Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T07:21:49.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rational Irrationality and Simulation in Environmental Politics: The Example of Climate Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Mathew Humphrey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Do western publics make ‘demands’ for environmental policy that they have no desire to see enacted? The thesis that they do has been put forward recently by advocates of the ‘post-ecologist’ paradigm such as Ingolfur Blühdorn. Taking the example of climate change, this article assesses survey results that provide indicative evidence that such ‘simulative’ demands may exist. I suggest that such demands are, however, best explained through conceptual tools available from game-theoretic and rational-actor models of political behaviour, in particular rational ignorance and rational irrationality, rather than with the societal-level accounts preferred by Blühdorn and others.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , 2009 , pp. 146 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2009.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

2 See his Post-Ecologist Politics: Social Theory and the Abdication of the Ecologist Paradigm, London, Routledge, 2000; ‘Sustaining the Unsustainable: Symbolic Politics and the Politics of Simulation’, Environmental Politics, 16 (2007), pp. 251–75;CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘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.

3 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).Google Scholar

4 Caplan, Bryan Rational Ignorance versus Rational Irrationality’, Kyklos, 54 (2001), pp. 3–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also his The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007.

5 Jamieson, Dale, ‘An American Paradox’, Climatic Change, 77 (2006), pp. 97–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For example Lorenzoni, Irene, Nicholson-Cole, Sophie and Whitmarsh, Lorraine, ‘Barriers Perceived to Engaging with Climate Change Among the UK Public and Their Policy Implications’, Global Environmental Change, 17 (2007), pp. 445–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 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.Google Scholar

8 Lieserowitz, Anthony, ‘Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values’, Climatic Change, 77 (2006), p. 46;Google Scholar S. Stephen Stradling, Jillian 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.

9 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.Google Scholar

10 http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/nicholaspoll.html, accessed 15 February 2008.Google Scholar

11 Jamieson, ‘American Paradox’, p. 98.Google Scholar

12 Emphasis added. Harris Poll, 9–16 August 2005, cited in Smith, R. K., ‘ “Ecoterrorism”? A Critical Analysis of the Vilification of Radical Environmental Activists as Terrorists’, Environmental Law, 38 (2008), pp. 537–76.Google Scholar 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.

13 Cited in McLean, ‘Climate Change and UK Politics’; original polling data from Yougov.Google Scholar

14 McLean, ‘Climate Change and UK Politics’, p. 10.Google Scholar

15 Ibid.Google Scholar

16 Ibid.Google Scholar

17 Farrell, Joseph and Rabin, Matthew, ‘Cheap Talk’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10 (1996), p. 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Blühdorn, Post-Ecologist Politics, ch. 8.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., p. 153.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 154.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 155.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., p. 159.Google Scholar

23 Smith, Mick, ‘Negotiating Nature: Social Theory at its Limits?’, Environmental Politics, 11 (2002), pp. 181–6;CrossRefGoogle Scholar 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.

24 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994.Google Scholar

25 Blühdorn, ‘Sustaining the Unsustainable’, p. 267.Google Scholar

26 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.Google Scholar

27 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.Google Scholar

28 Gardiner, Stephen M., ‘A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption’, Environmental Values, 15 (2006), pp. 397–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Blühdorn, ‘Sustaining the Unsustainable’, p. 271.Google Scholar

30 Blühdorn, ‘Self-Experience in the Theme Park’, p. 32.Google Scholar

31 ‘Apocalypse When?’, New Scientist, 17 November 2007, p. 20.Google Scholar

32 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, Unwin, 1987 (first published 1943).Google Scholar

33 Downs, Anthony, ‘An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy’, Journal of Political Economy, 65 (1957), pp. 135–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Caplan, ‘Rational Ignorance’, p. 14.Google Scholar

35 George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, London, Penguin, 2006.Google Scholar

36 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 262.Google Scholar

37 Ibid.Google Scholar

38 Caplan, ‘Rational Ignorance’; Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter.Google Scholar

39 Pincione, Guido and Tesón, Fernando R., ‘Rational Ignorance and Political Morality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 72 (2006), pp. 71–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 My thanks to Matthew Rendall for raising this objection.Google Scholar

41 Cass Sunstein, Laws of Fear, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 194; Jamieson, ‘American Paradox’, p. 101. See also Fischoff, B., ‘Value Elicitation: Is There Anything There?’, American Psychologist, 46 (1991), pp. 835–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Caplan, ‘Rational Ignorance’, pp. 8 and 10.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., p. 8.Google Scholar

44 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.Google Scholar

45 Pincione and Tesón, ‘Rational Ignorance’.Google Scholar

46 Downs, Anthony, ‘Up and Down with Ecology – The “Issue-Attention Cycle”’, Public Interest, 28 (1972), p. 45.Google Scholar

47 Weber, Elke, ‘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;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Galles, Gary M. and Sexton, Robert L., ‘Rational Ignorance, Deceptive Advertising, and the Size of Government’, Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, 20 (1995), pp. 423–34.Google Scholar

49 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 Politics’, p. 13).Google Scholar

50 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.Google Scholar

51 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/nrclimate08.xml, accessed 1 December 2008.Google Scholar

52 Congleton, Roger D., ‘Rational Ignorance, Rational Voter Expectations, and Public Policy: A Discrete Informational Foundation for Fiscal Illusion’, Public Choice, 107 (2001), p. 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 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.Google Scholar

54 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).Google Scholar

55 Broome, John, Counting the Cost of Global Warming, Cambridge, White Horse Press, 1992, p. 131.Google Scholar

56 See for example discussion in Benton, Ted and Craib, Ian, Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001, p. 90 Google Scholar; Hollis, Martin, The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 106.Google Scholar

57 Blühdorn, ‘Self-Experience in the Theme Park’, pp. 32–3.Google Scholar

58 Pincione and Tesón, ‘Rational Ignorance and Political Morality’, p. 95.Google Scholar