Local Attitudes Toward Energy Projects, with Holly Caggiano and Sara Constantino

Notable Quotes

• Community benefits drive support for clean energy projects: “We saw a preference for projects that, one, create jobs; and two … are community owned, which I think is becoming a bigger part of our conversation and thinking about how we own and manage our energy sources.” (13:52)
• The gap between the perceptions of local elected officials and the general public: “[Local elected officials] seem to show this bias toward thinking that their constituents share their own preferences; in this case, for natural gas projects [in Pennsylvania]. They also underestimate the importance of job creation in building public support and job loss in creating public opposition to projects.” (19:40)
• Bipartisan support for energy projects with community benefits: “We see substantial alignment across parties. These differences that we expected to see don’t really stand out, which … suggests that these community benefits … are a really important opportunity to build bipartisan support for renewable energy projects … There’s much more of an opportunity here to identify strategies to increase bipartisan alignment than very clear divisions.” (25:30)

Top of the Stack

• “Community Benefits Can Build Bipartisan Support for Large-Scale Energy Infrastructure” by Holly Caggiano, Sara M. Constantino, Chris Greig, and Elke U. Weber
• The People’s Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition by Kristen Kosmas
• Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon
• Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time by Thomas Hale Jr.
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• Climate & Community Institute reports

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Holly Caggiano, an assistant professor in climate justice and environmental planning at the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Sara Constantino, an assistant professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Holly and Sara recently published a paper with colleagues that examines how community members and elected officials perceive the benefits and drawbacks of different types of energy projects. I’ll ask them to share how issues such as proximity, environmental impacts, and economic effects resulted in higher or lower levels of public support for wind, solar, nuclear, and natural gas projects. As our listeners know, this issue of local support is central to determining whether we will be able to build enough clean energy infrastructure to achieve our climate goals. To find out what Holly and Sara found, stay with us.

All right, Holly Caggiano and Sara Constantino, welcome both to Resources Radio.

Holly Caggiano: Thank you so much for having us.

Daniel Raimi: Holly and Sara, it's the first time on the show for both of you, and we always ask our guests how they got interested in environmental topics—whether that began with some inspiration when you were a kid, or whether you came into this field later in life. How did it work out for each of you?

Holly Caggiano: We're fans of the podcast and really happy to be here. This is a fun question. I was thinking about being a kiddo and taking walks with my dad. We called them “nature walks”—just collecting things and being interested in what was going on outside. Those are my early memories.

I went to college and wanted to spend time doing creative writing, and I didn't really know what the right outlet was for that, and I fell into writing for our department's college newsletter about environmental issues at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Then, I realized that I could write about something that I really cared about and never really stopped.

Daniel Raimi: That's cool. Holly, where did you grow up? Where did you take your nature walks?

Holly Caggiano: I grew up in New Jersey, and that was in Bergen County behind my dad's apartment complex. We used to just walk around the woods and collect little bird bones, pine cones, and whatnot.

Daniel Raimi: Awesome. That's great. How about you, Sara?

Sara Constantino: I had the opportunity to travel a lot as a child—both moving because of my parents' jobs, but also traveling with my father for work. He's actually an environmental economist. He worked at various UN organizations in the World Bank on sustainable development, and forest management was one of his focuses. As part of this, I got to travel a lot and spent time in really amazing places.

I have this really strong memory of going with him to Mexico. As part of this trip, we were at a turtle sanctuary and got to see turtles hatching from their eggs and running to the water. They do this at night, so I remember I was little, and he woke me up. It was night time, and we went to the beach and saw all these little turtles running to the water. The water was kind of phosphorescent and glowing—these phosphorescents in the water.

