Trust in government influences views on carbon taxation

Professor Thomas Sterner (University of Gothenburg), recently made a presentation at the Mistra Carbon Exit webinar Understanding the resistance to carbon taxes. 

The focus was on findings from a recent study on attitudes toward carbon taxation and other environmental policy in the general public as well as a study among members of a large fuel tax protest movement, in Swedish, “Bränsleupproret 2.0”.  

In both groups educational level, political orientation and especially trust in government are important factors for acceptance or resistance to carbon taxes. Another important factor is the place of residence of respondents. The opposition to carbon taxation is higher in rural areas and lower in urban. And in both groups, “It is unfair because it hurts rural areas” is a common answer, while the opinion that carbon taxes affect low-income earners also exists but not quite so strongly. Household income, on the other hand, does not significantly affect responses which suggests that distributional issues are limited.

How important is climate change?

“Swedes are not generally to be described as climate deniers, but the protest sample does not find climate change quite as important as the national sample, and the group is clearly more negative towards Sweden's climate policy”, says Thomas Sterner. 

Asked how important they find the climate change problem the national sample had 2,1 respondents that answered “Very unimportant” compared to 13,1 in the protest sample.

Almost half of the protest group think Sweden's climate policy is very bad compared to one in ten of those surveyed in the national sample. The movement’s leaders say that they are more of a “fairness movement” than an “anti-climate movement”. They could even accept carbon taxes as long as everyone paid the same.  

The full paper by (authors Jens Ewald, Thomas Sterner and Erik Sterner) can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0928765522000483