Lecture: Social Science Aspects of Sustainability and Climate Change

As a grad student in Communication I also attend a lot of lectures on various topics including sustainability, climate change, gender, class and race awareness, and whatever else peaks my interest. I’m thinking that it would be a good idea to do a short write up after each one to help me digest the various topics and keep writing. So here begins a series of responses to lectures I attend.

Today’s lecture was given by Scott Butner who works at the Pacific NW National Lab, specifically in the Technosocial Predictive Analytics Initiative (TPAI). It was presented as part of the ISTC’s Seminar Series on Sustainability.

The motivating idea of the talk was that we (engineers?) should consider both group and individual behavior in modeling of climate change and energy use. Butner touched on the definition of sustainability noting that the Bruntland Commission’s usage has no inclusion of metrics, and that generally, engineers tend to think of the problem of sustainability as fundamentally rooted in material and energy constraints. I personally don’t this has people (society, individual behavior) integrated enough into the definition, nor do I think sustainability can be boiled down into one fundamental problem. It seems much more complex than that.

The group at TPAI through a grant from the EPA has used systems dynamic modeling (with STELLA) to combine technological systems (agriculture, climate change, smart grid) with social and individual behavior models. Apparently they’ve also use computer gaming to inform opinions. However, near the end of the talk he mentioned that these models are “pretty disposable” and are mainly used to spur critical thinking, not produce results.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• I’m not very familiar with modeling in the social sciences. I’d like to learn more about/if there are endemic (i.e. rooted in social science) models of, say, behavioral change. Usually when I think of social scientists using the word “model” it’s mostly theory, not a sort of “black box” type of thinking including inputs and outputs which I assume most engineers/technically-minded people think of. I might be wrong here, but I think the social vs. “hard” sciences have different uses of the word ‘model.’
• The speaker used a quote from the USDOE regarding the smart grid, noting it “will require cultural change.” How can the publishers so over-generalize and simplify cultural change, suggesting it might come from top-down government recommendations? Is this in line with folk knowledge (or scientific knowledge) about how cultural change actually occurs?
• Another point that was mentioned a few times is that even with increases in energy efficiency, energy use is still on the rise. Or, there are “normative expectations” for energy use. He cited this article to back up the claim.
• The team at TPAI used the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) data for mapping variables like affluence and behavior – one of the most interesting slides in the presentation was the correlation tables between behavior and energy usage across several variables. Like: affluence is correlated with the number of windows in a house. (More affluent = more windows)
• Also, and this may be slightly cynical, but I was struck by the sort of generalized nature of "social science" and discussions of "behavior." This is pretty much in line with many of the informal discussions I've had with engineering friends or groups. It made me wonder: who does critical social science? Do engineers who eventually recognize the importance of social science tend to have a less critical and more generalized understanding? Hopefully that's not horribly offensive, but there are open comments...