debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

29.7.06

The Unfairness Of Yucca Mountain

The proposal for a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is back in the news, as the Department of Energy moves forward with plans, people turn their attention to nuclear power as an alternative to increasingly expensive oil, and a proposal to make Nevada the second contest of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary gains steam. I don't have a strong view about the substantive merits of centralized versus dispersed storage of nuclear waste, or the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site on engineering grounds. What I do have an opinion on is whether the current approach to establishing a centralized repository at that site is a good one.

To some degree, the dispute over Yucca Mountain is a technical dispute over what the real level of risk is. But it also goes deeper, so that purely technical debate about milirems and geological stability will not resolve the issue. The deeper dispute arises from the fact that there are two ways of looking at what makes a risk acceptable, which I'll call the "economic paradigm" and the "social paradigm." Each paradigm can be treated as a descriptive theory (how actual people actually do think about risks) or as a normative theory (how people should think about risks).

The economic paradigm says that the acceptability of a risk is entirely a function of its (percieved) level of harm. In this way of thinking there are some levels of risk that are de minimis -- so unlikely, and/or of such small magnitude, that they effectively don't count. For risks above the de minimis level, we can apply some sort of cost-benefit criterion, so that for a given level of benefit, we would put up with a certain level of risk. There is much room for debate about how the de minimis level and the exchange rate between risks and benefits should be

Proponents of Yucca Mountain typically work within the economic paradigm. Their primary arguments focus on establishing that the harms from the waste repository fall below the de minimis level. Secondarily, they point to benenfits -- either to society at large, or specifically to those who will bear the risk -- that outweigh the risk.

The social paradigm doesn't deny that the level of harm plays a role in shaping risk acceptability. But it points out that social factors -- the why and how of imposing and mitigating risks -- can play as large, or even larger, of a role. An unfair risk can be just as unacceptable as a harmful risk. Research on risk perception consistently shows that if a risk is imposed through a democratic, participatory process in which the affected people have a say, people will accept a certain level of risk -- but the same risky project would be greeted with insatiable howls of outrage if it was implemented through the "DAD" ("Decide, Announce, Defend") approach. Think, as an analogy, of the way you might be angry if your housemate just went and used some of your milk, even though you would gladly have given them that same milk if they had asked permission first.

Opponents of Yucca Mountain are thinking in the social paradigm. In one sense, putting all of the country's waste in one state seems intrinsically unfair -- why should Nevadans have to bear the risks (however small they may be) for the rest of the country's energy choices? This prima facie distributional unfairness can, however, be overcome through a properly democratic approach to decision-making. If the people of Nevada were to feel that they had been given a real say in how the nation's nuclear waste would be handled, and that Yucca Mountain was not a foregone conclusion, they would be much more likely to support Yucca Mountain. And if they still said "no thanks," such a participatory process would be able to identify a solution that would be acceptable to whoever ended up living next to the waste. (There is an excellent case study of how this all can work out based on a landfill siting process in Canton Aargau, Switzerland*.) Further, there are concerns about politically motivated intervention in the supposedly benevolent dictatorship of the bureaucrats and scientists who chose the current plan -- notably Congress's 1987 order to the DOE to only consider the feasibility of Yucca Mountain.

Because the prevailing institutions accept only economic-paradigm arguments, people who oppose risks for social reasons will often have to recast their arguments in economic terms, creating a frustrating proxy battle. But social-paradigmers' larger assessments of the harms are not just a strategic move -- there's understandable spillover between knowledge of the fairness of a process, and skepticism about the data on the harms. There's enough uncertainty in technical risk assessment that it's quite reasonable to be concerned that if someone is proposing to impose a risk in an unfair way, they may have (consciously or unconsciously) resolved those uncertainties in ways that make the outcome more favorable to them, and hence unfavorable to the people who will have to directly bear the risk.