That was really amazing. I think those kinds of experiences stayed with me, and I love animals, nature, and things like that. When I started studying, I didn't want to do environmental economics and had started in economics, and so I focused instead on poverty, actually, in some of my earlier more applied work. Then, I got a little bit disillusioned with economics. The lack of nuance in terms of understanding how people make decisions in complicated situations—like situations that involve long time horizons, or where there's a lot of uncertainty, or where they're making decisions in groups, or where there might be group collaborative opportunities or conflicts. So, I ended up working at the intersection of economics and psychology and still focusing a bit on poverty, but that work … As part of the field work, I realized how interrelated poverty and many environmental challenges were.

I was working on various sustainable development projects in Brazil and realized that a lot of the challenges had to do with heat exposure, water shortages, and different sorts of environmental challenges. The work just sort of slowly moved toward a focus on the environment, which I think both has really interesting questions—economic and psychological questions, as well as many political questions, but is also a really important issue that intersects with so many other issues that I care about, as well.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that's super interesting. I would love to ask you more questions about your background, both of you, and especially Sara—your dad's work as an environmental economist, that's fascinating.

But we're going to dive into the subject of the study that you recently published with a couple of coauthors in the journal Nature Energy. We'll have a link to it down in the show notes, but if people want to check it out right now, the name of the study is “Public and Local Policymaker Preferences for Large-Scale Energy Project Characteristics.”

My hunch is that our audience has a pretty good understanding of why this topic is important, and why public attitudes toward large-scale energy projects that might be in their backyard is an important topic. Can you just give us a sense of the study itself? Where did you conduct it, how many people did you sample, and what kinds of things were you trying to figure out?

Holly Caggiano: We were interested in thinking about what kinds of characteristics of large-scale energy projects impact people's support for their development. Why do people support some projects and oppose others, based on what they're like? We took a look at one important case, which is Pennsylvania. We did the survey, which I think is interesting, because it's a swing state and also has pretty high untapped solar potential and lots of development going on right now in terms of utility-scale solar.

In terms of the sample, we surveyed about 900 residents and about 200 local elected officials about their preferences for energy projects in the state. My little bit of jargon is we used a conjoint experiment to assess these preferences, which is a nice way to do it, because you can look across multiple dimensions and compare trade-offs by randomly generating these bundles of attributes and then asking respondents to pick between two choice bundles.

In this case, they saw a list of attributes and got to pick which energy project they preferred—1 or 2. Those attributes varied along these different dimensions, including distance from residential areas—how close or far a project is from residential areas—whether it creates or takes away job opportunities, some other local project benefits, variation in ownership structure, site type, and energy type. We asked about solar projects, wind projects, nuclear projects, and natural gas projects with carbon capture and storage—going forward, we'll probably say CCS.

We also wanted to know, in addition to how people think about their preferences for these projects, how local elected officials perceive public support. We asked local elected officials about their own preferences, but we also asked them to choose which project that they thought most of their constituents would prefer, which was really interesting, because it allowed us to compare across those samples and see some misalignment.

Daniel Raimi: For sure. I'm going to ask you about that misalignment in just a moment. First, I'd love to ask about a couple of other findings. I'll refer people to the study itself to go into the details of the questions, the methodology, and other kinds of details. We're going to just jump right into some of the results.

First, distance. How did the distance from the hypothetical energy project affect people's support for that project?

Sara Constantino: I'll jump in here. We varied the distance to try and understand how proximity to residential areas might affect preferences for these projects. Specifically, we gave the options of having a project that's sited 2 miles away, 5 miles away, 10 miles away, or 50 miles away from a residential area. What we find is, maybe unsurprisingly, that respondents were more likely to prefer projects that were sited further away from residential areas, and they especially dislike projects that are within two miles of residential areas. That was our closest category—we say that these projects are likely visible from the home.

We found that this was associated with a 7 percent reduction in support relative to projects that were sited 50 miles away. So, this can be a substantial detractor for projects. But surprisingly, we also found that the distance of energy projects from residential areas didn't impact support for projects as much as the economic impacts they have, project ownership structure, or other project characteristics. I think we'll say a little bit more about this.

