Facing the Hard Truth

Public ignorance around climate change remains high in many countries, including the United States, where in 2019 only 67% of adults reported to believe that global warming is happening. In the paper presented in this ZEW Research Seminar, the authors show that information avoidance aimed at protecting identity contributes to explaining climate ignorance. Exploiting mass layoffs of coal miners in the US and a difference-in-differences design, they find that climate ignorance shrinks less in counties affected by the layoffs as compared to other coal-mining counties. An instrumental variable strategy that uses geographic variation in gas prices to predict mine closures strongly suggests that layoffs causally impact beliefs about climate change. The authors also employ a triple difference-in-differences strategy that compares layoffs from coal and metal mines to understand the underlying causes of persistent climate change ignorance in communities experiencing layoffs. Their triple difference results confirm that information avoidance is specific to coal-mining communities suggesting that protecting identity plays an important role.