The climate crisis, policy distraction and support for fuel taxation

The climate crisis looms but support for fuel taxation is low. How to boost support? The obvious way is to make the connection to the climate crisis explicit. Many observers fear, however, that policy myopia renders this strategy ineffective: As the consequences of the climate crisis are long‐term and insecure, people are loath to pay for costly countermeasures in the short term. We look at policy distraction as a second potential drag. We argue that climate crisis‐induced support for fuel taxation can also be undermined by other salient events which divert attention. To test our argument, we conduct a large‐scale survey experiment with more than 21,000 respondents in 17 European countries. Our results show that a simple climate crisis prime raises support for fuel taxation by 12 percentage points. The effect decreases but remains substantial when stressing the long time horizon of the climate crisis. It almost disappears when other current crises (COVID‐19 and Russian military aggression) are mentioned. Thus, distraction by concurrent events is a serious impediment to mobilising support for fuel taxation.