Natural disasters, salience and public support for climate change policy

Abstract

This paper examines whether or not public support for climate change mitigation policy can be affected by salient events such as natural disasters. We test this hypothesis using detailed, county-level data from the 2018 Yale Climate Opinion Maps, which documents both the degree to which residents of a county support climate change policy. We show that while natural disasters lead to statistically significant increases in both the share of a county’s population that support climate change mitigation policy and/or believe that climate change is happening, the magnitude of these estimated effects are economically small and perhaps not robust to hidden bias. As a result, and even assuming our results are in fact causal, the magnitude of our findings suggest that support as a policy objective by targeting agent’s beliefs about the risks climate change poses may ultimately be an ineffectual approach at achieving policymakers’ goals.