Conference Agenda

Charcoal remains the primary cooking-fuel for one-third of humanity, with important negative consequences for forests, wildlife and climate change. As access to electricity is steadily increasing, our randomized control trial asks whether electric cooking can become a credible alternative to charcoal in the context of a low-income country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We study the impact on the demand for charcoal and mechanisms that could encourage adoption. Our first results show that the adoption of energy-efficient electric cookers lead to a 21% increase in electricity consumption in the 12 months following the start of the experiment, and a 30% decrease in charcoal consumption after 6 and 12 months. The results indicate that it can be profitable for energy distributors to subsidise the initial purchase of a cooker ($65) and reimburse themselves through increased electricity revenues (+$106 over five years using a 10% discount rate) and carbon finance (over 6t CO2eq per cooker). As credit constraints are a key barrier preventing households to transition towards green, reliable but expensive cooking technologies, such business model has the potential to accelerate the transition towards clean cooking, with important benefits for the planet.

The failure of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) to provide sufficiently long ranges in a relatively (as compared with conventional vehicles) short charging time is one of the main technical barriers to consumers’ adoption of these vehicles. However, this technical barrier could be mitigated if consumers were willing to trade-off lower ranges with better charging infrastructure. This paper analyses trade-offs individuals are willing to make between range and charging station availability when considering the purchase of BEVs. By means of a meta-regression analysis of 33 stated preference studies, we find that consumers are willing to accept compensations for lower ranges in form of more dense charging infrastructure in their BEV purchase decision, but only when BEV ranges are longer than 250-300 km. This result is very relevant to promote the transition to BEVs because it shows that, in some circumstances, a significant technical barrier can be overcome with infrastructure investments.

Biased beliefs concerning both climate change and climate policy represent a major obstacle to the decarbonization process. Climate education may represent a scalable solution to address such biased beliefs. In the context of a nationwide reform of the secondary school curriculum in Italy, we built a course on climate change and climate policy and implemented a field experiment training thousands of teachers on climate change in a staggered fashion. At baseline and endline we collected survey data on teachers, students, and parents to examine starting knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, perceptions, and preferences and how such outcomes vary following exposure to climate education. Our study highlights important initial knowledge gaps among teachers, students, and parents and provides evidence on the ability of climate education to address biased beliefs at scale.

The ability of private interests to influence the political process is an important topic in economics and political science. While some of these efforts appear as campaign finance and lobbying expenditures in the official record, anecdotal evidence suggests that private interests may also engage in “covert” influence through media capture. In this paper, we systematically examine whether and to what extent corporations in the United States with interests in slowing climate action might have used corporate advertisements in media outlets as a strategic tool to align such outlets’ coverage with their particular interests. Based on several complementary empirical strategies, we find that advertisement spending from such actors (i) increases during election periods and (ii) is associated with less and more skeptical leaning coverage of climate

change.