to-save-planet-819703.html, accessed 3 September 2008.
18. http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/nicholaspoll.html, accessed 15 February 2008.
19. Jamieson, 'American Paradox', p. 98.
20. Emphasis added. Harris Poll, 9-16 August 2005, cited in R. K. Smith, ' "Ecoterrorism"? A Critical Analysis of the Vilification of Radical Environmental Activists as Terrorists', Environmental Law, 38 (2008), pp. 537-76. Original poll available at http://www.pollingreport.com/enviro2.htm, accessed 3 September 2008. See Caplan, 'Rational Ignorance', on the strong forms of belief espoused by the religious.
21. Cited in McLean, 'Climate Change and UK Polities'; original polling data from Yougov.
22. McLean, 'Climate Change and UK Politics', p. 10.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Joseph Farrell and Matthew Rabin, 'Cheap Talk', Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10 (1996), p. 116.
26. Blühdorn, Post-Ecologist Politics, ch. 8.
27. Ibid., p. 153.
28. Ibid., p. 154.
29. Ibid., p. 155.
30. Ibid., p. 159.
31. Mick Smith, 'Negotiating Nature: Social Theory at its Limits?', Environmental Politics, 11 (2002), pp. 181-6;
32. John Barry, 'From Environmental Politics to the Politics of the Environment: The Pacification and Normalization of Environmentalism?', in Marcel Wissenburg and Yoram Levy (eds), Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism, London, Routledge, 2004, pp. 179-92.
33. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994.
34. Blühdorn, 'Sustaining the Unsustainable', p. 267.
35. John Prescott at the Royal Geographical Society, 6 June 1997. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jun/06/transport.uk1, accessed 15 February 2008.
36. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3776913.stm, accessed 15 February 2008. Indeed, when fuel prices did rise sharply in 2000 the Labour government faced its first 'crisis' of widespread public protest. See http://news.bbc.co. uk/1/hi/uk/919429.stm.
37. Stephen M. Gardiner, 'A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption', Environmental Values, 15 (2006), pp. 397-413.
38. Blühdorn, 'Sustaining the Unsustainable', p. 271.
39. Blühdorn, 'Self-Experience in the Theme Park', p. 32.
40. 'Apocalypse When?', New Scientist, 17 November 2007, p. 20.
41. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, Unwin, 1987 (first published 1943).
42. Anthony Downs, 'An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy', Journal of Political Economy, 65 (1957), pp. 135-50.
43. Caplan, 'Rational Ignorance', p. 14.
44. George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, London, Penguin, 2006.
45. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 262.
46. Ibid.
47. Caplan, 'Rational Ignorance'; Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter.
48. Guido Pincione and Fernando R. Tesón, 'Rational Ignorance and Political Morality', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 72 (2006), pp. 71-96.
49. My thanks to Matthew Rendall for raising this objection.
50. Cass Sunstein, Laws of Fear, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 194; Jamieson, 'American Paradox', p. 101.
51. See also B. Fischoff, 'Value Elicitation: Is There Anything There?', American Psychologist, 46 (1991), pp. 835-47.
52. Caplan, 'Rational Ignorance', pp. 8 and 10.
53. Ibid., p. 8.
54. While Pidgeon et al. hold that 'people are not ill-informed or "irrational" about complex environmental and risk policy issues,' they seem to mean little more than that people will make reasoned responses to questions. Nothing in the surveys they cite suggests that people are well-informed about the issue they discuss - nuclear power or that they are not irrational in our sense, holding views without adequate justification. Indeed they accept that 'nuclear power is typically out of sight and submerged below conscious awareness' until events trigger the recollection of negative images. See Pidgeon et al., 'Climate Change or Nuclear Power', pp. 81 and 83.
55. Pincione and Tesón, 'Rational Ignorance'.
56. Anthony Downs, 'Up and Down with Ecology - The "Issue-Attention Cycle" ', Public Interest, 28 (1972), p. 45.
57. Elke Weber, 'Experience-Based and Description-Based Perceptions of Long-Term Risk: Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us (Yet)', Climatic Change, 77 (2006), pp. 103-20;
58. Jonathan Baron, 'Thinking About Global Warming', Climatic Change, 77 (2006), p. 138.
59. Gary M. Galles and Robert L. Sexton, 'Rational Ignorance, Deceptive Advertising, and the Size of Government', Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, 20 (1995), pp. 423-34.
60. Even Schumpeter accepts that it is 'no doubt possible to argue that given time the collective psyche will evolve opinions that not infrequently strike us as highly reasonable and even shrewd' (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 264). The problem is that politics is punctuated with short-term situations that may 'alter the course of events for good' (ibid.). Note also McLean's point that to 'characterise the Conservative move on climate change from 2000-2006 as cheap talk environmentalism is not to deride it. It may be not only advantageous for them but socially optimal' - under conditions where the n-person prisoners' dilemma is iterated rather than one-shot (McLean, 'Climate Change and UK Polities', p. 13).
61. Tim Dickinson, "The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration to Deny Global Warming', Rolling Stone, 28 June 2007, available at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15148655/the-secret- campaign-of-president-bushs-administration-to-deny-global-warming, accessed 1 December 2008. 'Cooney' here is Philip Cooney, a former 'climate team leader' for the American Petroleum Institute, drafted in to head up the White House 'spin' on climate change.
62. Bob Carter, 'A Dangerous Climate', Daily Telegraph, 11 April 2007, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/08/ nrclimate 08.xml, accessed 1 December 2008.
63. Roger D. Congleton, 'Rational Ignorance, Rational Voter Expectations, and Public Policy: A Discrete Informational Foundation for Fiscal Illusion', Public Choice, 107 (2001), p. 45.
64. Ibid., p. 46, emphasis in original. This raises the question of the extent to which public survey responses relating to climate change are themselves at least partially the product of politicians and others affecting information costs. Any answer is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article.
65. Ibid., p. 50. This goes against the view that a 'fully rational individual "knows the model" and cannot be fooled by mere political "cheap talk" ' (ibid., p. 50).
66. John Broome, Counting the Cost of Global Warming, Cambridge, White Horse Press, 1992, p. 131.
67. See for example discussion in Ted Benton and Ian Craib, Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001, p. 90;
68. Martin Hollis, The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 106.
69. Blühdorn, 'Self-Experience in the Theme Park', pp. 32-3.
70. Pincione and Tesón, 'Rational Ignorance and Political Morality', p. 95.