Climate Change Salience, Economic Insecurity, and Support for Mitigation Policies

Arbeitspapier

Many people remain opposed to climate change mitigation policies. This opposition is an obstacle to policy action and, therefore, important to understand. We explore how unusually high temperatures (heat waves), which observably increase the salience of climate change-related issues, affect people's support for policies to reduce emissions. We additionally test whether this relationship is moderated by economic status and employment conditions. By linking local temperature observations to attitudes collected in large U.K. surveys, we find that unusually hot weather caused significant reductions in support in 2012-2013, a high-unemployment period, but not in 2018-2019, a low-unemployment period. The negative effects in 2012-2013 were driven by people working in carbon-intensive industries and people who felt economically insecure. Overall, these findings suggest that economically vulnerable groups can respond negatively to the promotion of climate change mitigation policies, but that this negativity is mutable.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 15562

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness ; Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies ; Climate; Natural Disasters and Their Management; Global Warming ; Environmental Economics: Government Policy
• Subject: climate change ; attitudes ; economic insecurity ; employment

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Johnston, David W. ; Knott, Rachel ; Mendolia, Silvia
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2022

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/265783
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET