Environmental-economic trade-off questions are commonly used in survey research as they enable respondents to indicate their environmental protection support in the presence of scarce resources. Thus, they may capture attitudes that are directly related to actual support for the implementation of environmental policies. However, research is lacking on whether these questions primarily capture environmental attitudes or are actually picking up more on the economic dimension of the trade-off. Using data from the British Election Study, this note finds that such questions are primarily measures of environmental protection attitudes. Thus, such measures can be used in survey research to capture environmental protection preferences and, substantively, the findings also suggest that citizens' environmental attitudes are separable from their broader economic attitudes.