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

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

Building on this, I used our unique survey data to create a new summary variable: the climate-concern elasticity of carbon footprint. It provides a framework for looking at the relationship between pro-climate attitudes and carbon footprints. It turns out this relationship is similar in size to the income–carbon footprint relationship, and similarly variable across consumption categories.

For both, though, the relationship is small. That has a range of implications, which the paper draws out.