Overcoming the Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) Syndrome

National Public Radio featured a story this week about growing opposition to renewable energy facilities, particularly wind power. Wind advocates were asked how they might overcome such local opposition -- dubbed the NIMBY syndrome -- in the future. The spokesperson said, "We've got to get in there earlier and educate people." Wrong! How arrogant! You think people are opposed because they don't understand? No, they're opposed because the "costs" and "impacts" ON THEM are likely to outweigh the likely benefits TO THEM. The only way to overcome the NIMBY syndrome, regardless of the type of facility, is to make sure that the overwhelming majority of people in the area believe that the benefits TO THEM if the facility is built will outweigh the costs and impacts THEY are likely to experience.

Why is this so hard to understand? Facility siting scholarship has been clear about this for almost thirty years. (See O'Hare, Bacow and Sanderson, Facility Siting and Public Opposition, Wiley, 1983.) More than twenty years ago, we figured out how to overcome the NIMBY Syndrome and crafted what we called The Facility Siting Credo (Lawrence Susskind, Negotiation Journal, Volume VI, Issue 4, October 1990, pp. 309-314) ). The Credo was tested nationally against the siting experience in a great many American cities (Howard Kunreuther, Kevin Fitzgerald, and Thomas Aarts, Risk Analysis, Volume 13, Number 3, 1993, pp. 301-318)

Every siting effort starts with a small percentage of people who favor whatever is being proposed, probably less than 10%. These are usually people likely to gain personally if the facility is built, maybe by selling their land directly to the facility developer). And, as Mike Elliott, a Professor at Georgia Tech demonstrated many years ago, an equally small percentage of people usually start out opposed. Typically, these are people likely to bear disproportionate costs -- because they live right next to whatever is being proposed. While there are some people in every community who pay no attention to anything (maybe 10%), the vast majority -- 60% - 65% -- fall into a category called "Guardians." It's what that this middle group does that leads to most facility siting controversies.

We know two things about Guardians (thanks to Professor Elliott). First, if they think a licensing or permitting decision is unfair, they will side with the opponents. And, second, they want to hear whatever the arguments are for and against a proposed facility "on their merits." If believable information isn't presented in an open forum where questions can be asked of experts and proponents in a problem-solving format, they will side with the opponents. NIMBYism occurs when these two facts about Guardians are ignored.

Let me get back to the wind energy spokesperson on NPR. If proponents put out one-sided information to help "sell" citizens on the need for new renewable energy facilities, or try to convince them that there won't be any adverse impacts, that's sure to backfire. The Facility Siting Credo indicates how to avoid these and other mistakes, but I'm just going to emphasize the three most important principles in the Credo (and that are, for the most part, ignored in most facility siting disputes in the United States because proponents are typically way overconfident).

1. Engage in joint fact finding, not one-sided "educational" efforts.

2. Let all the key stakeholders choose a mediator to help manage a consensus building process.

3. Promise to compensate potential "losers" and hold any adversely affected neighborhood harmless.

Most environmental impact assessments are prepared AFTER proponents have committed to build a facility. So, whatever data or forecasts are generated tend to be discounted by opponents as nothing but propaganda on behalf of decisions that have already been made. This is exactly the kind of thing that causes Guardians to side with the opponents. The Cape Wind Project in Massachusetts (the first off-shore wind farm in the United States) has been caught up in what must be the most elaborate regulatory review process in energy facility siting history in the United States. Whatever evidence has been presented by proponents has been countered by opponents. Everyone had made up their minds long before studies of the likely impacts of the facility became available. By the time the formal regulatory reviews took place, it was impossible to get all the parties in the same room for a civil conversation. Maine, however, has taken a different tack. The state has pre-reviewed all possible off-shore wind sites and noted publically those that seem to make the most sense in technical, economic and aesthetic terms. We'll see whether private companies proposing to build in one of these pre-designated and pre-reviewed areas faces the same opposition as Cape Wind. Joint fact finding regarding the likely benefits, impacts and costs of a proposed facility tends to be a lot easier if they take place before a specific site has been selected.

Most public involvement in government decisions in the United States is a joke. Hearings and so-called town meetings offer trivial opportunities for opponents and proponents to make short statements that won't convince anyone of anything. They are all for show. The real battle takes place in the media and behind the scenes as each group does its best to lobby the elected and appointed officials involved.

