Hey, I’m back with another episode. This time I wanted to focus on what determines support for climate policies.
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Adrien Fabre, an economist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Drawing on his research in France and across 20 countries, we explore why perceptions of fairness, effectiveness, and personal financial impact matter so much, and why distrust in government can undermine even well-designed policies.
We also discuss his more recent research on global climate cooperation, including a proposal for a global carbon market that could finance a basic income and help eradicate extreme poverty. Surprisingly, his surveys find majority support for such ambitious international policies, even in wealthy countries where many citizens would bear additional costs.
And most importantly, I think people support climate policies if they understand the mechanisms. This is the most striking to me. When climate policies such as a carbon tax or ETS are misunderstood, people inevitably think they will lose and that nothing will change.
For questions, comments or suggestions, you can contact me at arvid.viaene.ce@gmail.com
Transcript
Arvid Viaene: On this podcast, we’ve already talked a lot about climate policies: their history, their design, and their effectiveness. But today I want to discuss something that may be even more important: public support for those policies. After all, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system might help solve climate change, but if the public never votes for it—or votes to repeal it—then it remains an academic concept. So what determines public support for climate policies? That’s today’s topic.
I’m joined by Adrien Fabre, who has done so much interesting research in this field that I couldn’t pick just one paper. We’re going to cover several. Adrien is an economist and researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, based at CIRED, and a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research focuses on climate economics and political economy, particularly how to design policies that are both effective and politically acceptable. He has published in journals including the American Economic Review and Nature Human Behaviour, with research on carbon taxation, the French Yellow Vests movement, and international support for climate policies. Adrien, welcome to the podcast.
Adrien Fabre: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.
The Yellow Vests and France’s carbon-tax backlash
Arvid Viaene: I’ve read quite a few of your papers, some focused on France and others covering many countries. I’d like to start with your work on the Yellow Vests movement in France, which was a turbulent period. What did you analyse, and what were the main takeaways?
Adrien Fabre: The Yellow Vests movement was sparked by rising fossil-fuel and gasoline prices. A few years earlier, the French government had introduced a trajectory of increases in the carbon price, and many people became angry. We used that moment to survey French attitudes towards climate policy, particularly a carbon tax and dividend scheme.
That wasn’t the policy the government had implemented. The actual carbon-tax revenue went into the national budget. At roughly the same time as it raised the carbon tax, the government repealed a wealth tax of an equivalent amount. In people’s minds, it was almost as though the carbon-tax revenue had been given to wealthy millionaires. Under a carbon tax and dividend, instead, the revenue would be returned equally to citizens.
In France, a carbon tax of €50 per tonne of CO₂ would, according to the example we discuss, finance a dividend of €110 per month for every French adult. The policy was designed to gain majority support: on average, people would receive about as much in dividends as they paid in carbon taxes, and because the average is above the median, most people would receive more than they paid. We estimated that 70% of people would be financial winners. Poorer people would generally gain more, while richer people, who tend to consume more fossil fuels, would pay more in carbon taxes but receive the same dividend.
Yet we found that the policy was massively rejected during the Yellow Vests movement. It was much less unpopular six months before and six months after. During our survey, only 10% supported the carbon tax and dividend, while 70% rejected it.
Arvid Viaene: Just to be clear, that was the carbon tax with the dividend, not simply a carbon tax?
Adrien Fabre: Exactly. We didn’t even test a simple carbon tax. Respondents might have confused the two schemes, or discounted our information that they would benefit. We provided personalised estimates based on their heating and driving habits. Using their reported fossil-fuel use, we estimated their carbon footprint and how much they would gain or lose from the policy. Most were told they would be financial winners, but a majority still rejected it. They didn’t trust the feedback.
Fairness, self-interest and effectiveness
Adrien Fabre: So a policy designed to benefit most people was rejected because of pessimistic perceptions about it. We identified three central perceptions behind support or opposition: whether people believe a policy serves their self-interest; whether they think it’s fair and progressive, with richer people contributing more and poorer people being compensated; and whether they believe it will actually reduce CO₂ emissions.
These factors were already known to be important. Our contribution was to use survey experiments to show that changing those perceptions can causally change support. Correcting misperceptions or reducing pessimism can increase support for a policy.
Arvid Viaene: That was one of my main takeaways. Even if a policy is in someone’s interest, they may not realise it. And even when you tell them, they may not believe you. Changing those beliefs seems very difficult.
Adrien Fabre: It is. We have unpublished results suggesting that this lack of trust comes from distrust of government. It’s not necessarily that people distrust our calculations; they don’t trust the government to actually pay the dividend, even if it promises to do so.
