The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an immense loss of human life, increased economic uncertainty, and negatively impacted individuals' mental health and close relationships. At the same time, experts ...have noted a concurrent improvement in many environmental quality indicators, including significant decreases in both localized air pollution and global greenhouse gas emissions. These positive trends are due to changes in human behavior necessitated by social distancing and self-quarantining measures (e.g., reduced car and air travel). However, there is already evidence that these improvements in environmental quality are only temporary. This suggests that more intentional efforts will be necessary in order to maintain positive environmental benefits and address major environmental issues as the world gets back to some version of pre-pandemic economic and social activity. Still, our collective experience over the course of the pandemic provides clear evidence that such change is possible and on a rapid timetable. Our individual and collective responses to COVID-19 reveal that we do indeed have the ability to respond to novel societal threats in highly coordinated and effective ways, suggesting that confronting the existential threat of climate change may in fact be feasible. Here, we theorize that the COVID-19 pandemic has potentially activated and made more salient some key psychological mechanisms—including norms of fairness and reciprocity, feelings of gratitude, and consideration of personal legacies—that previous empirical work suggests can be harnessed to promote beneficent intergenerational decision-making aimed at solving the environmental challenges we and our descendants will face in the twenty-first century.
In recent years, the field of climate ethics has grown into a truly multidisciplinary endeavor. Climate ethics scholars are pursuing both normative and positive questions about climate change using ...many different approaches drawn from a wide diversity of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Now, the field stands at a multidisciplinary crossroads, delineated in large part by two interrelated considerations: what are the key research questions most in need of multidisciplinary attention and what can be done to move the insights and implications of climate ethics scholarship into real-world climate decision-making. Here, we identify four directions for near-future climate ethics research that we believe are both in need of further examination and likely to be of interest to a diverse coalition of decision-makers working “on the ground”: geoengineering; scope of ethical consideration; responsibility of actors; and, hazards, vulnerabilities and impacts. Regardless of the specific questions they choose to pursue, multidisciplinary climate ethics researchers should strive to conduct accessible and actionable research that both answers the questions decision-makers are already asking as well as helps shape those questions to make decision-making processes more inclusive and ethically-grounded.
Scientists are increasingly expected to participate in public engagement around prominent science and technology issues. However, scientists remain concerned that public engagement takes time away ...from conducting research. Little is known about the relationship between scientists’ productivity and their willingness to participate in different types of public engagement. Using a census survey of scientists from 30 U.S. land-grant universities (N = 5,208), we find that productive scientists are slightly more willing to participate in public scholarship than less productive scientists. In addition, social science consideration, institutional incentives, and self-efficacy are associated with a greater willingness to participate in public scholarship and informal science education.
Extant theoretical and empirical work posits that perceptions of responsibility are crucial antecedents of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. However, the degree to which this association ...exists reliably, across nations, and across different proenvironmental outcomes (self-reports of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and policy support), as well as the degree to which national-level factors influence variability in such perceptions, has received less attention. To shed light on this inquiry, we utilized data from the eighth round of the European Social Survey, collected across 23 countries (N = 44,387). Utilizing multilevel and meta-analytical regressions we find that perceived responsibility to address climate change relates to 10 different pro-environmental outcomes. This association was seemingly stronger and more consistent for climate change beliefs (i.e., anthropogenic causes, acceptance, concern), proenvironmental policy support, and behavioral intentions, but not for knowledge-specific beliefs, such as the use of (non-)renewable energy. Further, 12% of variance in perceived responsibility to address climate change was explained by national factors. We conclude that additional cross-national and experimental work is required to better understand the (causal) influence of perceptions of responsibility on proenvironmental behaviors and the degree to which national factors influence this association.
•Perceived responsibility to address climate change relates to proenvironmentalism.•With some variability, this association was consistent across 23 European nations.•Country factors explain variation in responsibility to address climate change.
Current policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increase adaptation and mitigation funding are insufficient to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. It is clear that further action is ...needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and achieve a just climate future. Here, we offer a new perspective on emissions responsibility and climate finance by conducting an environmentally extended input output analysis that links 30 years (1990–2019) of United States (U.S.) household-level income data to the emissions generated in creating that income. To do this we draw on over 2.8 billion inter-sectoral transfers from the Eora MRIO database to calculate both supplier- and producer-based GHG emissions intensities and connect these with detailed income and demographic data for over 5 million U.S. individuals in the IPUMS Current Population Survey. We find significant and growing emissions inequality that cuts across economic and racial lines. In 2019, fully 40% of total U.S. emissions were associated with income flows to the highest earning 10% of households. Among the highest earning 1% of households (whose income is linked to 15–17% of national emissions) investment holdings account for 38–43% of their emissions. Even when allowing for a considerable range of investment strategies, passive income accruing to this group is a major factor shaping the U.S. emissions distribution. Results suggest an alternative income or shareholder-based carbon tax, focused on investments, may have equity advantages over traditional consumer-facing cap-and-trade or carbon tax options and be a useful policy tool to encourage decarbonization while raising revenue for climate finance.