Only an extended public dialogue, when questions can still be asked and answered before the Guardians have taken sides, is likely to lead to believable analyses of the merits and demerits of each proposed technology, location, design, or mitigation strategy). We know how to do this, but it requires that some of the money that will inevitably be spent on lawyers and litigation be used to pay professional mediators to facilitate authentic problem-solving or consensus building efforts. This is not about public relations (which is what the wind spokesperson meant by "education"). Rather, it's about public learning through joint inquiry facilitated by a professional neutral. Most people don't even realize that such a thing is possible! Not everyone needs to be involved. Mediators know how to manage conflict assessments that can bring the right stakeholders to the table, to work on a jointly crafted agenda, with a range of experts advisors to help them. Such public inquiries can now be made entirely transparent on the web.

Now we get to the third principle at the heart of the Facility Siting Credo. Professor Howard Raiffa and others have written about this extensively. Unless you "hold potential losers harmless" they will oppose anything that is likely to hurt them. If you want to build a new facility in a particular location, there is no question that a small number of people living adjacent to the site will be opposed. Telling them that the "gains" to everyone else outweigh whatever "losses" they might experience -- so they should support the project -- is crazy. It's not rational. And, as Professor O'Hare noted years ago, it is easy for that small number of peole to find each other. And, they have a substantial incentive to try to block the facility. On the other hand, all the potential gainers (who could number in the millions if we are talking about switching from fossil fuels to clean energy) are usually unaware of the rather small gains they are might realize over the long haul. They don't have an incentive to organize themselves.

Iff the gains to the gainers far outweigh the losses to the losers, that's not going to stop the small number of potential losers from trying to block a facility. And, since regulators and public officials don't employ the Facility Siting Credo, they play into the hands of that small group who can easily recruit Guardians by complaining that decisions have been made without them and no one is doing anything to compensate the losers. Instead of 10% opposed, the opposition grows to more than 50%, and public officials have no choice but to fight the project.

Compensation to potential losers is not as tricky as it might seem. Most people haven't thought about the difference between compensation (something good) and a bribe (something bad). Also, compensation doesn't have to take the form of financial payments. A facility developer could promise to remove something that has for a long-time been a problem -- like cleaning up a contaminated site somewhere else in the area if they are allowed to go build their new facility.

A bribe is an illegal payment which people would be embarrassed to have made public. But compensation, awarded based on clear principles that ensure that everyone in the same category is treated equally, is not a bribe. Community benefit agreements (currently being debated in New York City) seek to ensure that everyone in a community will benefit when a new facility of some kind is built. Some of the gains to the gainers (especially proponents who stand to make a profit) are, in effect, taxed (before they go to the gainers) and used to ensure that the small number of opponents who really stand to lose will be made whole. Some gains are also used to compensate neighborhoods or communities who experience real losses so that everyone else in the city or region can benefit. Compensation payments, or compensatory measures to eliminate a problem in the area, ensure that all those who bear disproportionate costs (even small ones) realize some tangible benefit over and above the general benefits that all the gainers will get if a facility is built. Construction jobs, for example, ought to be held for those adversely affected. Property tax abatements (or at least property tax insurance) should be offered to those who live near a new facility. This will hold them harmless against any property value losses caused by the new facility. The key is to ensure that potential losers are fully compensated. This will lead the Guardians to side with the proponents and NIMBYism will melt away.

If there is no way to tax the gainers, and capture some of the benefits to compensate the losers, then the proposed facility is probably a mistake -- its either in the wrong location, using the wrong technology or being proposed at the wrong time.

Now, there are some opponents who just don't care what they are offered or what their neighborhood is offered (and, again, I'm not just talking about money). They oppose a new facility for ideological reasons or because they just don't want things to change. In real life, when the Facility Siting Credo is followed, the folks in this category (ideological opponents) are a very small minority (fewer than 5% of the total population of a community or region). Elected and appointed officials (and courts) who see that every effort has been made to use some gains to compensate losers and make the host community whole (through an open problem-solving conversation managed by a professional mediator) are not likely to block what 95% of the community supports. So, the trick is to get the Guardians to side with the proponents.

Please, no more whining about NIMBY. Just adopt the Facility Siting Credo and run the process the right way.

