This report describes Californians’ opinions about offshore oil and gas development. The report begins by describing the trends in support for offshore drilling since 1977. It then focuses on explaining the surge of support for offshore oil drilling that accompanied the rapid increase in gasoline prices in 2000 and 2001. In this report, we present data from a series of public opinion polls of Californians, which were conducted between 1977 and 2001. The surveys were conducted by the Field Institute, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit public opinion research organization established by the Field Research Corporation. The samples were representative cross-sections of California adults with sample sizes ranging from 485 to 1,034 (See the data appendix for details). We should also note that this study updates some of the information published in a previous MMS report, Trends in Public Opinion on Offshore Oil Development in California (Smith 1995), and in the recently published book, Energy, the Environment, and Public Opinion (Smith 2002).

I propose the psychological proximity hypothesis to shed additional light on our

understanding of the motivation behind political participation. When people directly

experience a political issue, that is, when the political issue is psychologically proxi

mate, they are more likely to become involved. There are two mechanisms contained

within this hypothesis. First, psychological proximity leads to higher levels of issue

public membership, which in turn leads to activism. Second, because psychological

proximity often leads to thinking of the issue in concrete terms, people are better

able to match specific political activities to address the problem. I develop the psy

chological proximity hypothesis in relation to issue-based activism across a variety of

political domains in chapter two by using a combination of representative survey data

from the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey along

with original data and a survey-experiment collected through Mechanical Turk. In

chapter 4, I apply the hypothesis to the environment and climate change in order to

examine the mechanisms more closely. In both chapters, the two mechanisms linking

proximity to activism are empirically supported.

In addition to the psychological proximity hypothesis, in this dissertation I present

a novel measure of environmental attitudes that does not suffer from a confound

with liberal ideology as existing scales do. The Moral Environmentalism Scale is

constructed by incorporating a mix of liberal and conservative moral language. The vii

MES is the only scale analyzed that is able to predict Republican environmental

behavior. Furthermore, the MES is psychometrically valid. All items load on a single

factor, the scale detects low and high levels of moral environmentalism, and the MES

discriminates between someone who is at the low end of the scale from someone who

is very pro-environment.

Mosquitoes are widely regarded as the deadliest animals on the planet because of the many diseases they vector. Malaria alone killed 429,000 people in 2015. To date, the most effective method at reducing the burden imposed by mosquito-borne illnesses is vector control. Traditional vector control strategies have largely relied on the use of chemical insecticides to reduce vector populations and ease disease burden. The most effective current methods continue to use insecticides, but they are being incorporated in programs known as integrated vector management that aim to incorporate multiple vector control strategies and closely monitor success and failures. Recent advances in genetic technology are now making it possible to modify and control vector populations via the introduction of genetic elements that will spread through the target population. While there has been great success in using insecticides and the use of genetic elements shows great promise, there is still much we do not yet know about vector evolution and population genomics. The following research projects fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge. We have modeled effective population size changes Aedes aegypti in response to the deployment of novel traps in Puerto Rico, generated fine-scale recombination rate maps for Anopheles gambiae, and reconstructed a genomic region of high divergence between An. gambiae and An. coluzzii to gain insight into the evolution of genes important in the modulation of the mosquito’s immune response to malaria infection. Our results indicate that despite success in An. gambiae, approximate Bayesian computation may not be an appropriate method for estimating effective population size in Ae. aegypti; we show that recombination rate in An. gambiae varies dependent on sex and the presence of chromosomal inversions; and we describe a previously unannotated gene in An. gambiae that may play an important role in mosquito immunity, as well as show that it arose as a chimera of two neighboring genes, much like another gene in this region. Taken together, these projects fill important holes in our knowledge of mosquito vector evolution and population genetics and will help inform future vector control strategies.

Offshore oil drilling has been controversial in California for decades. Oil drilling in national forests has never received the same kind of attention, but because of the Bush administration’s decision to increase oil development in the national forests, attention is likely to increase. This paper examines public opinion regarding oil drilling in California’s forests. We find that attitudes toward drilling for oil in national forests are similar to attitudes toward offshore oil drilling. This implies that oil drilling in the national forests can easily develop into a national controversy.