资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

In Climate Insights 2020: Overall Trends, we showed that huge majorities of Americans believe that Earth has been warming, that the warming has been caused by human activity, that warming poses a significant threat to the nation and the world—especially to future generations—and that governments, businesses, and individuals should be taking steps to address it.

In this report, we turn to specific government opportunities to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions, often referred to as climate change mitigation. Policies to accomplish this goal fall into multiple categories, including:

1. Consumer incentives that reward people for taking steps that reduce their use of fossil fuels and, by extension, reduce their carbon footprint
2. Carbon pricing policies that require emitters to pay for their carbon emissions, such as a carbon tax (which would require carbon emitters to pay a tax for each ton of carbon they emit), or a cap-and-trade program (which would require businesses to have a permit for each ton of carbon they emit)
3. Regulations that require manufacturers to increase energy efficiency of their products, including automobiles, appliances, and buildings
4. Tax incentives that encourage manufacturers to increase the energy efficiency of their products
   

The 2020 survey asked Americans about their opinions on a wide array of such policies, which allows us to not only assess current attitudes, but also to track changes in those attitudes over the past two decades through comparisons with responses to comparable questions asked in earlier national surveys. As we outlined in our first report, one might imagine that the current public health, economic, and social crises facing the nation may have caused Americans to be less willing to support government climate mitigation efforts in favor of addressing more immediate problems. As we shall see, that did not happen.

We also took this opportunity to explore whether people evaluate government policies based on what they believe is best for the nation as a whole (called "sociotropic" reasoning) or whether each individual evaluates policies based on their own personal financial interests (called "pocketbook" reasoning). As we explored in previous installments in this report series, a great deal of economic theory has portrayed people as rational actors pursuing their own personal material self-interests (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1981; Lewis-Beck and Paldam 2000). Rational choice theory suggests that people will support a public policy if they perceive that it will yield greater economic benefits to them than the costs incurred (Downs 1957). However, research has shown that a person's material self-interests have little impact when forming opinions about government policies. Instead, people form their opinions based much more on "sociotropic" reasoning (Lau and Heldman 2009; Sears and Funk 1990; Sears et al. 1980).

To test these competing hypotheses, we explore the extent to which support for mitigation policies is driven by beliefs that unchecked global warming will either hurt (or help) the respondent personally or hurt (or help) society as a whole, and whether efforts to mitigate global warming will have unintentional side-effects that will either hurt (or help) the respondent economically or hurt (or help) society economically.