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How David Stevenson, a guy with a hybrid car and a solar rooftop, helped take down a burgeoning US energy sector.

“You want a healthy amount of skepticism in a democracy…You don’t want 100 percent believers,” said Dietram Scheufele, a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies public perspectives on science and technology. But he warned that skepticism in the US is ​“on steroids,” pushing people from the middle into polarized political camps and toward conspiratorial thinking.