Arvid Viaene: So it’s a credibility problem. People may think the government will eventually say, “We need the money to pay down debt, so we’re not going to return it after all.”
Adrien Fabre: Exactly. Many people see carbon taxes as just another way of collecting revenue. There’s also a deep need for alternatives among people who depend on fossil fuels. They may need to drive to work, or live in homes heated with gas or oil. A tenant often can’t change a building’s heating system. A carbon tax therefore seems insufficient unless it’s accompanied by publicly funded alternatives: public transport, subsidies for heat pumps, and so on.
Arvid Viaene: That’s interesting because in the standard economic model—for instance, the classic carbon-tax literature—you set a carbon price and return the revenue through lump-sum payments. But people may prefer using that revenue to subsidise alternatives, such as improving buildings or deploying clean energy. Is that a fair way to put it?
Adrien Fabre: Yes, although the distributional question is central. Subsidies can be financed by taxing richer people or, in countries with fiscal space, through public borrowing. They can also be financed over time through growth or savings on energy expenditures. Given discontent with inequality, one way forward is to combine climate policy with redistribution.
There’s growing recognition among economists that a good climate-policy package needs several instruments: carbon pricing to create incentives, subsidies to provide alternatives, standards to give industries a clear direction for the future, and a redistributive component. A recent paper in *Nature Climate Change* makes that point.
Why information doesn’t always change minds
Arvid Viaene: Before we move from France to your global research, is there another finding from the Yellow Vests paper that you would like to highlight?
Adrien Fabre: Yes. I’ve talked about how perceptions affect support, but we also find that causality runs the other way: support or opposition can shape perceptions. We call this motivated reasoning. People who are already opposed to the carbon tax and dividend, or who feel close to the Yellow Vests, don’t update their beliefs as much as others when we tell them they would financially gain. Yet they do update their beliefs when told they would lose, even though many already expected to lose.
Arvid Viaene: So information that confirms the belief that they would lose is accepted, while information saying they would win is more likely to be dismissed. There’s an asymmetric response.
Adrien Fabre: Exactly. Beliefs are partly shaped by identity and prior convictions, which can be stronger than the information people receive.
Arvid Viaene: Have you thought about how to address that? Is there a way to change those perceptions?
Adrien Fabre: One way is to implement policy packages that already receive majority support, combining carbon pricing, subsidies and redistribution. We’ll talk about examples at the international level. Another is to involve citizens in the decision-making process. In France, for example, 150 randomly selected citizens took part in the Citizens’ Convention for Climate, deliberating together and drafting proposals for national climate policy.
Arvid Viaene: Both approaches may also change how people identify with a policy. Instead of seeing themselves as members of a group that opposes it, they might feel included in a broadly supported package or a decision-making process. That brings us to your international research. You expanded this work beyond France in a paper published in the American Economic Review. What did you do?
What surveys in 20 countries reveal
Adrien Fabre: Antoine Dechezleprêtre at the OECD liked my earlier paper on France, which I wrote with Thomas Douenne. Together with Stefanie Stantcheva and other colleagues, we extended the survey to 20 countries, with OECD funding. We weren’t trying to reproduce the earlier causal results. We wanted to survey attitudes as comprehensively as possible: people’s knowledge of climate change, their willingness to change behaviour, their beliefs, and their support for a wide range of climate policies, mostly at the national level.
We also included two informational videos. One explained the consequences of climate change; the other explained how different climate policies work. We wanted to see whether the information affected support.
It did, especially the video explaining policy mechanisms. Many people mistakenly believe a carbon tax and dividend is regressive and harms poorer households. When we explain that it can be progressive, support rises. Video also worked better than text in that experiment.
Arvid Viaene: That was a striking result for me. A video emphasising the damages of climate change may affect people’s private actions, but explaining how a policy works is what changes their beliefs about that policy.
Adrien Fabre: Yes. In almost every country, around 80% of people are already very concerned about climate change. So they don’t learn much from another video about its consequences. But they do learn something when we explain how a ban on internal-combustion-engine cars, a carbon tax and dividend, or a green infrastructure programme would work. The carbon tax and dividend explanation had the largest effect, increasing support by around 10 percentage points.
Arvid Viaene: That has an important implication for debates about policies like the EU ETS. People sometimes argue that we’ve forgotten how bad recent heatwaves were, but your research suggests that many people are already concerned. What they need is an explanation of the policy itself, including why it’s fair and what the money does. I also wonder how to make those explanations accessible through media such as this podcast.
