Green alternatives to polluting technologies need to be made widely available via public infrastructure (e.g. public transport) and subsidies for adoption (heat pumps, electric vehicles) targeted at exposed households.

Many people already support policies like: 

• mandatory and subsidised insulation of buildings
  
  
• green infrastructure programmes and subsidies to low-carbon technologies.

Making public transport widely available increases support for bans of combustion engine cars by about 10% on average across all countries.

Opposition to climate policies is in fact correlated with “carbon dependence”: lack of public transport, car usage and (to a lesser extent) gasoline expenditure.

Higher levels of education and having children are correlated with higher support, across countries. But overall, socio-economic factors are less important in predicting policy support compared to “carbon dependence”.

The perception that a climate policy may be regressive explains much of the lack of support. This is particularly true for energy taxation and carbon pricing.

Since support for carbon taxes strongly depends on revenue use, carbon pricing can receive strong support from citizens if:

• revenues are used to fund green infrastructure and low-carbon technologies
  
  
• revenues are redistributed to households with lower incomes or households strongly affected by the carbon tax (for example in rural areas), via lower income taxes or cash transfers.

A key finding of this report is that communicating information to the public on how climate policies work increases policy support, especially for policies for which support is low – such as carbon taxes.

Information campaigns should explain: 

• How do climate policies reduce emissions?
  
  
• What are the individual costs of the climate policy?
  
  
• Who will gain and who will lose from the climate policy?