Law Commons^™

Anatomy Of Industry Resistance To Climate Change: A Familiar Litany, Robert L. Glicksman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The industries that generate environmental risks in the United States have long been hostile to regulatory programs that increase their costs of operation and reduce their profits. While industry may have been unprepared for, and thus poorly organized to resist, the first wave of federal environmental legislation enacted during the “environmental decade” of the 1970s, it quickly marshaled its forces. Regulated or potentially regulated entities, their trade associations, and their lobbyists began a concerted effort to defeat, delay, and weaken environmental regulation.

This book chapter describes the process by which regulatory opponents successfully relied on free market ideology to couch …

Cultural Cognition Of Scientific Consensus, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Why do members of the public disagree - sharply and persistently - about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The "cultural cognition of risk" refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals' beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting …