Heart moves or action moves? The high temperature arousing the perception for climate warming facilitate to energy savings

Jingxin Gao, Jianing Zhang, Jinbo Song, Weiguang Cai and Liangdong Ma

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2024, vol. 207, issue C

Abstract: While the impact of human energy-related activities on climate change is well-studied, limited research explores the reverse causality from physical and psychological perspectives, specifically the influence of abnormal temperature rise on people's concern about climate warming. To address this gap, we have developed a conceptual framework that integrates arousal theory, environmental load theory and environmental stress theory to analyze the relationship between changes in energy consumption and rising temperatures, while using multiple regression models to build identification strategies. Using fine-grained, high-frequency data, including 762,275 building-level hourly data points from 77 large public buildings from February 1st, 2020 to January 31st, 2021, we have empirically examined how consumers respond to short-term weather shocks and long-term variations to uncover disparities in the existing literature. Our results indicate that rising temperatures indeed increase the search index, serving as a proxy for the concern of climate warming. A 1 % increase in the search index is associated with a 15.3 % reduction in total energy intensity, a 39.1 % decrease in heating energy, a 23.7 % decrease in air conditioning energy and a 7.91 % reduction in office equipment energy consumption. Additionally, our research reveals that air pollution can divert people's attention away from climate warming, leading to a decrease in arousal levels. We discussed the effectiveness of pollution regulatory and carbon regulatory intensities, and found that an increase in carbon regulatory intensity weakens the arousal effect of indoor and outdoor temperature changes, while pollution regulatory intensity shows no influence on arousal levels. We proposed a sense of guarantying (SoG) and sense of learned helplessness (SlH) to interpret the unexpected results. Our findings shed light on the design and delivery of carbon reduction programs, especially for countries with dual pressing environment pollution and climate warming threats.

Keywords: Human's energy-related activities; Climate change; Short-term shocks and long-term variations of weather (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:207:y:2024:i:c:s0040162524003937

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123595

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