Do Europeans Care about Climate Change? An Illustration of the Importance of Data on Human Feelings
Adam Nowakowski and
Andrew J Oswald
Additional contact information
Adam Nowakowski: Bocconi University
Andrew J Oswald: University of Warwick, CAGE, and IZA
CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)
Abstract:
Economists have proposed a variety of sophisticated climate-change interventions. But do our citizens care enough about climate change to enact such policies? This paper provides evidence that suggests they do not. Two kinds of findings are presented. Using data on 40,000 Europeans from the 2016 European Social Survey, the paper shows that only 5% of people say they are extremely worried about climate change. The cooler European countries express particularly low levels of worry. Using data on 30,000 citizens from the 2019 Eurobarometer Surveys, the paper demonstrates that climate change is viewed as a less important problem than parochial issues such as (i) health and social security, (ii) inflation, (iii) unemployment, and (iv) the economic situation. Other results, from regression equations, are provided. This paper’s conclusions seem to have exceptionally serious implications for our unborn great grandchildren -- and imply that economic policy should now focus on how to alter feelings rather than upon the design of complicated theoretical interventions. An analogy with successful anti-tobacco policy is discussed.
Keywords: Climate change; global warming; feelings; economic policy; welfare JEL Classification: Q54; Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)
Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp510.2020.pdf
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:510
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().