Getting Agreement on Energy Policies and Plans

Energy planning ought to be about avoiding problems and seizing collective opportunities. Cities (and nations) have problems when there is not enough energy available at a reasonable price. And, if they could get their act together, cities, regions, states and countries could reduce wasteful patterns of energy use and take advantage of "greener" energy production technologies that reduce costs of all kinds --especially environmental cost -- and increase energy independence (i.e. reducing our dependence on "foreign" oil). Energy planning is about figuring out the best way to match energy supply and energy demand in sustainable ways. It gets complicated, though, because different groups have their own ideas about (1) the desirability of relying on various sources of energy; (2) the desirability of relying primarily on markets to set prices, encourage technology innovation and meet long-term needs, and (3) the appropriateness of allowing some groups and countries to tightly control certain energy supplies. In the final analysis, negotiations at the international, national, state, regional and local levels determine which energy supplies are available and what price we pay to meet our growing demand for electricity, transportation, home heating, and economic production.

Imagine a pie chart that shows the composition of our current energy supplies. We can do this at any scale. Let's think about the country as a whole. Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, renewables (like solar and wind power), and a few other sources each constitute a wedge. A similar-sized pie chart shows how we use energy: industrial uses, residential uses, transportation, commercial uses, and the like. Supply and demand must be in balance in the sense that we can only use what we are able to find and pay for.

If you ask what the supply and demand pie charts will look like at a certain point in the future, say 10 years from now, there is no correct answer. Different groups will prefer a different mix of energy supplies and want to reshape energy demand, either because a shift will benefit them directly or because they are committed to improving the net overall impact on society in some way. One thing is for sure, though, experts can't tell us what the pie charts ought to look like. We have to make those decisions for ourselves.

If it were up to you, how would you want to alter the pie charts for the United States? The current supply is made up of about 29% coal, 16% oil, 31% natural gas, 12% nuclear, and 11% renewables (including hydro). Current demand includes 30% industrial, 22% residential, 28% transportation, and 19% commercial. The overall price of energy is just over 9 cents per kilowatt, although not everyone pays the same price. The environmental costs of current energy use and production are hard to calculate. Sometimes these are framed in terms of impacts on public health: x people die or get sick each year from diseases associated with pollution of various kinds caused by energy production and utilization. Increasingly environmental costs will be framed in terms of what we would have to spend to artificially do the work that ecosystem do naturally like filter air and water or convert CO2 to oxygen. These are called ecosystem services and we can price them.

Any change in the overall size of the "pie" will effect certain groups -- either changing the price they have to pay for a unit of energy, redistributing job opportunities, reshaping environmental costs, or altering the balance of power in the world. Someone's got to pay for investments in new technology if we want to grow the pie or change the size of a supply or demand wedge.

Efforts at present, at the city level for instance, to change the pattern of energy supply and demand include (1) reducing the amount of energy used by municipal governments; (2) encouraging individual homeowners and businesses to conserve energy and reduce their carbon footprints; (3) encouraging more energy efficient patterns of land use and development, and (4) looking for ways to encourage more sustainable electricity production (through re-use of brownfields for renewable energy, building trash-to-energy plants and the like). In a big city, these can have a noticeable effect. Overall, though, states and national governments will have to get involved or the larger pie charts won't look very different in the future than they do now. In recent years, states have begun to require that at least 20% of the electricity produced within their borders come from renewable energy sources by 2020 or 2030. We'll see whether these provisions are enforced. If they are, the size of the renewable energy wedge could double in the national supply chart.

Unfortunately, we don't have proper forums in which we can work out agreements on how existing supply and demand pie charts should look in the future. Congress has never faced this issue directly; preferring instead to make incremental decisions about whether to subsidize one form of energy development or not (often, at one location at a time). As a nation, we have not set supply or demand goals; instead, we have just bumped along. As I mentioned, states have been trying to encourage investment in cleaner forms of energy production, but they are limited by the grid -- the system of power lines that allows energy produced and stored in one location to be "wheeled" to other locations as demand ebbs and flows. We need a national plan to expand and modernize the grid. We also need to figure out how to store and distribute highly distributed forms of (renewable) energy. We need to decide whether we are going to maintain or increase our reliance on nuclear energy even if we don't have a plan for storing high level nuclear waste.

If states try to change energy efficiency standards or subsidize new forms of energy production, they end up competing with each other. Localities are even more highly constrained. They can improve energy efficiency in public buildings, increase the efficiency of the municipal bus fleet and work with building owners to encourage retrofits that reduce the demand for energy. They can also urge residents to use less energy. But, most are not about to get involved directly in producing energy on their own. If we allow more drilling, maybe we can increase our reliance on oil and gas. But, how do we do that and decrease greenhouse gas emissions at the same time? Can we assume that technology innovation (i.e. clean coal technology or carbon sequestration) will resolve that apparent conflict?

