Beliefs, Politics, and Environmental Policy

Millner, Antony; Ollivier, Hélène

doi:10.1093/reep/rew010

Cited by 42 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…Yet, Kirchgassner and Schneider (2003) stress the importance of considering voters' preferences, and how their pure economic objectives may compete with other interests, including environmental preferences. The opinion of the general public may however be biased by media, and captured by vested interests, possibly leading to inaccurate opinion formation and policymaking (Millner and Ollivier 2016). But citizens can also organize in environmental advocacy groups and play an active role in the political arena.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Green Taxes in a Post-Paris World: Are Millions of Nays Inevitable?

Carattini

Baranzini

Thalmann

et al. 2017

Environ Resource Econ

208

135

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Turning the Paris Agreement's greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value-added tax. We examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes, along with the perception of ineffectiveness. Most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes. Second, at the same time of the ballot, we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the Swiss population. Survey respondents are informed about environmental, distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design. These impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model. This original setting generates a series of novel results. Providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking. Making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs, e.g. social cushioning or recycling via lump-sum transfers. The case of lump-sum recycling is particularly striking: it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs, which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature. We show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists' prescriptions and the preferences of the general public.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Green Taxes in a Post-Paris World: Are Millions of Nays Inevitable?

Carattini

Baranzini

Thalmann

et al. 2017

Environ Resource Econ

208

135

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Insights into public awareness levels, which we measure by online search behavior, are important inputs for the long-term recovery strategies after the COVID-19 crisis as public opinion—supportive or otherwise—is a key determinant of policy change in democratic countries (e.g., Burstein 2003 ; Dalton 2013 ; Millner and Ollivier 2016 ). For example, as public opinion shifts towards prioritizing the environment, there is a significant and positive effect on the rate of renewable energy policy outputs by governments in Europe (Anderson et al 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Awareness of Nature and the Environment During the COVID-19 Crisis

Rousseau

Deschacht

2020

Environ Resource Econ

194

120

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As our behavioral patterns change due to the COVID-19 crisis, our impact on nature and the environment changes too. Pollution levels are showing significant reductions. People are more aware of the importance of access to local green and blue spaces. By analyzing online search behavior in twenty European countries, we investigate how public awareness of nature and the environment has evolved during the COVID-19 crisis. We find that the crisis goes hand in hand with a positive shift in public awareness of nature-related topics, but that awareness of environmental topics remains unaffected. While the decreasing pollution levels and media attention may reduce the overall sense of urgency to tackle pollution problems, the increased experience with local natural resources may strengthen public support for a recovery program that puts the transition towards a more sustainable economic system centrally.

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“…Jang, 2013). Furthermore, individuals may lack awareness of environmental politics (Millner & Ollivier, 2016), meaning that they do not understand the complexity involved in policies. For instance, they may not understand all the economic impacts that fast political shifts may have, nor how politicians are lobbied by many different interest groups, so they need to balance many different perspectives towards certain environmental issues.…”

Section: Pre-service Teachers' Differing Views On Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The blame-game: pre-service teachers views on who is responsible and what needs to be done to mitigate climate change

Tolppanen

Kärkkäinen

2021

International Journal of Science Education

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To mitigate climate change, immediate actions are needed, but who is responsible for taking these actions and what actions will people support? This article examines pre-service teachers' (N = 230) views on who is responsible for mitigating climate change and what they perceive as the most effective ways to do so. The data consist of essays, analysed through inductive and deductive content analysis. The findings show that although pre-service teachers present a multitude of ways to mitigate climate change, there is a divide in what is seen as the best practice and who is viewed as responsible. Furthermore, most pre-service teachers present a simplistic or biased view about who is responsible for mitigative actions. Only a small proportion of pre-service teachers seem to examine climate change mitigation through a systems thinking approach, where individuals, governments and businesses all play a role in climate change mitigation. Six profiles were formed to describe the different ways how individuals see responsibility in the context of climate change. Furthermore, an educational model, that can help develop systems thinking, was created. The significance of the findings and the model are discussed in relation to holistic climate change education.

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Beliefs, Politics, and Environmental Policy

Cited by 42 publications

References 84 publications

Green Taxes in a Post-Paris World: Are Millions of Nays Inevitable?

Green Taxes in a Post-Paris World: Are Millions of Nays Inevitable?

Public Awareness of Nature and the Environment During the COVID-19 Crisis

The blame-game: pre-service teachers views on who is responsible and what needs to be done to mitigate climate change

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