Adrien Fabre: I’m somewhat pessimistic about how much information alone can achieve. Any public information campaign competes with a lot of well-funded disinformation, so tackling that may be a priority. But we can also design policies that people won’t perceive as regressive. For instance, instead of distributing carbon-tax revenue equally to everyone, we could target poorer or more vulnerable households, including those who depend heavily on fossil fuels. People then perceive the policy as more progressive and support it more.
Designing compensation for the EU ETS2
Arvid Viaene: That brings to mind the EU ETS2 and the Social Climate Fund. The idea is to use some of the revenue to help the people most affected, particularly those who depend on fossil fuels. But if they don’t understand the mechanism, or don’t trust that the money will reach them, they may not believe they’re being protected.
Adrien Fabre: One thing we could do with ETS2 revenue is compensate people based on how much they spent on heating and how much they drove before the policy was implemented. They would receive support reflecting their previous level of emissions while still having an incentive to reduce those emissions.
I think the main distributional issue with carbon pricing isn’t necessarily between rich and poor. Even within the same income bracket, some households would lose much more than others. We need to protect people who can’t readily change where they live, how their home is heated, or how much they need to drive.
But the transfer should be based on *past* fossil-fuel consumption, not current consumption. If you compensate people for their current fuel use, you undermine the incentive to reduce it. Using their previous consumption would preserve that incentive.
Arvid Viaene: That would require quite a lot of data. It might be easier to administer at the national level rather than centrally across Europe.
Adrien Fabre: Yes. The Social Climate Fund provides financing to governments, and national governments are responsible for disbursing the money. It would still require a lot of data, but car insurers may have data on how much people drive, and energy providers have information on heating consumption.
Three perceptions explain much of policy support
Arvid Viaene: Returning to your international work, how important are the three factors you’ve mentioned—self-interest, fairness and effectiveness—in explaining support for climate policy?
Adrien Fabre: In France, these three perceptions can explain a great deal of support or rejection. Among people who think a policy serves their interests, is fair and is effective, around 90% support it. When they believe in two of those three qualities, about two-thirds support it. With only one, support is closer to one-third.
Of course, these are correlations; we can’t say all of that relationship is purely causal. We do have experimental evidence that perceptions affect support, but prior support or opposition also shapes perceptions. Another important factor is trust in government.
And there’s one more precondition: people have to care about climate change. But most do. The share of outright climate deniers is relatively small, including in the United States. Many people don’t fully understand the mechanisms of climate change: for example, some believe that simply halving emissions would stop warming, whereas reaching net-zero emissions is necessary to stop further human-caused warming. Others attribute a substantial share of current warming to natural cycles. So knowledge is imperfect, but people are concerned and understand that something needs to be done.
A global carbon market and basic income
Arvid Viaene: Let’s turn to your more recent research. We’ve talked about support for national and EU-level policies, but you’ve also looked at something much bigger: a global climate scheme. What is it?
Adrien Fabre: It’s similar to a carbon tax and dividend, but at the global level, with an important difference: it’s a quota system rather than a tax. We would cap global CO₂ emissions and auction emissions permits to firms that extract, produce or import fossil fuels. The revenue from carbon pricing would finance a global basic income of $30 to $50 per month for every person over the age of 15.
Arvid Viaene: Thirty to fifty dollars every month?
Adrien Fabre: Yes. In our proposal, that would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty among the roughly 600 million people living on less than $2 a day. It would involve north-to-south transfers of around 1% of world income.
For the average person in Europe or the United States, the system would be costly, because emissions are higher than the global average. Just as under the national version, people who emit more than average would typically pay more than they receive. Under a global scheme, many people in the Global North would be net contributors.
Other research, including work by Franziska Funke and co-authors on prices versus quantities, suggests people prefer an emissions trading system—like the EU ETS or this global scheme—to a carbon tax. One possible reason is that an emissions cap provides a clearer guarantee that emissions will stay within a defined climate target.
The scheme meets two of our three main conditions: it is fair, in the sense that it transfers resources to people living in extreme poverty, and it is environmentally effective because it caps emissions. That appears sufficient to attract majority support even in high-income countries, where many people would lose financially. Depending on the country, around 50% to 70% of respondents support the global climate scheme.
Is support genuine, or just virtue signalling?
Arvid Viaene: When we hear results from surveys, there’s always the concern that respondents say they support something because it feels good or sounds virtuous, rather than because they genuinely want it implemented. How did you test whether that support is sincere?
Adrien Fabre: We used several approaches. One was a conjoint analysis in a survey across 11 high-income countries. At the beginning of the survey, respondents saw two political programmes, A and B, and were asked which they preferred. Each programme combined randomly selected policies across several domains, including taxation, foreign policy and climate policy. The global climate scheme was one of the policies that could appear.
