2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

Deepening Understanding of Environmental Tradeoffs of Alternative Energy Sources

William Ascher, PhD

To explore how to overcome superficial understandings of the tradeoffs among different energy uses, several experiments have been conducted to determine how exposure to information about the benefits and risks of energy sources (e.g., natural gas generated through fracking, coal-sired plants, nuclear power generation) can be effective in a) deepening citizens' appreciation for these tradeoffs; b) inducing information searches to learn more about these tradeoffs. The "before and after" surveys of citizen attitudes and actions reveals considerable promise in inducing more constructive assessment of the alternatives.

The Fukushima Crisis: Civil Society and Policy Transitions in Japan and Beyond

Robert Mason

The transformative potential of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis—and the related earthquake and tsunami—is the focus of this paper. Immediately following the disaster, there were high expectations and many calls for revolutionary changes to civil society and energy and environmental policies in Japan. By many measures, Japan’s civic environmentalism— which combines a tradition of local activism with a national environmental movement that is limited in size and policy influence—lags in comparison with peer industrialized countries.  But the transformative potential of significant environmental shocks is demonstrated by the policy consequences of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, which helped bring about significant reforms that made it easier for NGOs to attain legal status and raise funds. The Fukushima crisis, by contrast, has brought some major changes to Japan’s energy and environmental trajectories, but not the significant political and civil society transformations that had been widely anticipated. Germany, on the other hand, moved to phase out nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Other major nuclear powers tended to “pause” and make limited course corrections in response to Fukushima—but no other country responded as precipitously as Germany. This paper explores various explanations for these dramatically differing responses--giving due attention to the challenges in making such international comparisons—and speculates on the longer term implications for civil society, and energy and environmental policy, in Japan.