Climate disinformation can push carbon taxes off a cliff model shows
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Climate and policy outcomes under disinformation scenarios, comparing peak temperature, final atmospheric CO₂, early carbon taxation, and average abatement under a politically constrained planner and majority voting across benchmark, early, late, persistent, and intervention scenarios.
view moreCredit: Katsiaryna Bahamazava and Stanley Reznik
Carbon pricing is widely regarded as a cornerstone of climate policy, yet real-world carbon prices remain far below the levels recommended by benchmark climate models. One reason may lie not in the physics or economics of climate change, but in what people believe about it. Most climate-economy models assume that citizens hold correct beliefs about climate damages. In practice, climate disinformation can distort those beliefs and weaken support for mitigation.
In a study published in the KeAi journal Risk Sciences, researchers from University College Dublin and the ILaVita Foundation developed a dynamic climate-economy model in which the population is divided into two groups: "informed" agents, who understand the true extent of climate damage, and "misinformed" agents, who systematically understate it. The share of informed agents shifts over time through learning, disinformation shocks, and feedback from visible climate harm.
The team compared two ways of setting a carbon tax. In the first, a politically constrained planner understands the true damages but faces implementation costs whenever policy exceeds what public opinion will support. In the second, policy is decided by majority voting and adjusts gradually, reflecting how slowly real tax systems change.
"Contrary to the common view that insulated planners are always better suited for long-horizon climate policy, majority voting can initially generate stronger carbon taxation than a politically constrained planner," explains corresponding author Katsiaryna Bahamazava of University College Dublin. “As long as informed voters remain the majority, the median voter backs the ambitious policy, producing stronger early mitigation and lower peak warming.”
That "democratic advantage", however, proved fragile. Once disinformation erodes the informed majority, the political target for carbon taxation shifts sharply, producing what the authors describe as a cliff-edge dynamic in which implemented policy declines rapidly. The planner, by contrast, weakens more smoothly as public support fades.
Notably, timing matters too. Disinformation arriving late or persisting over time was especially damaging because it undermines support after the transition to stronger climate policy has begun, generating "hothouse" warming trajectories under both regimes. Encouragingly, a sufficiently strong counter-disinformation intervention almost completely offset an early disinformation shock, returning outcomes close to the no-disinformation benchmark.
"Protecting the information environment is not merely a matter of public discourse or democratic quality; it is a macroeconomic component of effective climate policy," says co-author Stanley Reznikof the ILaVita Foundation. "Information policy is not just complementary to carbon pricing; it helps sustain the political conditions under which carbon pricing remains feasible."
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Contact the author: Katsiaryna Bahamazava, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Email: Katsiaryna.Bahamazava@ul.ie
The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 300 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
Journal
Risk Sciences
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Climate disinformation, belief distortions, and the timing of carbon taxes: A policy analysis.
COI Statement
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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