Two new polls out this month reveal interesting insights about Americans’ attitudes toward climate science and policy action.

The first poll, “Climate Change in the American Mind: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in 2011,” is the fourth in a series of polls tracking Americans’ understanding of climate science facts since 2008. The second poll, “Public Support for Climate and Energy Policies in May 2011,” tracks Americans’ support for and how highly they prioritize climate change and energy policies. The two are different, and surprisingly, Americans’ attitudes toward the science seem to register far below their support for policy.

On the one hand, the polling shows that only 64 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, with only 47 percent believing humans to be the main cause. Yet the other poll from the same month showed that 71 percent of Americans said addressing global warming should be a very high, high, or medium priority for Congress, and a whopping 91 percent of Americans—including 85 percent of Republicans—said developing clean energy should be a very high, high, or medium priority.

To explain this discrepancy, we talked with Dr. Tony Leiserowitz, the principal investigator of both polls and the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Sean Pool: Why do more Americans seem to support action on climate change than actually believe in climate change? Has there been a decline in the number of Americans who understand climate science overall?

Tony Leiserowitz: Sure. Let me take the second question first of public understanding. What we have seen since the fall of 2008 was a pretty significant decline in the belief that climate change is happening or that humans have caused it. As of last year, particularly January of last year, with our own surveys, we saw a 14-point drop in public belief that climate change was happening. This was also found by a number of other survey companies, including Gallup, Pew, and CNN, and others.

But since then, the number has climbed back up, though not to the fall 2008 levels. About half of the distance, about seven points until May of this year, we found that 64 percent of Americans said that climate change is happening.

SP: So to what can we attribute this drop in 2009 and 2010 to the rebound that we are seeing in 2011?

TL: Several things happened here; there is no one single cause. First and foremost is the economy, the economy, the economy. But secondly, and I think underappreciated, is the role of media coverage. We have colleagues who study newspaper coverage as well as television coverage, and they have found that, since 2007, newspaper coverage of this issue has dropped to less than one-third of what it was in 2007 and television coverage, things like the “CBS Evening News,” has dropped to less than one-fifth of what it was back then.

Most Americans know about this issue through what they encounter in the media. They don’t know climate scientists. They don’t read the peer-reviewed literature. They learn about this issue, which is invisible to most of us, through the media. So when the media doesn’t report the issue, it is literally out of sight. So that’s what we think has played an important role.

Andrew Light: Your work with Ed shows that they’re more undecided on the issue while other work by John Krosnick, for example, has a much lower number. So how’s that explained?

TL: The main thing is how the questions are worded. For example, John forced people to say “Yes, global warming is happening,” or “No, it isn’t.” And then only if they volunteer does he allow them to record an “I don’t know” answer.

We view that as a very important knowledge question. We view climate change to be an important scientific fact. As a part of that, we want to know who thinks it is happening and who thinks it isn’t, but just as importantly, who doesn’t know. And so we make that an explicit response option and find that 20 percent of the population consistently doesn’t know, as compared to the 3 percent that John finds. That’s the fundamental difference between the two findings: whether the option of “I don’t know” is explicitly given in the question or not. When people are asked a question with just the two options—“It is happening” or “It isn’t”—what [Krosnick] finds is that about 10 percent more people will say that it is happening. Whereas, what we find, when we give those same people the option that they don’t know, 20 percent of Americans will choose the option “I don’t know.”

We also take it a step further with our study; for the people who say that it is happening, we ask, “How sure are you that it is happening?” We do the same for those who do not believe that it is happening. We find that 50 percent on both sides say that they are really sure about their opinion. The other 50 percent, in both of those groups, are really kind of wishy-washy about this, and when you put this together with the other 20 percent who say upfront, “I don’t know,” it shows just how much movement there is on this issue. People don’t know a lot about it.

What this really says about those who say it is happening or those who say it is not happening, about half of each of those groups are unconfident, not really sure about their views, suggesting that there is more flexibility among those perspectives than what would be known from a study that asks simply “Is it happening?” or “Is it not happening?”

AL: Which is both good news and bad news for those of us in the advocacy community. On the one hand, we could lose some people if there is another “ClimateGate” in the future, but we could also get some people on-side with the right kind of education.