We found that a political programme was about 9 to 13 percentage points more likely to be preferred when it contained the global climate scheme. Because we asked the question at the beginning, respondents didn’t know that this particular policy was our focus. They were comparing full programmes containing many different proposals. That helps address the concern that they’re simply giving the answer researchers want to hear.
We used another test of what economists sometimes call *warm glow*: saying you support a policy to feel ethical, even if you wouldn’t support it if it became a real possibility. If that were driving the results, support should fall when people believe implementation is more likely.
So I presented respondents with a set of plausible international redistribution and climate policies. A randomly selected half were told that official international work and negotiations were under way and that these policies might be implemented in the near future. If that information made the policies seem more likely and reduced support, it would be evidence of warm glow.
The information increased the perceived likelihood of implementation by about 15 percentage points, but it did *not* reduce support. Support actually increased slightly, by about one percentage point. We also estimated that believing such policies are likely to be implemented is associated with substantially greater support, with a causal estimate of around 18 percentage points in our analysis.
Arvid Viaene: So that’s almost the opposite of the warm-glow story. When people think a policy might actually happen, their support doesn’t collapse; it can increase.
Adrien Fabre: Exactly. It may be more consistent with a status quo bias: people become more favourable towards policies when they believe the world is moving in that direction.
Why people underestimate others’ climate-policy support
Arvid Viaene: Your research also suggests there’s a gap between what citizens support and what politicians or media outlets discuss. Why is that?
Adrien Fabre: One reason is what we call pluralistic ignorance. In places such as Europe and Japan, many people wrongly think there isn’t majority support for a global climate scheme. They might guess that 40% support it when actual measured support is closer to 60%. That could help explain why global climate policies receive relatively little attention in public debate and why political parties and think tanks tend to propose solutions at the national level.
Another factor is that our institutions are national. Elections, political parties and much of the media operate within national borders. That can frame how people imagine political solutions and make it harder to picture genuinely global ones.
Yet when we ask respondents at which level climate policies are needed, 85% say at the global level, compared with around 50% who say at the national level.
Arvid Viaene: People recognise climate change as a global issue, but national media naturally tend to focus on national solutions.
Adrien Fabre: Yes. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem. I think stronger global institutions, or more global public debate and democratic structures, could help accelerate international climate policy.
Could climate clubs be a stepping stone?
Arvid Viaene: The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, goes a little in that direction. It’s an EU policy, but it has effects beyond Europe. I wonder whether it could help create a climate club or coalition that other countries join.
Adrien Fabre: CBAM is still designed by the EU for the EU, rather than as an international instrument that any country can simply join. But a broader climate coalition is an interesting possibility.
One concern is that support for the global climate scheme might collapse if it were implemented by only a coalition of countries rather than the entire world. I tested that in my latest survey. Support fell by only about four percentage points—from 69% to 65%—when the participating countries’ share of global emissions fell from roughly three-quarters to one-third.
Arvid Viaene: That’s a fascinating result. So the proposal might retain substantial support even if it starts as a smaller coalition rather than a fully global agreement. Is that in your new working paper?
Adrien Fabre: Yes.
A sustainable future or business as usual?
Arvid Viaene: Before we finish, is there anything else from your recent research that we haven’t covered?
Adrien Fabre: I’d mention two final findings from my working paper on 11 high-income countries. First, we presented respondents with two possible futures. In one, countries cooperate to tackle global warming, tax millionaires and finance poverty reduction in low-income countries. But the transition also has costs and requires lifestyle changes: more expensive gasoline, heating fuels and meat, restrictions on combustion-engine cars, and changes in diet.
In the other future, people can largely maintain their current lifestyles, but global warming continues and inequalities remain. About two-thirds of respondents preferred the first, more sustainable scenario.
Second, roughly two-thirds said they would support global movements to fight climate change, tax millionaires and finance public services in low-income countries—for example, by signing a petition, participating in protests or going on strike.
Arvid Viaene: Thank you so much for joining me. Your research really highlights the importance of public perceptions. As economists, we spend a lot of time discussing whether a policy is efficient and effective. But if the public doesn’t support it, it may never be implemented. This conversation has helped me think much more carefully about that political and social dimension of climate policy. Thank you for taking the time.
Adrien Fabre: Thank you very much. And if listeners want to follow my research, they can find me on LinkedIn or Bluesky.
Arvid Viaene: I follow your work there, and I recommend it to listeners as well. Thanks again, Adrien.