We also don't see strong differences between siting projects 5 miles, 10 miles, or 50 miles away. It seems like there's really this penalty when they're very close to residential areas, which makes sense. One thing I just wanted to add is that this is one of the questions where the hypothetical nature of the question—we don't see these differences between 5 miles, 10 miles, and 50 miles away—but that might be in part due to the hypothetical nature of this question. Whereas if a project was actually being sited 5 miles away, you might see much more community opposition than at least our results suggest.

Daniel Raimi: Right. People would be more aware of the project and they would probably learn more about it and understand the potential risks and maybe the potential benefits a little bit better, as well.

Sara Constantino: Exactly.

Another question you all ask folks is just about the types of energy projects that they might be more or less inclined to support. Can you say what you found there?

Sara Constantino: Yeah. We find significantly greater support for solar projects, and that's compared to onshore wind projects, to nuclear energy, or to natural gas with CCS. We found a 7 percent increase in support associated with solar projects relative to natural gas with CCS, which was sort of our baseline category, against which we did most of these comparisons.

And the other thing we found is that this ordering of preferences holds across political parties qualitatively. Though we find that Democrats significantly prefer solar and also disprefer, or are less favorable to, nuclear, we find these preferences are less strong among Republicans, but at least, qualitatively, they look very similar.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. If we have time, I'd love to dig in a little bit deeper on those differences across political parties.

I'm wondering, actually, if either of you have a sense of the why here? People prefer solar relative to natural gas with CCS, and they don't like nuclear so much. Listeners probably have some hypotheses in their head as to why that might be, but I'm curious what some of yours are.

Sara Constantino: Holly and I have actually talked about this a little bit. We don't know—this is speculation—but it could be that Pennsylvania residents have less experience with wind than they do with solar, or that this has been less prominently covered in local media.

I do some other work in Texas, where many of the conversations around wind were quite favorable toward wind across the political spectrum. So, it could be that this is context-specific. In terms of nuclear, I also think that the history with Three Mile Island and the Three Mile Island accident in the late seventies could contribute toward the dislike we see for nuclear projects. Holly, is there anything else, you think?

Holly Caggiano: No, I think you covered it. Maybe we'll talk about this a little later on, if we have time, but Pennsylvania is just quite interesting—its diversity of energy sources and the experiences people have with them.

Daniel Raimi: For sure. It's a really important energy state, as you all note in the paper, for a variety of reasons.

I'd love to ask you next about how people's preferences changed for these types of energy projects, when you gave them, again, hypothetical information on the environmental or economic impacts of the project. What are some of the environmental or economic issues that seem to be most salient or most attractive to community members?

Holly Caggiano: My favorite part of the results are the associated increases in support when you talk about community benefits.

Two benefits stood out. We saw a preference for projects that, one, create jobs; and two, projects that are community owned, which I think is becoming a bigger part of our conversation and thinking about how we own and manage our energy sources. Projects that were community owned were associated with a 5 percent increase in support, compared to the baseline, which here was projects owned by American companies. On the other hand, which is quite interesting, we found that projects owned by foreign companies decreased support by the largest margin of any of our attributes, which was 17 percentage points, compared to the baseline owned by American companies, which is quite a big jump.

Then, considering jobs, compared to a baseline of no changes in number of jobs, projects that were associated with creating permanent jobs increased support by 12 percent. On the flip side, very similarly, job loss reduced support by 12 percent, so about the same margin. This is a really exciting find to me, because it suggests that if projects have clear community benefits, and people are aware of these benefits, that's likely to translate when it comes to support for clean energy.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. I'm curious about a couple of things with the job. First, you said job loss was associated with a reduction in support. Is the idea there that building the new solar plant, the new CCS plant, or whatever, would cause some other plants in the community to shut down and that would be the source of the job loss?