TL: That’s right. There are many different species of skeptics that have many different reasons for not being content. Some of those who are hardcore conspiracy theorists who think this is all a plot are really hard to convince because of their steadfast views. Plenty of others want evidence and are open to evidence. Other people base their opinions on personal experience. You know, we had a record snowstorm last year. You know, it can’t be true. Those people, we believe, are more amenable to interacting with the science if given the chance.

“Republicans, independents, and Democrats overwhelmingly support investments in clean energy.”

AL: Your second poll on policy also suggests that 76 percent of Republicans believe that there is no impact of environmental protection on economic growth, or that there is a positive impact. Don’t you find this surprising?

TL: That’s one of the things I found most interesting as well. This comes out of a longtime frustration that I have had, that one of the most commonly used measures of public support for the environment, which goes back decades, is the simple question, “Do you support environmental protection if it hurts the economy or economic growth if it hurts the environment?”

Again, it’s a forced, false choice. It’s an either-or, zero-sum game. I’ve never really liked that question because it forces people into a situation that does not reflect what they believe. So what I did was that I rewrote the question.

I asked, “Do you believe that protecting the environment hurts the economy and costs jobs, has no effect, or actually improves the economy and increases jobs?” About 82 percent of Americans believe that protecting the environment improves the economy or has no effect. 56 percent of Americans believes that protection improves the economy while 26 percent believe that it has no effect. Even 76 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of independents, and 94 percent of Democrats don’t buy into this zero-sum notion that it’s either the environment or the economy.

AL: This is important in light of last week. You have Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, who are among the crowd of possible Republican nominees for the 2012 field and have not stepped down from their former claims as governors that climate change is real. Both, almost identically, have said that climate change exists but that now is not the time to do something about it because of the economy. But your findings suggest that this attitude only seems to resonate with about 25 percent of the Republican electorate.

TL: True, but this is an important segment of the Republican electorate. We have to remember that this is during a Republican presidential primary and that the most important thing is reaching the most hardcore voters during a primary.

We have seen that the Republican Party has gone quite away from even George W. Bush when he was president. That is, not only refusing to pass policy but also questioning the basic validity of the facts of climate science. I really think that both Huntsman and Romney have taken a risk in saying that they believe climate change is real and that humans are the main cause and that is a serious problem. The day after Romney said that, Rush Limbaugh went on the air and said, “Bye bye, nomination.” So, you know, they are in a tough spot.

SP: So you have 82 percent of the American electorate that believes that environmental protection either benefits or is neutral to the economy. But when you look at climate change in particular, another one of your results showed that 68 percent of Americans support requiring public utilities to produce a certain amount of renewable electricity, even if it would cost American families an average of $100 a year. This includes 58 percent of Republicans who would favor requiring renewable energy generation even with this hypothetical additional cost. If four-fifths of Americans believe that environmental protection is good or neutral for the economy while two-thirds of people say they would want environmental protection even if it cost the economy, how is it that members of both parties are not clamoring to capture these winning messages? These are big, big numbers in politics. Presidential elections have been waged and won on slimmer margins.

TL: I think this is a part of a larger pattern that we have seen with many surveys for years. Americans overwhelmingly support a transition to a clean energy future. Republicans, independents, and Democrats overwhelmingly support investments in clean energy, subsidies for homeowners, fuel-efficient cars, solar panels on roofs, etc. I think that everyone understands our vulnerabilities and risks for what George W. Bush called “our addiction to fossil fuels.”

Some support clean energy because they care about climate change and the environment and that renewable energy will help this. Many more conservative people do not believe in climate change but see clean energy policies as a way to deal with their own values, which are often individualistic and ones based on self-reliance. We are held hostage to our addiction to these old energy systems and imported energy from abroad. The point here, again, is that liberals, independents, and conservatives all support the same exact policies, albeit for different reasons.

SP: This brings us back to one of these big topics that we were hoping to address, which is this large gap between the vast majority of Americans who want to see action on this issue of climate change and clean energy and the slimmer majority of Americans who actually report believing in climate change. On the one hand, there is that uncertainty, even among those who say that climate change is or is not happening. And second, other imperatives for clean energy, besides climate change, such as energy independence, resource security, etc.

