Meta-analyses of fifteen determinants of public opinion about climate change taxes and laws

Abstract

Public acceptance is a precondition for implementing taxes and laws aimed at mitigating climate change. However, it still remains challenging to understand its determinants for the climate community. Here, we use a meta-analytic approach to examine the role of public opinion about climate change taxes and laws. Fifteen variables were examined by synthesizing 89 datasets from 51 articles across 33 countries, with a total sample of 119,465 participants. Among all factors, perceived fairness and effectiveness were the most important determinants. Self-enhancement values and knowledge about climate change showed weak relationships and demographic variables showed only weak or close to zero effects. Our meta-analytic results provide useful insights and have the potential to inform climate change researchers, practitioners and policymakers to better design climate policy instruments.

Attitudes to fossil fuel subsidy removal: A cross-country analysis on four continents

“…Climate concern has a statistically signi cant and strong impact on attitudes to removal of fossil fuel subsidies, whereas variables such as gender, age, education, and place of residence do not seem to have a statistically signi cant effect. These results are in line with previous studies on public opinion on climate mitigation policies 14 . We also nd that the support for removal of fossil fuel subsidies increases when the respondents themselves own a fossil-fueled vehicle or have a higher annual household income, but these effects are limited.…”

“…Fewer studies are concerned with public attitudes to climate policy in developing countries in general and even less, if at all, with attitudes to the removal of fossil-fuel subsidies as a climate change mitigation strategy. 14 By using a 1x7, pre-registered, factorial design survey experiment (N=6,636), we make the following contributions to the related literatuare: 1) We consider ve developing countries (Ecuador, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Mexico), which currently subsidize both consumption and production of fossil fuels. We select these countries because they are some of the countries with the highest levels of subsidies on consumption of fossil fuels (https://www.iea.org/topics/energy-subsidies).…”

Give Up Flights? Psychological Predictors of Intentions and Policy Support to Reduce Air Travel

“…In addition to personal mobility behaviors, approval for policies that regulate air traffic is also important for decarbonizing transport. Past literature identified several factors that influence approval of environmental policies, such as the perceived fairness and effectiveness of policies, risk perception, concern and knowledge about environmental problems, trust, values, political orientation, or social norms ( Kallbekken and Sælen, 2011 ; Drews and van den Bergh, 2016 ; Fairbrother et al, 2019 ; Bergquist et al, 2022 ). However, most of the conducted studies dealing with policy support in the transport sector focus on everyday behavior (i.e., reduction of car usage, diffusion of electric vehicles or modal shift; Schade and Schlag, 2003 ; Pridmore and Miola, 2011 ; Schuitema et al, 2011 ; Schmitz et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Moreover, the perceived fairness of policies is a particularly strong correlate of policy acceptance ( Bergquist et al, 2022 ). Fairness perception might depend on individual justice concerns as well as the salience of inequalities.…”

Editor’s Introduction: Greta Thunberg’s Challenge on the Urgency of Climate Action

“…Few citizens demand stronger action because the public consensus seems to be that better technology can solve the problem without any personal sacrifice. There has been long‐standing public opposition in the United States, Europe, and much of the rest of the world to carbon taxes because they raise the cost of driving, which is widely viewed as “unfair” (Povitkinaa et al 2021; Bergquist et al 2022). Charges levied on energy companies and large subsidies for energy technologies are acceptable to most survey respondents, but that framing of the question allows them to ignore the resulting increase in consumer prices (Marlon et al 2021).…”