Holly Caggiano: I think that is a fair assumption. The way the categories worked is we held as a baseline no changes to the number of jobs. For job increases, we had two attributes. One was increasing these permanent well-paying jobs, and the other was increasing temporary jobs, which also was associated with additional support for projects, just not as much as permanent jobs as you'd expect. And then, this job loss—I think that it's a pretty salient concern right now in communities, particularly in Pennsylvania, as energy systems are changing. We've been talking quite a bit about fracking nationally lately, so I think it is probably top of mind.

Daniel Raimi: For sure. A number of coal-fired power plant closures have happened and are scheduled to happen in Pennsylvania, as well. One other follow-up on the job question—a lot of energy jobs, especially the ones where there's lots of construction involved, like wind turbines, solar panels, and also oil and gas development—a lot of the workforce can be sort of transitory, right? They can move from state to state, doing different construction and capital-intensive job activities. I'm wondering, when you asked people those questions, if you sort of specified whether the jobs were taken by community members, were filled by people from outside, or whether you didn't specify?

Holly Caggiano: That's a great question. We didn't specify, but I think that would be very interesting to ask. Based on the other results we found, the hypothesis would be that they'd prefer jobs go to community members. Particularly along that ownership line where you see that foreign ownership was associated with a reduction in support for projects. Part of the logic of including that permanent jobs and temporary jobs was to allude to that a little bit.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that totally makes sense.

Okay, let's go next to the elected officials. You mentioned a few moments ago that you wanted to compare and contrast the way that elected officials viewed these projects compared with their constituencies. What'd you find there?

Sara Constantino: This is a really exciting part of this study. We asked local elected officials—this is local elected officials at the municipality or county level in Pennsylvania. They matched the public sample about their own preferences for projects across these different project characteristics, but also their expectations about their constituents' preferences. They completed two of these conjoints that Holly described earlier.

This is interesting, because local elected officials face different incentives or different ways that they're forming their preferences about these projects relative to the public. They also have to form beliefs about what their constituents prefer in pretty noisy information environments. So, they don't have perfect information about what their constituents prefer. We can say a bit more about this. What we find is that local elected officials show the strongest preferences when it comes to the type of energy project and ownership of those projects.

Similar to the public, they dislike projects that are owned by a foreign company relative to those owned by an American company or cooperatively owned by the community. They also disfavor all other types of energy projects—nuclear, wind, natural gas, and solar—relative to natural gas with CCS. Though the comparison here with solar isn't significant, we do see qualitatively that they're less favorable to all these other types of projects.

In contrast, as I mentioned earlier, the residents, or the public, dislike nuclear and prefer solar relative to natural gas with CCS. So, we see this difference in how local elected officials report their own preferences relative to the public's preferences. Critically, we also find that local policymakers underestimate residents' preferences for solar. When they're asked what they think their constituents' preferences are, they underestimate the preference for solar. Instead, they seem to show this bias toward thinking that their constituents share their own preferences; in this case, for natural gas projects.

They also underestimate the importance of job creation in building public support and job loss in creating public opposition to projects. As Holly mentioned, this was a really important factor influencing public preferences toward these projects. Maybe the biggest alignment we see between the public and local elected officials in terms of their preferences and their perceptions of their constituents' preferences is that everyone is on board and perceives the dislike of foreign-owned projects and is aware that this would reduce support across all the different conjoints that we ran.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. For folks reading along at home with the paper, this is illustrated really nicely in Figure 5 of the paper.

I'm curious, Sara, again about the why here. Particularly on solar, do you have any guesses as to why the elected officials might perceive their constituencies as being more negative on solar than they actually are?

Sara Constantino: To speculate, because we don't get into this in this paper, there is research showing that opposition tends to be louder than support. So, people show up to public hearings when they're against something or when they have something to lose. That's something David Brockman, Matto Mildenberger, and Leah Stokes have all done some work on; also, people that study public commenting, who attend public hearings, and who local elected officials actually hear from. Those tend to be a very biased sample. It's not a representative sample of the population, which we tried to have for our public-opinion portion.

The other thing is that there are also large-scale targeted misinformation campaigns that might increase the perception that there's dislike for solar. But I'm speculating here. We didn't get into this.

Daniel Raimi: For sure. I really want us to do an episode at some point on this issue of misinformation and disinformation, specifically around local level solar and wind projects. It's a really interesting, weird, and problematic space. We'll have to save it for another time.

I'm sure our listeners are thinking about policy implications here. You've already alluded to some of them, but I'm wondering if you could highlight some of the most important ones that you think are coming out of this study that policymakers, maybe particularly at the local level, should be aware of?

Holly Caggiano: I'll give you the big three, and this is something I've been particularly stressing, given that my background is in community and regional planning. Local elected officials play a key role in the energy transition, right? We think about our emissions goals or how we're building projects often at the national level, and we think about federal policy, which is very important. But local elected officials play this key role in approving new energy projects and negotiating the benefits that they bring to communities.

So, aligning their perceptions with the public's is important. We think that this could improve progress on energy transitions, if we can see that one of the problems is that, maybe, elected officials don't actually know what their constituents want because of some of the reasons that Sara outlined.

The second is that direct benefits to communities are key to energy transitions. I think much other research also suggests this, but this was, for me, an exciting piece to come out—that this is important, if we can show communities what they have to gain rather than focusing on what they have to lose. This is not just a messaging tactic, right? I think there's a lot of opportunity for energy transitions to come with these direct concrete community benefits that communities will really feel, but we also need to deliver on that and get the messaging so that people know how they'll benefit.

Third, and I think this is the hopeful takeaway, is that when you think about, What can any of us do about this? Does that local participation matter? Sara just talked a little bit about how opposition can be louder than support. One thing that we can do to correct these misperceptions is prioritize open and consistent dialogue within our communities.

What do we want energy transitions to look like? Every community is a bit different geographically, culturally, and economically in terms of what benefits will make the biggest difference there. I think that we have a lot of opportunities to explore that. It's really difficult to do if we aren't talking about it. So, the talking-about-it piece really matters and is actually the piece that all of us can get involved in.

Daniel Raimi: Sort of like being a YIMBY voice instead of a NIMBY voice for these types of projects. YIMBY, of course, being Yes In My Backyard, rather than NIMBY, or Not In My Backyard.

I'd love to ask you just a little bit more about the results, because we have a little bit more time.

One of the differences that you observe is across political parties and different levels of support for different technologies and types of ownership structures across Republicans and Democrats. Can you say a little bit about that?

Sara Constantino: Yeah. When Holly and I sat down to look at the results and write up our findings, we were looking at these partisan differences and framing the paper a little bit around partisan differences. What was really clear in the results was, actually, we see substantial alignment across parties. These differences that we expected to see don't really stand out, which, to us, suggests that these community benefits that we've been mentioning throughout are a really important opportunity to build bipartisan support for renewable energy projects. It struck us that there's much more of an opportunity here to identify strategies to increase bipartisan alignment than very clear divisions.

But we do see some differences. While both Republicans and Democrats dislike projects owned by foreign companies and prefer those owned by the community, we also see that Republicans have a preference for projects that are owned by American companies, more so than Democrats.

We also find that they're both influenced by impacts on jobs. Both prefer projects that are associated with the creation of permanent jobs with union-scale wages and opposed to projects that imply job losses. But Republicans seem to be marginally more sensitive to reducing energy costs; so, other types of community benefits. But these differences are really small.

We also see that Democrats are more likely to support onshore wind than Republicans and also less likely to support nuclear relative to Republicans. Otherwise, I think one of the more notable findings is that there aren't so many differences across political parties.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, I found that really interesting, too. For people reading along at home, this is laid out in Figure 2 of the article really nicely.

