Environmental sociology was a popular topic this year at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Seattle. As current graduate students in the Department of Sociology and Fellows at the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland, we were thrilled to see the wide range of environmental topics covered on panels and in sessions this year. The offerings included (but were by no means limited to) a presidential panel on climate change and social movements, a thematic session on reimagining the environmental and climate justice movements, a session on environmental policy, three separate sessions on environmental sociology, a series of three sessions on current research taking place in the Environment and Technology Section from micro to macro levels of analysis, and a lively Environment and Technology roundtable session with 14 different tables.
 
Of particular interest was a Saturday morning session on environmental policy, with papers on disclosure conflicts surrounding crude oil trains and frack chemicals, scientific and public knowledge about the dangers of non-stick chemicals, and the relationship between World Bank structural adjustment policies and forest loss. Given our work on US climate and energy policy for the Climate Constituencies Project, we were especially interested in a paper by Joshua Basseches of Northwestern University entitled “Rethinking the Legislative Process: ‘Buffering Opportunities’ as Limits of Social Movement Influence in Environmental Policymaking.” In it, Basseches describes the ways in which certain gatekeepers have the ability to limit social movement influence over policy-making. He finds that legislators in privileged positions keep discussions of policy matters private, thereby limiting the ability of social movement organizations to strategize and influence legislation. Overall, each of the papers in this session provided unique vantage points into highly relevant environmental policy debates.
 
The Environment and Technology session series on advances in micro, meso, and macro level research were also popular, with standing room only crowds of environmental sociologists in attendance. Each session included strong research across a range of methods and units of analysis. William Ryan Wishart’s presentation, “The Coal Coalition and Energy Policy Planning Network in 2009: Class Capacities and Climate Politics,” raised interesting questions about the influence of the coal industry on policy-making on the meso-level panel. John Aloysius Zinda also presented interesting work on vegetation gain in China and the effects of community officials’ strategies on local economic and environmental change.  On the micro-level panel, PSE Director Dana R. Fisher presented work (with PSE Fellows William Yagatich and Anya M. Galli) on volunteer stewardship and the Maryland Watershed Stewards academies. Keep an eye on the PSE Blog for an upcoming post about this project.
 
The popularity of these sessions indicates three things about the ASA Section on Environment and Technology: we have a robust membership, we have generated a substantial amount of interest in environmental research, and the section organizers might want consider booking bigger rooms for its sessions next year! It is exciting to see so many scholars finding innovative ways to understand environmental problems, and to have the opportunity to discuss such interesting work in person. The Section on Environment and Technology has grown substantially and we look forward to seeing even more great environmental research at the ASA 2017 Annual Meeting in Montreal!
 
 
Anya Galli is a PhD Candidate and Amanda Dewey is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Both are Fellows at the PSE and research assistants on the Climate Constituencies Project.

 In the past few weeks, the media and tweetosphere have been abuzz about climate denial, public opinion on energy and climate change, as well as how these issues are related to political polarization more broadly.  Much of the discussion has suggested that there is a link between public opinion and voting behavior, as well as the behavior of the policy actors who make the decisions about energy and climate policy in the United States.

This summer, the Climate Constituencies Project surveyed the top policy actors involved in climate and energy issues at the federal level and in four swing states: Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio.  In each, the ‘top policy actors’ were identified using a methodology adapted from our previous work, which has been published in Nature Climate Change, and Contexts.  The pre-election survey component of the study closed in the beginning of September.  As part of it, we asked these policy actors their attitudes about the science of climate change.  Responses were scored on a scale of 1-5 ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree, mean scores are reported in the table above. 

The results show that there is an overwhelming level of consensus around the science of climate change among policy actors at the Federal level and in these four swing states.  In fact, even with all of this talk of climate denial, opinions have gotten even stronger and the numbers have gone up since summer 2010 when we conducted a previous round of this research.  Across the four swing states and the federal level, there are no statistically significant differences in opinions on these questions.

When asked about potential policy instruments to address climate change and energy options, however, there was much less agreement.  Opinions around a potential cap-and-trade bill were statistically significantly different across the swing states and the federal levels, with policy actors in Florida and at the federal level having much lower opinions than the other states.

- Dana R. Fisher (drfisher@umd.edu)