American Opinions on Carbon Taxes and Cap-and-Trade: 10 Years of Carbon Pricing in the NSEE

June 2018

In this chapter, we present time-series data on American support for such policies, showing how attitudes have shifted—or not—over the last decade. We also detail how sensitive support or opposition is to more specific policy design elements: the actual price-point, how government revenues generated from the policy would be expended, and which level of government enacts the policy. We also report on survey experiments that have aimed to understand the impact that framing of these policies—for example, as partisan efforts, or as "taxes" versus "fees"—have on support. Because these details often do matter to the public, we present the data on carbon taxes and cap-and-trade in two separate sections, but provide head-to-head comparisons where the data exist.