So to try to defend the project with strictly economic paradigm arguments miss the point. Even if you believe that the economic paradigm is normatively correct, your arguments will fall on deaf ears unless you can either win Nevadans over to that paradigm first, or satisfy their fairness concerns. Resolving the question of fairness is critical. At sites across the country, nuclear waste sits in temporary storage, produced over the past few decades pursuant to the DOE's now-broken promise that it would find an acceptable place to permanently store it.

* Full disclosure: One of the authors, Tom Webler, is one of my bosses on a different research project.

Stentor Danielson, 01:24, |

27.7.06

Climate Change Is Morally Repugnant

I'm a pretty sorry excuse for a blogger, since I'm only just now getting around to commenting on a much-blogged article by Daniel Gilbert about climate change. Gilbert argues that people aren't concerned about climate change, because people all have certain evolved cognitive biases.

The problem is that it's not "people" who are unconcerned about climate change, because many people are concerned. Any psychologically worthwhile theory of risk perception must be able to recognize the diversity of views and account for both the skeptics and the alarmists.

Gilbert is right to point out that risks will attract more attention if (among other things) they're blameable on humans, morally repugnant, immediate, and quick. But he writes as if these four criteria are objective features of various potentially risky activities. That assumption may be close enough in the case of immediacy and speed of onset. (Though we should note the big debates over whether certain particular events, such as Hurricane Katrina, are immediate impacts of climate change. Depending on where and how you live, the impacts may be much closer than they are for other, more sheltered, people.) But Gilbert's first two criteria are clearly not objective. Whether a risk is human-caused or morally repugnant depends on your worldview -- so therefore some people do get worked up about climate change, while others brush it off.

Let's start with whether climate change is human-caused, since that one is easy to dispose of. Gilbert frames it as a matter of impersonal atmospheric chemistry. To see that an alternative frame is possible, all you need to do is mention climate change to an environmentalist (or even just a run-of-the-mill Democrat). You'll quickly learn that climate change has a few definite faces behind it -- President Bush, oil company CEOs, and SUV drivers in particular.

Then there's the most talked-about aspect of the article: Gilbert (following Mary Douglas) says a risk must be "morally repugnant" to generate concern. This is as culturally-relative a criterion as you could ask for. Take his example of the "risk" of homosexuality. For people who incorrectly think that homosexuality is morally repugnant, it's easy to see it as posing a major risk, conjuring up scenarios of the breakdown of family bonds and plagues of STDs. But for those of us who don't find homosexuality to be morally repugnant, such scare stories sound ridiculous. Right or wrong, moral views shape risk perception.

There are two mechanisms leading from assessing an activity as morally repugnant to seeing it as having risky consequences. On the one hand, there's a functionalist route -- sounding the alarm about a risk will justify implementing policies that you liked anyway. On the other hand, there's the role of avoiding cognitive dissonance. We like to think about things as being either good or bad, so if we already think something is bad, we'll be more open to believing additional bad things about it than additional good things, and vice-versa.

Now let's turn to climate change. Gilbert declares that it is not morally repugnant -- but morally repugnant to who? It should be no surprise that concern over climate change has found a comfortable home among those of us who think, on independent grounds, that the modern capitalist system is in need of an overhaul (whether reformist or radical). The modern economy produces inequality, unhappiness, unfreedom, and anomie*. So it's not a big leap to see that system as also producing risks such as climate change (and pollution and deforestation and so on). Perhaps more importantly, as David Roberts and the Bishop of London point out, the consequences of climate change are morally repugnant to those of us who have well-tuned moral senses.

On the other hand, those whose moral compasses are calibrated to approve of the modern lifestyle are going to be disinclined to worry about climate change. After all, action to avert or mitigate climate change would require things like regulation and changes in conusmption patterns, which such people regard as morally repugnant.

We won't understand why there isn't more concern about climate change if we treat people in general as an undifferentiated mass.

*The point here is that it produces too much of these things, regardless of whether or not it produces less than some other economic system that has been tried.

Stentor Danielson, 05:27, |