Adam Mayer

Education and the environment: an international study

More educated people typically care more about the environment and are more willing to support environmental policy than people with less formal education. However, the relationship between education and environmental outcomes at the population level has been less studied. Using international data and panel regression techniques, this paper shows that increases in national investment in education and access to education increase fossil fuel usage and greater access to education increases carbon dioxide emissions per person. This finding is net of the effects of economic development, democratic institutions, and export intensity.

Rethinking Economic Conditions and Environmental Attitudes: Macroeconomic Effects, Individual Experiences, and Subjectivity

The global environmental concern literature has focused on economic development as a contextual predictor of environmental attitudes with conflicting empirical results. Some studies, informed by postmaterialist theory or the affluence hypothesis, find that national affluence increases environmental concern, whereas others find the opposite. In this article, we qualify the economy and environmental attitude relationship by arguing that it has several dimensions: long-term macroeconomic history, short-term economic growth, individuals’ recent economic experiences, individuals’ subjective understandings of the national economy, and their personal economic circumstances. This holistic framework is operationalized with multilevel models and data from the Life in Transition II project, using outcomes for climate change attitudes. We find that recent economic hardships at the individual level (e.g., a job loss) have a positive to null effect. More subjectively, respondents who believe that the recent global recession had a negative effect on their household are more concerned with climate change. At the country level, long-run economic development does little to explain cross-national differences in climate change attitudes whereas short-run, relative economic growth increases both climate change concern and willingness to pay for climate policy. More broadly, future research should de-emphasize long-run, macroeconomic conditions as determinants of environmental attitudes.

Free market ideology and deregulation in Colorado’s oil fields: Evidence for triple movement activism?

ABSTRACT Unconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) has spurred an unprecedented boom in onshore production in the US. Despite a surge in related research, a void exists regarding inquiries into policy outcomes and perceptions. To address this, support for federal regulatory exemptions for UOGE is examined using survey data collected in 2015 from two Northern Colorado communities. Current regulatory exemptions for UOGE can be understood as components of broader societal processes of neoliberalization. Free market ideology increases public support for federal regulatory exemptions for UOGE. Perceived negative impacts do not necessarily drive people to support increased federal regulation. Utilizing neo-Polanyian theory, interaction between free market ideology and perceived negative impacts is explored. Free market ideology appears to moderate people’s views of regulation: increasing the effect of perceived negative impacts while simultaneously increasing support for deregulation. To conclude, the ways in which free market ideology might normalize the impacts of UOGE activity are discussed.

The Fist in the Face of God: Heavy Metal Music and Decentralized Cultural Diffusion

The purpose of this paper is to explain the timing and location of the diffusion of heavy metal music. We use data from an Internet archive to measure the population-adjusted rate of metal band foundings in 150 countries for the 1991–2008 period. We hypothesize that growth in “digital capacity” (Internet and personal computer use) catalyzed the diffusion of metal music. We include time-varying controls for gross national income, political regime, global economic integration, and degree of metal penetration of countries sharing a land or maritime border with each country. We find that digital capacity is positively associated with heavy metal band foundings, but, net of all controls, the effect is much stronger for countries with no history of metal music prior to 1990. Hence, our results indicate that increasing global digital capacity may be a stronger catalyst for between-country than for within-country diffusion of cultural products.

Visitor Willingness to Pay U.S. Forest Service Recreation Fees in New West Rural Mountain Economies

This study uses a contingent valuation model to evaluate visitors’ stated willingness to pay (WTP) for recreation at Colorado “Fourteeners”: peaks that rise higher than 14,000 feet. The study also assesses the respondents’ self-reported response uncertainty. One scenario queries respondents about a hypothetical situation in which they would pay an entrance fee where 80% of the funds are used on-site, and the degree of certainty with which they answered the question. Like prior articles from this 6-year project (2006-2012), results indicate a high WTP for recreation on Colorado Fourteeners. Results reveal that 62% of respondents are willing to incur an additional fee of

Environmental Risk Exposure, Risk Perception, Political Ideology and Support for Climate Policy

20 or less to recreate at the study site. Regardless of whether or not the respondent is willing to pay an additional fee for recreation, approximately 90% of respondents report a high level of certainty in their stated answers to both the WTP and the fee questions, which could be connected to the recreators’ sense of place on Fourteeners. Therefore, recreators exhibit clear preferences and low uncertainty in their WTP for general cost increases and localized access fees. Implications could have a complex effect on when, if, and how fees should be applied in “New West” economies reliant on revenues from recreation.

Understanding Recession and Self-Rated Health with the Partial Proportional Odds Model: An Analysis of 26 Countries

ABSTRACT The degree to which risk perceptions are socially constructed versus the result of actual exposure to risk is highly contested; how risk exposure and risk perception influence policy attitudes is also poorly understood. We examine how personal exposure to risk factors impacts risk perceptions and policy support related to air pollution and climate change. Our selection of risk exposure variables is informed by the “mental models” literature, and we employ an array of variables to capture subjective risk perceptions using novel survey data. We find that exposure to risk does little to predict risk perception and has a small influence on policy support. Overall, our findings lend support to a constructionist understanding of risk perception and support for policies related to environmental risks.

A Multidisciplinary Research Framework on Green Schools: Infrastructure, Social Environment, Occupant Health, and Performance

Introduction Self-rated health is demonstrated to vary substantially by both personal socio-economic status and national economic conditions. However, studies investigating the combined influence of individual and country level economic indicators across several countries in the context of recent global recession are limited. This paper furthers our knowledge of the effect of recession on health at both the individual and national level. Methods Using the Life in Transition II study, which provides data from 19,759 individuals across 26 European nations, we examine the relationship between self-rated health, personal economic experiences, and macro-economic change. Data analyses include, but are not limited to, the partial proportional odds model which permits the effect of predictors to vary across different levels of our dependent variable. Results Household experiences with recession, especially a loss of staple good consumption, are associated with lower self-rated health. Most individual-level experiences with recession, such as a job loss, have relatively small negative effects on perceived health; the effect of individual or household economic hardship is strongest in high income nations. Our findings also suggest that macroeconomic growth improves self-rated health in low-income nations but has no effect in high-income nations. Individuals with the greatest probability of “good” self-rated health reside in wealthy countries (

Will Democratization Save the Climate? An Entropy-Balanced, Random Slope Study

23,910 to

The Dual Importance of Political Identity in Environmental Governance: The Case of Oil and Gas Policy in Colorado

50, 870 GNI per capita). Conclusion Both individual and national economic variables are predictive of self-rated health. Personal and household experiences are most consequential for self-rated health in high income nations, while macroeconomic growth is most consequential in low-income nations.