Great expectations: Public opinion about energy transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Energy transition is a fundamental part of the policy response to climate change, but unlike climate change, we know little about the factors that shape public attitudes about it. We address three questions: 1) how supportive are people of energy transition, 2) how do pre-existing ideas – about politics, economics, climate change, and energy – affect public views on energy transition, and 3) how malleable is public opinion about transition? Using the Canadian province of Alberta – a context where oil and gas are politically and economically predominant – we assess these questions with a population-based survey experiment (n = 1591). Results indicate that energy transition is widely popular. Pre-existing values and beliefs about the economy; political identification with the left-right spectrum; worry about climate change; and hope in the future of oil and gas as a predominant industry strongly structure attitudes about transition. We argue that championing the economic benefits of clean energy will not be persuasive with people who continue to have high hopes in the future economic benefits of fossil fuels. Instead, we suggest policy makers focus instead on the economic risks that come from continued reliance on fossil fuels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".