Attitudes to Personal Carbon Allowances: The effect of trust in politicians, perceived fairness and ideology

Abstract

The idea of Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs) was presented by the British Environment Secretary David Miliband in 2006. Although no state is seriously developing proposals for them, they have been heavily debated within academia, NGOs and policy making circles. PCAs can be seen as a logical extension of market efficiency underpinning emissions trading schemes, so far only applied at the firm level, to individuals. The purpose of this paper is to analyse some critical aspects of the public’s support for a PCA scheme. We focus on the relations between attitude towards a PCA scheme and trust in politicians, perceived fairness and ideology, respectively. We also analyse the relation between the respective attitudes towards an increase in the current tax rate and towards an implementation of a PCA scheme. We base our study on a mail questionnaire sent out to a random, representative sample in Sweden.