Does your pro-climate attitude actually lead to good things?

Recently, in collaboration with Jukka Heinonen, Sanna Ala-Mantila, and Áróra Árnadóttir, I lead a paper that questions the methods used in the literature of income elasticity of carbon footprint. Researcher use this summary variable to investigate the relationship between income and carbon footprint. By improving upon the methods, we find that the positive relationship is much smaller than thought previously, and that the relationship is highly different in different consumption categories.

Building off of this, I decided to use our unique survey data to create a new summary variable, building off of this existing literature, called the climate concern elasticity of carbon footprint. This provides an framework for looking at the relationship between pro-climate attitudes and carbon footprints. It turns out that this relationship is similarly-sized as the income-carbon footprint relationship, but also highly variable in different consumption categories.

For both relationships, however, the relationship is small. This has a multitude of implications, highlighted in the paper.

You can find the paper here.