A great number of social and environmental issues our society is facing today (e.g., climate change) necessitate action in the present in order to benefit future others. Perceptions of responsibility ...towards future generations have been shown to increase intergenerational prosociality and combat intertemporal discounting. However, the degree to which these findings are generalizable across samples and valid in the context of environmental issues remains unknown. We utilized data obtained from the Public Religion Research Institute to examine the association of perceived responsibility towards future generations with proenvironmental attitudes in a large and representative sample of the US population. Across a wide variety of proenvironmental outcomes and controlling for key demographic covariates (e.g., political ideology, religiosity), our results suggest that perceived responsibility towards future generations has a robust relationship with proenvironmental attitudes. Increasing and leveraging perceptions of responsibility towards future others may be a powerful tool for promoting intergenerational environmental concern and action.
•Responsibility towards future others relates to increased environmental concern.•Responsibility towards future others relates to elevated climate change acceptance.•Responsibility towards future others relates weakly to demographic characteristics.•Responsibility towards future others could reduce intergenerational discounting.
When corporations behave inappropriately, for example, by intentionally circumventing emissions regulation or jacking up the price of a life‐saving drug, assessing and assigning culpability is both ...natural and necessary. Such ascriptions of blame influence how consumers perceive and engage with corporations in the wake of misconduct. In a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examined how people's mental models of corporate wrongdoing influenced their awareness of and responses to a series of corporate scandals that broke between 2015 and 2017. Using a mixed effects modeling approach addressing both individual and scandal‐level variability, our results revealed that subscribing to the belief that corporate scandals are the product of the corporate culture (as opposed to the actions of a “few bad apples” within an organization) amplified people's awareness of, degree of concern about, and the probability of having taken action against transgressing corporations. The findings presented here highlight the importance of exploring consumers’ complex responses to corporate scandals, particularly for regulators and consumer advocates interested in leveraging public outcry to hold corporations responsible.
Following unethical corporate behavior, consumers face decisions on how to engage with brands in the future. Consumers' beliefs about the underlying causes of a corporate scandal may influence future ...patronage intentions, for example, by influencing perceived likelihood of future wrongdoing. We investigated how beliefs about corporate culture and consumer proximity to the recent Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal influence expectations of future ethical action by Volkswagen Group (VW), feelings of anger, and future brand engagement. Results indicate that beliefs about corporate culture and proximity each independently influence future brand engagement. Specifically, owners who believed “a few bad apples” (rather than a “rotten” corporate culture) caused the scandal reported higher expectations of future ethical action by VW, less anger, and more positive intentions to engage with VW in the future. Those more proximately affected by the scandal, that is, turbocharged direct injection owners, were more likely to be angry and less likely to engage with VW. Expectation of future ethical action and anger mediated the effects of corporate culture on engagement, whereas only anger mediated the effects of proximity. This small set of factors accounted for over half of the observed variance in future brand engagement intentions, highlighting the importance of understanding consumer responses to corporate scandal.
How responsible one feels for reducing climate change is theorized to be an important antecedent of pro-environmental behavior. Building on existing work in this domain, we report a preregistered ...replication of recent evidence suggesting a robust association between responsibility and proenvironmentalism across nations. Replicating and extending this work, our study used data from Wave 10 of the European Social Survey (ESS), collected across 31 countries (N = 40,117). All correlational findings for measures overlapping across ESS waves were replicated (within and across all countries). We found that perceived responsibility to reduce climate change related to increased worry about climate change and the belief that it is mainly caused by humans. Furthermore, pre-registered exploratory analyses showed that over the four-year period since the previous ESS wave, the average scores for responsibility, concern and belief in climate change have significantly increased.
•We replicate results from Syropoulos and Markowitz (2022) in 31 European countries.•Personal responsibility relates to increased belief in and concern for climate change.•Meta-Analyses suggest that such relationship is consistent in all 31 countries.•Perceived responsibility, concern and belief increased from 2016 to 2020.
Relatively little public opinion research has explored beliefs about consumption. This lack of research is surprising given the increasing attention paid by many commentators to the relationship ...between consumption and ecological sustainability. Reporting on data collected from a series of five statewide surveys of Oregonians conducted between 2008 and 2009, we find that a strong majority (74–88%) of the Oregon public supports reducing consumption and believes doing so would improve societal and individual well‐being. These findings appear to challenge conventional wisdom about our collective and never‐ending need for consumption of material goods. Our results reveal broad agreement on the consumption issue across traditional ideological divides. We also conducted in‐depth qualitative interviews, which allowed us to explore what “consumption” means to Oregonians and why people think our country would be better off if we reduced consumption. Our findings suggest that populist attitudes toward reducing consumption may fill a role that policymakers avoid for a variety of reasons. We discuss the relevance of consumption beliefs to public policy aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as well as directions for future research.
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