COVID-19 led to a decline in climate and environmental concern: evidence from UK panel data.

A key question in understanding barriers to climate and environmental policy is whether changing economic conditions weaken individuals' support for climate and environmental action. The large body of literature examining this question, however, has come to contradictory results, with studies measuring changes within individuals typically finding no such effect (e.g.

Current surveys may underestimate climate change skepticism evidence from list experiments in Germany and the USA.

Strong public support is a prerequisite for ambitious and thus costly climate change mitigation policy, and strong public concern over climate change is a prerequisite for policy support. Why, then, do most public opinion surveys indicate rather high levels of concern and rather strong policy support, while de facto mitigation efforts in most countries remain far from ambitious? One possibility is that survey measures for public concern fail to fully reveal the true attitudes of citizens due to social desirability bias. In this paper, we implemented list-experiments in representative surveys in Germany and the United States (N = 3620 and 3640 respectively) to assess such potential bias.

Could revenue recycling make effective carbon taxation politically feasible?

Carbon taxes are widely regarded as a potentially effective and economically efficient policy instrument for decarbonizing the global energy supply and thus limiting global warming. The main obstacle is political feasibility because of opposition from citizens and industry. Earmarking revenues from carbon taxation for spending that benefits citizens (i.

Commitment-Failures Are Unlikely to Undermine Public Support for the Paris Agreement.

Success of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which is founded on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), hinges on whether domestic support for international environmental agreements would be undermined if countries that are crucial to the global effort fail to reduce their emissions. Here we find that citizens in China (n = 3000) and the United States (n = 3007) have strong preferences over the design of international climate agreements, and contributions of other countries to the global effort. However, contrary to what standard accounts of international politics would predict, a survey-embedded experiment in which respondents were randomly exposed to different information on other countries' behavior showed that information on other countries failing to reduce their emissions does not undermine support for how international agreements are designed.