Holly and Sara, this has been a fascinating conversation. I wish we had more time to talk about it. Maybe just one last question before we go to Top of the Stack, which is asking you about Pennsylvania, and how representative you think it might be of the country as a whole or of other states in the region. Can you say a little bit about the unique place of Pennsylvania and how much it can tell us about the country as a whole?

Holly Caggiano: Yeah, I think Pennsylvania is a really interesting place to study. We're seeing it a ton in the news right now, which was not what we were thinking about when we picked it. We were really thinking about the solar potential and getting a place that also had a good mix of urban centers and rural areas to think about how that may be a little bit representative for the country.

Pennsylvania is quite unique in that it's a major energy-producing state. It's important to the economy across these different types of production. So, potentially, the general public is more attuned to these issues and maybe has a little bit more information or has spent more time thinking about it. It's also quite demographically diverse, which is helpful for considering different points of view. I pointed to that. We made sure to get enough of a rural sample to ensure that all of our respondents weren't in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.

Another unique aspect is that it's a very local-government state, where siting typically happens at the local level, with very little decisionmaking happening at the county or the state level. There are more than 2,000 municipalities in the state. So, that points to why getting a pulse on local elected officials is really important.

To wrap up, the results are unique to Pennsylvania, but they emphasize the importance of considering variation in project features. So, while not every state or community will probably prioritize the same project benefits, I think we have a pretty good idea about how conferred community benefits more broadly might build public support.

Daniel Raimi: That makes lots of sense. Well, Holly and Sara, one more time, this is just a really fascinating study. I'm so glad you were able to come onto the show and share it with us. I hope listeners will check it out and dig into the fine points a little bit.

Before we go, I'd love to ask you the same question we ask all of our guests, which is, What's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack—something that you've read, watched, or heard that you think is really great and would recommend to our listeners? So, Holly and Sara, what's at the top of your stack?

Holly Caggiano: I love this question. I mentioned that I love creative writing. For other folks that do, something I'd recommend that I've read recently is called The People's Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition by Kristen Kosmas. It's a paperback; it's a play. It's very broadly about what possibilities lie beyond a climate catastrophe.

It was originally a production, and then Kristen turned it into this short book that's a monologue that's meant to be performed in small spaces. You can read it, but you can also do it with friends. The description says that it attempts to transform feelings of despair, grief, and rage into something of value, into positive action, into something of beauty that might uplift and create space and occasion for imagination and community. I found it quite compelling and helpful.

Daniel Raimi: That sounds fantastic. Sara, how about you?

Sara Constantino: I spend my time trying to avoid reading too much climate fiction outside of work, actually. I am going to cheat a little bit by grouping three books, only one of which is top of the stack. These are all books that I've read that in different ways grapple with the long timescales of environmental change and climate change from different perspectives. I think they're all humbling in a sense. They sort of put the timescale of human life in a much broader perspective. These are Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon, who's a professor of humanities and environment at Princeton, and Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing across Time by Thomas Hale, who's a professor of public policy at Oxford. This one's more about how our institutions can manage these—he calls them “lengthening” problems—and how our institutions should be designed to manage these types of issues. And then, The Overstory by Richard Powers, which I'm sure someone else on here has brought up. This is a sort of sprawling, intergenerational novel that tells stories of different families, but always with reference to these trees that precede these families or live long after they're gone.

Those are my three. But I also just wanted to make a really quick plug for the Climate and Community Institute reports. They're really great, and they cover all sorts of topics, including at the intersection of housing, climate change, public ownership of infrastructure, and energy transition. So, it’s related to some of the things we've talked about today.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that's a really interesting organization, and it’s really fascinating stuff they're putting out. I'm glad you shared all of those resources with us, Sara. That's great.

One more time, Holly Caggiano, Sara Constantino, thank you so much for your work. Thank you for coming on Resources Radio. We really appreciate it.

Sara Constantino: Thank you.

Holly Caggiano: Thank you so much.

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