TL: And not only those, but also concerns of the economic competitiveness of this country, as well as concerns about public health, and the fact is that the current energy system use, such as coal, has a terrible impact on health. All people can come together around the same policy direction for different reasons, from environmental concerns to national security issues to health reasons, and even moral and religious reasons. All of those communities can support this type of policy direction.

SP: One last question: Is the American public more or less ready for climate policy today than we were two years ago, and where are we going?

TL: Well, what we have seen consistently is that the American people long ago gave their elected officials permission to act, to move toward clean energy. Again, these are not new results. There is very strong bipartisan support, and this has been true for years. So, really, the American people long ago gave their elected officials permission to act.

SP: Thanks very much again for your time.

TL: Yep, no problem, guys. Take care.

Dr. Tony Leiserowitz is the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, Dr. Andrew Light is the Coordinator of International Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress, and Sean Pool is the Assistant Editor for Science Progress. See Joe Romm’s take on our interview at Climate Progress.

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The need for sound science to guide national and international policymaking exists in almost every sphere of public policy, from climate change to drug regulation to mercury pollution. But perhaps nowhere do policymakers need to hear the voice of science more urgently than in the case of our collapsing fisheries. The precipitous decline of some of the oceans’ most magnificent creatures, such the bluefin tuna, shows us that we are at risk of becoming the generation that consumes the world’s last wild food unless we take a drastic change in course and engage in unprecedented international cooperation.

In the new book Four Fish: the Future of the Last Wild Food, author and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg tackles the changing relationship between human beings and the ocean by examining the history of four staple seafoods: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna. Each fish represents a different historical step in the human pursuit of fish: salmon were first fished from freshwater rivers, sea bass from shallow coastal waters, cod from continental shelves, and tuna from deepwater zones.

Greenberg explores the realities and implications of both wild and domestic sources of fish, and his adventures lead him across the globe to places such as a salmon megafarm in Norway, a fair trade fishing company in Alaska, and the endangered bluefin tuna habitat in the South Pacific.

The message of the book is simple: “Human beings have [ignored] the fundamental limits the laws of nature place on ecosystems and have consistently removed more fish than can be replaced by natural processes.” Greenberg’s assertion is carefully researched and reflects the work of major ocean stewardship organizations. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has stated, for example, that demand for fish continues to rise globally, yet “70 percent of the world’s fisheries are now exploited, overexploited, or have collapsed.”

Wealthy human appetites have outgrown the oceans’ finite bounty, and we have begun to fill the gap in recent decades with the industrial-scale domestication of fish, or aquaculture. Yet this shift in fishing practices has created its own environmental problems, from overuse of antibiotics to help fish survive in incredibly high densities, to nutrient pollution, to the escape of domesticated fish. Escaped fish cause significant damage to local ecosystems and to their wild neighbors because domesticated fish are often not native to the places in which they are farmed.

Greenberg lays out the issue clearly, saying, “the fish we have chosen to tame are by and large animals that satisfy whimsical gustatory predilections rather than the requirements of sound ecologically based husbandry.” In other words, we are not wisely choosing the fish we are farming and may be harming more than we are helping in our attempts to support the demand for fish.

Despite the gloomy outlook, Greenberg advances a positive vision for what an “equitable and long-lasting peace between man and fish” might look like.

Our wild fisheries can be saved with better communication between ocean scientists and policymakers. We can reduce our overall fishing effort, convert a significant portion of ocean ecosystems to protected no-catch areas, put international protections in place for unmanageable species such as bluefin tuna that cross many national boundaries or live in unregulated international waters, and prioritize protecting the bottom of the food chain.

This will inevitably lead to fewer wild fish on people’s dinner plates, so aquaculture must be part of the solution to fill the gap and provide for the billions of people rising out of poverty in Asia and Africa who are increasing their consumption of fish. The world will need to produce an additional 37 million tons of farmed fish each year by 2030 just to maintain current levels of consumption, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Greenberg suggests that we can make aquaculture more sustainable by focusing on the types of fish we choose to farm. The fish we choose to domesticate should be herbivores rather than carnivores, nondestructive to a wild system, limited in number, adaptable, and functional in a polyculture with other useful marine organisms. Taking steps to reduce escape of domestic fish is also critical to minimizing the harmful impact of this practice on wild populations.

