Bloomberg Professor Paul Ferraro pens op-ed in Bloomberg View explaining bipartisan actions on environmental conservation
By Julie Messersmith / January 19, 2017
In his op-ed publishing this morning in Bloomberg View, Paul Ferraro describes three experiments that reveal little partisan divide across individual efforts to conserve water and electricity, and mitigate climate change.
Ferraro, who joined Johns Hopkins as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in 2015 and is appointed across the schools of Business, Engineering and Public Health, states, “Behavioral scientists would explain these findings by pointing out that all three experiments motivated people’s actions by describing a variety of private and public benefits. They enabled people to make their decisions privately, and they avoided hot-button cultural-identity questions and trigger words, such as ‘green.'”
Further, he concludes that this evidence demonstrates that “partisan polarization should not be an insurmountable obstacle to taking action to protect the environment.”