Who Is Afraid Of The Dark? Some Evidence From A Cross-Country Investigation

ABSTRACT

It is a fact that energy saving depends not only on countries’ environmental policies but also on citizens’ ways of responding to these actions. This indicates the need to thoroughly investigate how households’ attitudes are shaped to understand the driving factors enhancing pro-environmental attitudes. However, it is also important to understand how people judge countries’ environmental performances. To the best of our knowledge, there are few studies that have tried to observe people’s evaluations and reactions to the way countries conduct their economic activities or, generally, to the way they exploit and produce the energy required. Hence, we jointly considered both countries’ environmental performances and their citizens’ feelings about them. In particular, we focused on two main aspects: (i) citizens’ fear of energy cutoff and (ii) related preferences for the adoption of green policies. This study aimed to underline that an energy-intensive economy scares citizens, who claim for green policies as a reaction to this perception. In this case, people are claiming for more environmental protection. All of these lead to the conclusion that it is not viable to implement a policy by sidestepping the potential response of citizens, and it is not convenient to disregard the current preferences of citizens while framing future policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy consumption
• energy preferences
• social values

Notes

¹ https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/02/25/25climatewire-emissions-bill-needed-to-save-our-planet–oba-9849.html?pagewanted=all

² See data from World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG

³ https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-information-2019

⁴ According to the data provided by Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/energy/data/shares), the share of energy from renewable resources increased from 14% in 2004 to 32% in 2018.

⁵ https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Energy_consumption_in_households.

⁶ https://ec.europa.eu/environment/action-programme/

⁷ https://www.eea.europa.eu/airs/2018/resource-efficiency-and-low-carbon-economy/household-energy-consumption

⁸ Although it is not possible to run a factor analysis with two items, we obtained positive results from a confirmatory factor analysis regarding the construction of a unique WaES variable. Here, we also specified that both variables can be read in ascending order by the intensity of (i) worry (WaES) and (ii) green preferences (GPP).

⁹ In both cases, we considered the simple average value of the variable proposed by the factor analysis. The average result of single variables increases the variability of the variable created, implementing a scale with both integers and decimal values. A simple OLS model is useful to analyze, as we can no more implement an ordered logistic model with ordered categorical variables with the newly generated variable.

¹⁰ https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database

¹¹ https://data.oecd.org/emp/employment-by-activity.html

¹² https://epi.envirocenter.yale.edu/

¹³ Note that not all variables have the same range of variation and so the magnitude of the coefficients strictly depends on these differences.

¹⁴ They found this result for liberal, socio-democratic, and corporatist welfare regimes.

¹⁵ See, for instance, a report on the EPI (2020) at https://epi.yale.edu/downloads/epipolicymakersummaryr9.pdf