Good Enough? Pro-environmental Behaviors, Climate Change and Licensing

Policies to encourage pro-environmental behaviors must be based on an understanding of the factors that affect it: the literature has identified a role for information, attitudes, moral norms and several socio-demographic characteristics. Pro-environmental behaviors are however not homogeneous and include a mix of self-interested and pro-social decisions, and whilst the former are positively affected by Pigouvian taxes, the latter may well not be and the literature on moral balancing has identified licensing effects such that once a threshold of pro-social behavior is reached no further pro-social behavior may be elicited. Here we use a national representative sample drawn from the British Household Panel Survey and results from a smaller survey conducted in Britain in 2010 to study pro-environmental behaviors and assess how they are affected by of information (particularly individual understanding of climate change), attitudes, demographic, lifestyle, and economic factors. We find evidence of warm glow from more pro-social environmental behaviors and a negative correlation among different kinds of pro-environmental behaviors suggesting the presence of licensing effects, mediated by attitudes, information and education.