What would it mean to create national, state and local forums in which we could negotiate agreements regarding the changes we want to achieve in the current supply and demand pie charts? At each level, we would have to bring together representatives of all the relevant interests groups, engage in joint fact finding (with the help of appropriately qualified experts), formulate comprehensive agreements regarding five, ten and twenty year objectives and commit to appropriate implementation strategies. These conversations would not be easy. It is hard to formulate overall "packages" that will leave everyone better off. Discussions of this sort need to be mediated by qualified consensus building professionals. At the national level, the Department of Energy could take the lead (in cooperation with the appropriate Congressional committees) but a great many other groups would have to be involved. At the state level, governors and legislative leaders could convene appropriate consensus building efforts, but first we would need to figure out how to define the scope of state energy policies and how they fit within certain national decisions. In every city, broadly-representative working groups would need to consider possible changes in their supply and demand objectives within the framework of state and national plans. Final decisions would be made, of course, by those with the legal authority to make them, but to ensure implementation, the trade-offs and shifting distribution of gains and losses would need to have broad political support.

In the end, energy policies and plans are political choices that ought to reflect the best possible scientific, economic and engineering inputs. Our traditional approach to making public policy -- careening from one crisis to the next -- won't produce the interlocking decisions required. We need to commit to a consensus building approach to energy planning.

Climate Change: Adaptation vs Mitigation

There is a substantial risk that the continued release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will cause a range of adverse impacts including global warming, sea level rise, intensification of storms, changes in historical patterns of rainfall (and drought), threats to endangered habitats and the possible spread of infectious diseases.  Even if the countries of the world agree to take aggressive steps to stabilize or reduce CO2 emissions over the next twenty to fifty years, there is still a strong possibility that the cumulative effects of past greenhouse gas emissions will cause sea level to rise and storms to intensify for at least the next several decades, and probably longer.   Think about the worst storm you or your family can remember and the damage it caused.  What if storms like that occurred every ten years instead of every 100 years? 

Given such risks, it makes sense to search for low-cost ways of reducing CO2 emissions. Collectively, such steps fall under the heading of mitigation. We also need to be thinking about how to reduce the severity of whatever impacts do occur. These are generally called adaptation measures.   In the same way that cities and towns plan ahead for natural disasters like earthquakes, they should take steps to deal with the risks posed by climate change and sea level rise. This is particularly true for coastal communities.

There is a consensus building approach to managing the risks associated with climate change. First, coastal communities need to forecast the likely impacts of sea level rise, storm intensification, changes in rainfall patterns, and potential public health threats. They need to identify the ways in which their community is vulnerable. While this is not easy to do, most communities have documentation of the worst storms that have occurred in their area and the damage they did.  If there are photos, these can provide particularly useful evidence of what a two foot or an six foot rise in sea level might mean.  Communities can use various computer-based forecasting and scenario-casting tools to anticipate the risks that they face. Then, they need to inventory their options.  What can they do to protect themselves?  Our team at MIT (http://scienceimpact.mit.edu) has identified five types of responses:  reduce the vulnerability of the built environment by removing certain important structures from harm's way or protecting them in place by adopting new building or land use codes; protect water and waste water infrastructure by increasing water supplies and decreasing demand; protect wetlands and wildlife by preserving existing assets and enhancing their resiliency; preserve farm and forest land in the same ways; and invest in public education (including emergency preparedness, evacuation strategies, and civil defense). Once a community has an inventory of policy options, it needs to organize a public forum to consider which options make the most sense from a risk management standpoint. A lot of groups and individuals will need to be involved in joint fact finding and collaborative problem solving. (Professional facilitation can make the job easier).   Finally, communities need to enhance their adaptive management capabilities.   That means clarifying which agencies and organizations have responsibility for monitoring risks and implementing risk management strategies given new information.  

These are not merely technical tasks, they involve political choices, particularly about what money to spend and what added restrictions to impose on private property holders.  Such decisions can't be left to experts.  Communities must engage representatives of all relevant stakeholding groups in making these hard choices.  And, since we are talking about very complex "socio-ecological systems," nobody is going to get it right the first time.  A process of continuous public learning and adjustment will be required.

The global battle goes on over who should pay for mitigation and whether we can restrict

CO2 emissions while simultaneously encouraging economic growth in the developing world and economic recovery in the developed nations. Whatever these decisions, however, there is a high likelihood that we have already begun to feel the effects of climate change.  We can not ignore the risks (think Katrina and what happened when that city's infrastructure was overwhelmed). A consensus building approach can make it easier to reach fair, efficient, stable and wise agreements about how best to adapt.