Public acceptance of energy technologies

Abstract

Energy can be viewed as a resource or an issue. Just as the news media tend to focus on issues rather than resources, so do pollsters. Much of the published and publicly-available polling data on energy, therefore, relate to issues that the pollsters considered important or timely, like acid rain or nuclear waste, or to interesting psycho-social phenomena, like the gap between experts' risk estimates and the perceptions of risks by the public. This brief summary of the social science research attempts to broaden the understanding of public attitudes by drawing largely on a variety of surveys that were designed to learn what Europeans think of energy not only as an issue but as a resource.