There are differences across Europe in elements of climate citizenship, including climate concern, perceived responsibility, and willingness to support and take climate action. This paper examines how individual-level climate perceptions correspond to a country’s contribution to climate change and its ability to develop climate policies. Data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (23 European countries, n = 44,387) was used to explore how national-level factors (affluence as per capita GDP, carbon emissions as per capita CO2 emissions, and democracy as electoral democracy index) are related to individual-level climate perceptions (climate concern, perceived climate responsibility, climate policy support, and personal climate action).
Despite a widespread public support for wind energy in general, wind turbine proposals attract a considerable amount of public opposition. At a time of political commitments to building more wind turbines for climate risk mitigation, we study the potential causes of this opposition and its electoral effects. Our analysis draws on a survey experiment in Switzerland, where the number of wind turbines will grow from a couple of dozens to many hundreds in the next three decades.
In the fight against climate change, renewable energy has been subsidised in many countries. With the costs passed onto consumers, governments are paying those, for example, who install domestic solar panels on top of their homes and feed electricity back into the system at preferential rates. We know that substantial amounts of income flow into households with solar installations as a result, but we do not know much about the political consequences.
While using carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may well be effective, this has recently proved too unpopular to put into practice in a number of countries. Yet, at a time when governments across the world are preparing their nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement, our knowledge of whether and why people oppose these taxes originates from a single or small number of cases. Drawing on the European Social Survey (n = 44,387), this article provides evidence on public attitudes towards increasing taxes on fossil fuels to reduce climate change from 23 countries, most of which have never featured in the literature before.
Reducing consumers’ demand for energy is on the agenda of various energy and climate policies. Although these policies are increasingly internationalised in Europe, our understanding of consumers’ energy saving behaviour remains fragmented with often contradicting findings from single case studies. Drawing on the latest round of the European Social Survey across 22 countries (n = 41,830), we find that many variables have the same relationship with different energy saving behaviours, except household income.
Energy security is an important policy goal for most countries. Here, we show that cross-country differences in concern about energy security across Israel and 22 countries in Europe are explained by energy-specific and general national contextual indicators, over-and-above individual-level factors that reflect population demographics. Specifically, public concerns about import dependency and affordability reflect the specific energy context within countries, such as dependency on energy imports and electricity costs, while higher concerns about the affordability, vulnerability and reliability of energy are associated with higher fossil fuel consumption.