Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-14-2017
Abstract
Climate change is a global social dilemma. Mitigating it is partly a political problem created by inequitable distributions of the benefits of carbon emissions and the costs of climate change; that is, the people who benefit the most are not the same set of people who pay the most costs. Here we use an experimental economic approach to political science to study these inequities. In two experiments, we show that people willingly create climate problems when those problems are passed along to others. Surprisingly, this is not further exacerbated if those others are from another country. We also show that, with increasing relative losses from climate change, people are more likely to contribute to its mitigation. Thus, we identify a factor that makes preventing climate change difficult and a factor that may lead citizens to contribute to mitigation.
Recommended Citation
Del Ponte, A., Delton, A. W., Kline, R., & Seltzer, N. (2017). Passing It Along: Experiments on Creating the Negative Externalities of Climate Change. The Journal of Politics, 79(4), 1444-1448. https://doi.org/10.1086/692472
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
Southern Political Science Association
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Climate Commons, Economic Theory Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Medicine and Health Commons, Other Economics Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Political Economy Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Economics Commons
Comments
This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in The Journal of Politics, volume 79, issue 4, in 2017 following peer review. This article may not exactly replicate the final published version. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at https://doi.org/10.1086/692472.