Climate Change and Environmental Policy: Preferences and Perceptions

No abstract available

Media coverage of climate change is arguably a fundamental factor shaping climate change attitudes and possibly behaviors, but its trends and determinants are still underinvestigated. In this paper, we analyze a comprehensive dataset representing more than 1.7 million online news articles covering climate change in the 28 countries of the European Union in 22 different languages for the period 2014-2019. We combine our news dataset with observed temperature data to investigate whether and how temperature abnormalities influence media coverage of climate change. We find that the strongest determinants of media coverage are positive deviations from short-term average temperatures. Abnormalities with respect to average temperatures in recent years have stronger effects than abnormalities with respect to temperatures in baseline periods that climatologists use to identify changes in climate. This suggests that the media are less influenced by scientific accounts of climatic changes than by shorter-term changes in weather patterns. Policies to phase out fossil fuel cars are key to averting dangerous and irreversible changes to the earth’s climate. Here we study the role of specific policy design features in shaping Americans’ preferences for policy proposals to phase out fossil fuel cars. Based on a demographically representative sample of 1,520 American residents rating 24,320 hypothetical policy scenarios in a conjoint experiment, we find that Americans prefer phase-out policies to be implemented no later than 2030. Policy features other than timing are also important: higher policy costs significantly reduce public support; subsidies for alternative technologies are preferred over taxes and bans; and policy co-benefits in terms of pollution reduction increase public support only when they are substantial. The study also investigates the role of individual characteristics in shaping policy preferences, finding that perceived psychological distance of climate change and party identification influence policy preferences. The results of this study have important implications for the political feasibility of rapid decarbonization initiatives. Among these is the insight that smart sequencing of policies might help ensure majority support for a fossil fuel car phase-out. Although Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies can potentially play an important role in climate change mitigation efforts, commercial CCS projects are still rare. Knowledge about the technical challenges of these technologies is rapidly advancing, but the challenges related to their public acceptance are still underinvestigated. Here we try to close this research gap by investigating public perceptions of CCS and public attitudes towards policies to scale up these technologies in the United States, where most existing industrial-scale CCS projects are operating. Based on a demographically representative sample of US residents, we find that awareness of CCS is extremely low. Using a conjoint experiment, we show that policies that outlaw the construction of new fossil fuel power plants without CCS find higher public acceptance than CCS subsidies and increases in taxes on unabated fossil fuel power generation. Public acceptance decreases with rising costs of CCS deployment and decreasing minimal distance requirements of CCS plants from residential areas. Our results provide insights into the political feasibility of a large- scale deployment of CCS and show that specific policy design choices play an important role in influencing US public support for policies to scale up these technologies.