Four Fish explores fishing from the multiple perspectives of the fisherman, the environment, and the consumer. Recent national attempts to address the fishing crisis include President Barack Obama’s executive order establishing a national ocean policy, but Greenberg notes that, “In fact, there is no “ocean policy” as such, at least none that looks at wild and domesticated fish as two components of a common future.”

It’s time for us to step up and start planning for the future. The question we have to answer, Greenberg says, is whether we have to “eliminate all wildness from the sea and replace it with some kind of human controlled system, or can wildness be understood and managed well enough to keep humanity and the marine world in balance?”

The interview was conducted by Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. The article was written by Sean Pool, Special Assistant for Energy, Science, and Technology policy, and Laurel Hunt, an intern for the energy policy team at the Center for American Progress.

Paul Greenberg is the author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and has been fishing since he was a young child. He has written for various publications including the New York Times Magazine, Book Review, and Opinion Page, as well as National Geographic and GQ. Mr. Greenberg is also a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow. 

A little more than half, or 54 percent, of U.S. weathercasters accept that climate change is happening. And in many local television newsrooms, weathercasters have become the de facto science reporters at their station. Edward Maibach, who headed a recent study surveying professionals in the field, sees this as an opportunity for enhancing their role as informal science educators.

Previous public surveys demonstrate that weathercasters are the second-most trusted source of information on climate change. For Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, that finding was unexpected. The first is climate scientists themselves, and running a distant third are “friends and family.” “That clued us into the fact that our nation’s weathercasters are a potentially important source of informal education about climate change,” he said in an interview with Science Progress. He spoke about his new research with Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on international energy policy, and the director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason. (The podcast audio is accessible above.)

The latest study from the Center for Climate Change Communication is the largest and most representative survey of TV weathercasters to date, and its findings on how this group of professionals thinks about climate change science and news generated significant media attention, including a front-page story at The New York Times. Coverage like that is hard to earn, and Maibach is grateful for it, though he disagrees with the conclusions. Much of the media attention has been on the 25 percent of respondents who said that global warming isn’t happening at all. But as Maibach points out, the idea that this group is “a hotbed of climate change skepticism turned out to not be the case.”

“We see this as a ‘glass already half full’ finding,” he said, referring to the majority of weathercasters who accept global warming. “To the extend to which they were not currently acting as climate change educators, we wanted to identify the path to cultivate them as an important source of education for the public.”

Maibach says the data points to that opportunity, as two out of three survey respondents said they were interested in educating their viewers about the relationship between local weather and the changing global climate.

Weathercasters as informal science educators

The latest survey confirms other findings on the small fraction of dedicated science reporting at local outlets. The study reached almost 1,400 weathercasters who belong to the two major professional associations, the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association. Almost all, or 94 percent of the 571 respondents, said they are the only full-time staffer covering science or environmental issues at their station. Some 79 percent embraced this role, a fact the American Meteorological Society already recognizes. The organization, Maibach says, sees an opportunity to embrace weathercasters as “station scientists” and is pursuing educational programs to support them.

Moreover, weathercasters share their professional expertise not just on air, but at local school and adult education events. Almost 70 percent of the respondents do between one and three speaking events each month, building loyalty that helps draw viewers to their broadcasts. According to the survey, a small proportion of these weathercasters are incorporating climate change information into their broadcasts, but a large proportion of them are finding ways to address the issue in their community presentations.

For Maibach, the “Ah-ha!” moment of the study came from looking at the responses from those participants who said they were interested in communicating more information on climate change. Ninety percent of that group indicated that a variety of relatively simple resources would help them do their jobs more effectively. They needed access to peer-reviewed journal articles, which are typically locked behind paywalls. They need to be able to interview media-savvy climate scientists. Most valuable, they said, are high-quality graphics and animations explaining key concepts of climate science. His group is now working with climate science communication experts to produce these resources.

