Climate Change Salience and Electricity Consumption: Evidence from Twitter Activity
This working paper investigates whether Italian households reduce their electricity consumption based on climate change's salience in their social media feeds.
Abstract
We employ electricity-use data covering 1,500,000 Italian households for 2015–2019 and a granular measure of social media attention to climate change derived from universal-coverage Twitter data to show that increases in climate change salience induced by exogenous sociopolitical and climatic events cause a significant reduction in energy consumption. Sentiment analysis suggests that natural disasters and climate strikes are associated with emotions that are strong motivators for action. These results imply that episodes that draw attention to climate change may lead to actual behavioral change, but their effect is short-lived.
Authors
Jacopo Bonan
European Institute on Economics and the Environment
Daniele Curzi
University of Milan
Giovanna D'Adda
European Institute on Economics and the Environment
Simone Ferro
European Institute on Economics and the Environment
