Climate Change Salience and Electricity Consumption: Evidence from Twitter Activity

Jacopo Bonan, Daniele Curzi, Giovanna d'Adda and Simone Ferro

No 23-34, RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: We employ electricity-use data covering 1,500,000 Italian households for 2015–2019 and a granular measure of social media attention to climate change derived from universal-coverage Twitter data to show that increases in climate change salience induced by exogenous sociopolitical and climatic events cause a significant reduction in energy consumption. Sentiment analysis suggests that natural disasters and climate strikes are associated with emotions that are strong motivators for action. These results imply that episodes that draw attention to climate change may lead to actual behavioral change, but their effect is short-lived.

Date: 2023-08-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-ene and nep-env
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