Evaluating the Terms Americans Use to Refer to “Carbon Emissions”

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of climate change communication depends in part on how people perceive common terms used to describe key climate concepts. In a mixed methods study (N = 2859), we examined affect, top-of-mind associations, beliefs, policy support, and behavioral intentions elicited by terms communicators colloquially use to refer to the gases responsible for climate change: greenhouse gas emissions, carbon emissions, and carbon pollution. Open-ended responses revealed that, of the three terms, carbon pollution evoked more negative images of harm; carbon emissions evoked more negative images of pollution; and greenhouse gas emissions evoked more images of climate change. Respondents had generally stronger negative affect toward carbon emissions and carbon pollution than greenhouse gas emissions. Although Americans had similar beliefs about carbon emissions and carbon pollution, they linked both terms more strongly than greenhouse gas emissions to harms to human health and the environment and to poor air quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change communication
• carbon emissions
• word choice
• greenhouse gas emissions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Statement of data availability

Data are publicly available on OSF at https://osf.io/2q3xu/.

Statement of code availability

Code is publicly available on OSF at https://osf.io/2q3xu/.

Notes

1 Consistent with our preregistration, we originally planned to collect data from 1500 respondents. However, the initial sample included a large overrepresentation of women ages 18–29. We soon learned that this was likely driven by a contemporaneous viral video on TikTok that led young women to start taking surveys on Prolific, and this conclusion was later confirmed by the Prolific platform (https://blog.prolific.co/we-recently-went-viral-on-tiktok-heres-what-we-learned/). To counteract this problem and obtain a sample that was more representative of the United States online population, we approximately doubled the sample size with the goal of more accurately representing the other gender and age groups that were underrepresented in the original sample.

2 That carbon emissions evoked more POLLUTION images than did carbon pollution could be because carbon pollution already has the word “pollution” in it, which may have reduced the likelihood that respondents provided pollution-related words as their affective image, because they may have tried to avoid repeating the content of the stimulus.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Energy Foundation; Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment; Heising-Simons Foundation; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; 11th Hour Project.