This Wednesday, October 24, from 12:00 to 1:30 pm, in MCML 350, Jean Boucher will present:
Culture, Carbon, and Climate Change: A Class Analysis of Climate Change Belief, Lifestyle Lock-in, and Personal Carbon Footprint
Jean Boucher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Clean Energy Research Center at UBC.
Here is his description of the work:
In this presentation, I discuss my analyses of the relationship between peoples’ household income, carbon emissions, and climate change beliefs in the United States. I explore how climate change beliefs affect what I call the income-carbon relationship: the way people consume to their income (the more money people make, the more they buy things and consume energy).
Using U.S. survey data, I found that only those most concerned—“Alarmed”—by climate change (18% of my sample) consumed a little less than their similarly placed income counterparts. I also confirm that income is the most dominant variable related to energy use and personal carbon emissions.
Additionally, I report on 28 qualitative interviews with climate change activists—in Washington, DC, in 2015. I found that they all had some form of habit from which their climate change activism originated. In other words, it was not difficult for these individuals to get involved in climate change activism as they were (for the most part) already engaged in some other type political activity.