Delaying the Point of No Return: Discounting Evident in Climate Change Policy Preference
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Delaying the Point of No Return: Discounting Evident in Climate Change Policy Preference Jordan Belisle 1 & Lacie Campbell 1 & Mason Todd 1 # Association for Behavior Analysis International 2020
Abstract We sought to empirically evaluate delay discounting of the point of no return (PNR) within participants’ climate change policy preferences. Three-hundred one college student participants completed 2 discounting tasks. The first was a monetary loss task where participants chose between losing a smaller sum of money now and a larger sum of money later. The second was a climate change discounting task where participants chose between preferred policies that either imposed or did not impose constraints on access to carbon dioxide–emitting commodities. Results suggest that most participants discount money and climate PNR hyperbolically, although subject-level differences in discounting rates were observed between the 2 tasks. On average, participants were willing to forego access to high-emission commodities to delay climate PNR. These results have potential implications for future research aiming to inform policy development toward slowing global warming resulting from anthropogenic causes. Keywords Climate change . Behavioral economics . Delay discounting . Social behavior
Unprecedented increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other emissions following the industrial revolution are markedly impacting Earth’s geographical and ecological systems (Gowdy, 2008; Pachauri et al., 2014). Climatologists have reported that the greatest increases in global temperatures have occurred in the last 100 years (Dow & Downing, 2016; Kaufman et al., 2009; Mann, 2012), corresponding with record climate hazards observed within the past decade, such as Hurricane Michael (see Hallegatte, 2014). Estimated damages could exceed the point of recoverability in as little as 20 years if rates of carbon dioxide and other emissions continue to increase along with rising global temperatures, which has been termed the “point of no return” (PNR; Aengenheyster, Feng, Van Der Ploeg, & Dijkstra, 2018). PNR is defined as the point at which reducing emissions will no longer be sufficient to revert the impacts of * Jordan Belisle [email protected]
1
Missouri State University, 901 S. National Ave., Springfield, MO, USA
Behavior and Social Issues
climate change. Climate change policies that limit anthropogenic influence by focusing on reducing emissions to limit warming of global mean temperatures to as low as 2°C to 1.5°C are increasingly being discussed (Betts et al., 2018). Thus, policies should aim to delay or avoid PNR to achieve global climate sustainability (Aengenheyster et al., 2018). As noted by Berns, Laibson, and Lowenstein (2007), behavioral economic models of consumer choice are a key consideration in recent debates on policy reform, emphasizing discounting rates as predictors of human action. Hyperbolic discounting is modeled using Mazur’s (1987) model. Kaplan, Reed, and McKerchar (2014) conducted an initial evaluation of the
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