Andrew Light pointed out that federal government already plays an important role supplying these types of resources, as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produce a wealth of climate science information. As well, he suggested that a move within NOAA to create a National Climate Service will further ramp up the amount of accessible information. Administrator Jane Lubchenco is particularly interested in filling this information gap, he said.

Meteorological myths

While about four out of five weathercasters are men, there is a diversity of professional and educational backgrounds within the community. Previous research shows that about half of the practicing weathercasters in the United States are meteorologists, certified by the AMS or the NWA. Some hold scientific degrees, some have journalism backgrounds, and some simply come to the role through experience in broadcasting.

But the survey results also dispel the notion that there is a rift between weathercasters and professional climate scientists, who tend to be academic researchers. “Approximately three out of four of our respondents look at climate scientists as a trustworthy source of information about climate change,” said Maibach. “That’s good news.”

The myth of this “culture gap” between meteorologists and climatologists, he said, rests on an assumption that forecasters, who struggle to model weather a few days into the future, consider it hubris to claim that they should trust climate models that are decades in scope. But the trust meteorologists say they have in climate scientists doesn’t support this idea, said Maibach.

Light suggested that the immediate media response to the survey may have rested upon this explanation, which he called “seat-of-the-pants sociology—of the working class meteorologists who ‘don’t get no respect.’” In that context, the survey fit into a particular storyline about the the continuing fallout of the overhyped “Climategate” incident, in which computer hackers stole emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The content of the years of private correspondence revealed scientists besieged by freedom of information requests from climate skeptics, and global warming deniers said the information undermined climate science itself. A recent inquiry of the British House of Commons found no basis for either that claim, nor others leveled against the Climate Research Unit at the University, its director, Phil Jones, and the research on historical climate data the group manages.

“None of that has changed any of the overwhelming consensus on the causes of anthropogenic global warming and what are the necessary solutions,” said Light.

In the present media climate, the release of the survey data did create the opportunity for “talking head debates” on cable news, said Light, pitting high-profile weathercasters who deny climate change against scientists who accept the facts.

Setting up the discussion as a debate reinforces the notion that there is disagreement within the scientific community, said Maibach. “And that’s a totally erroneous notion.” Approximately 97 percent of climate scientists who are active researchers say that climate change is real and human-caused. “So this notion that there is still disagreement out there in the scientific community about climate change is fundamentally wrong.”

Climate change as a public health hazard

Maibach’s goal for future projects supported by this research is to enable “local weathercasters to make the connection between the conditions we are living with here, in our community, and the changing global climate.” People have a sense that climate change is “happening somewhere else,” he said, “We understand there is a problem, but it isn’t our problem.”

“The way in which the climate change story has been framed historically is as an environmental problem,” he explains, and it is unquestionably an immense environmental problem. But it is also a public health problem, and before turning to climate change research in 2007, Maibach’s career focused on public health communications. “As a result of 25 or more years in the field, I’m absolutely convinced that for the American people, health is right up along with baseball, mom, and apple pie,” he said—it is something of immense social value. He aims to engage citizens “at a fundamentally deeper, more values-based level” by magnifying research on the public health impacts of climate change.

The Obama administration focuses its discussion of climate change on jobs in clean energy industries and energy security, Light points out. Because it takes time to train scientists to communicate on the expanding set of issues, including the public health threats, it could be effective to provide that information to weathercasters in the near term.

Maibach reports that he is already working with small group of 18 weathercasters who are actively using their platform to talk about climate change as informal science education.

He is also collaborating with the weather team at WLTX, the CBS affiliate in Columbia, South Carolina, headed by Jim Gandy, to become “climate change educators in their community.” Climate Central, a nonprofit that provides scientific information on the issue, will develop graphics, and for the next year, the station will try to help its viewers better understand climate change science and the impacts the global phenomenon has on the local area. If the effort is effective, then Maibach’s group will have a strong case for scaling it.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

In the early 1980s, Andrew Feenberg did some work for French telephone company, which introduced him to county’s Teletel network. Built to utilize the existing phone lines, the system, launched in 1982, was one of the first large-scale precursors to the modern Internet. In a decision that helped ensure the computers’ widespread adoption and the success of the network, France Telecom gave away some 6 million Minitel terminals to subscribers. Users could place online orders for mail-order products, buy train or airline tickets, and access news and information services. Charges for visiting commercial sites appeared on users’ monthly phone bills, and the telco passed along a portion of the proceeds to the other businesses.

Engineers originally envisioned the network for mostly passive information gathering: subscribers would use sites like they would a catalog or telephone directory. But that changed, Feenberg explains, when hackers broke into a commercial site and used it to send messages to visiting users. Although alarmed at first, the business owners realized the potential for profit from a user-to-user communication system. The result was one of the first commercial instant-messaging platforms.

Feenberg is a professor of the philosophy of technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and he recently joined Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Andrew Light for a podcast discussion about the democratic power of online communities. What happened next in France, Feenberg says, illustrates an important lesson about the evolution of digital communication.

The Minitel computers were developed, Feenberg says, “in order to modernized French society along the lines of a highly rational, efficient, technically sophisticated society.” But rational efficiency was not what a lot of citizens had on their minds. “It turned out that what most people wanted to do with instant messaging was get dates,” Feenberg explains. “It went from cold to hot all of a sudden in the space of a few months. The meaning of the computer was transformed because instead of being an information system it became a communication system.”

This re-imagining of the network as an interpersonal communications tool (or specifically, a dial-up dating service) was an example of what Feenberg describes as “democratic rationalization.” The term “rationalization” refers to modern processes used to improve how people manage and control resources through measurement and incremental adjustment. Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line, where humans and machines work together in a carefully calibrated ballet, is an iconic example. Rationalization in this sense is hierarchical, top-down innovation.

“When you make elaborate plans to rationalize something, it usually doesn’t work exactly the way you intended,” Feenberg explains, and management theorists have understood for a long time that initiatives from the bottom could play an important role in the innovation process. He calls large-scale, bottom-up innovation like the user-generated communication on the Minitel network “democratic rationalization.” This process is non-hierarchical and participants may share different values from top-down innovators, but these distributed users brought together by the network are also very good at getting things done. “Without a lot of input from below, you don’t get anywhere. You don’t have innovation and creativity,” he says. “Even though you could make fun of the French for seeking dates…the idea of human communication on computer networks is extremely important for us today.”

Trained as a philosopher, Feenberg eventually found himself working in applied ethics at an experimental medical center focused on treating neurological diseases. His work expanded into investigating questions about the relations between science, technology, and society, and this led to pioneering work in the field of online education. From there, connections in the personal computing industry bloomed. In 1983, the vice president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, the innovative company behind many of the most popular minicomputers of the 1970s and 80s, invited Feenberg to lunch.

“What do you think the future of the personal computer will be?” the executive asked. “I had this sudden revelation,” Feenberg recalls, “Here I was, a student of Herbert Marcuse, this obscure German Marxist radical philosopher, being asked about the future of technology by somebody who was going to make that future.” It dawned on him that he was now involved in something big and important, and he set out from there to develop his own philosophy of technology.

In the early 1990s, he won grants from the National Science Foundation to study nascent online communities, exploring the groups users formed around shared interests, like hobby enthusiasts, or through shared illnesses—without the support or direction of large corporations or government projects. The trends he observed are now entirely familiar to citizens of a networked world, but this was in the early days of the Internet when subscribers dialed in to far less complex services like Prodigy.

This grassroots community building, Feenberg says, was possible because “the networks didn’t really know what they were for. They didn’t have a fully dedicated purpose yet. They were waiting to see what people would make of them, and that gave opportunities for innovation to ordinary people.”

He also says that these democratic features of open networks are important in the current discussions of rules the Federal Communication Commission is considering to protect net neutrality in the mobile phone industry. Feenberg contends that if the wireless business continues on its present development path, with more people accessing the Internet on mobile devices, then large portions of the network will become proprietary, “And the space for innovation and creation that characterized the Internet in its early phases will disappear.”

The FCC decision on net neutrality is important, he says, because the design and configuration of technology constitutes the “framework of our lives.” “If it is not democratized, at least to some degree…then i think it will become a very oppressive environment.”

Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.