U.S.-Canada climate public opinion and urban climate governance panel

so good afternoon everybody um thanks for joining us and this is the third and final event of a series of three web events that are marking the release of eight reports on the topic of north american climate policy i'm brendan boyd i'm assistant professor of political science at mcewen university uh in edmonton alberta canada and i'll be monitoring today's event um on the topic of u.s canada public opinion and urban climate governance so these events are a product of the 2020 2021 north american colloquium on climate policy the north american colloquium is a collaborative venture between the university of ford school of public policy uh particularly its international policy center uh it also involves the university of toronto and the autonomous national university of mexico so it was established in 2018 and it brings together leading academics and analysts as well as practitioners from mexico canada and the united states to address key public policy issues that face all three countries and this year of course the issue was climate change so these events and reports uh on the topic of north american climate policy have also enjoyed uh generous support from the meaney family foundation and so today we're going to talk about two uh different papers first off we have uh a paper by eric lachapelle and christopher bork which is called a decade of comparative climate in american public sorry canadian and american public opinion on climate change and then we also have city powers and the governance of urban ghg emissions in the us in canada which is a paper by sarah hughes from the university of michigan so just i'm going to take i guess what we're going to do today is i'll introdu i'll sort of um talk really briefly very very briefly about the papers quickly and then we'll quickly turn it over to um the authors to talk about their papers then after that i will provide a few questions um to the authors and then we'll finish up with some questions from the audience so first of all i think in terms of the la chapelle and borax paper i think it's really important because it gets us past some of the broad sort of caricatures or stereotypes that we have about you know public opinion uh in canada and the us right it starts to dig into that and the takeaway for me is that although there's a lot of evidence there that you know could appear frustrating to advocates or other people that are looking at pushing climate policy what we see is that there is some convergence around public opinion although that hasn't translated into policy yet that really speaks to the importance of collaboration amongst the two countries and also really speaks to the importance of this initiative around north american climate policy in terms of um the second paper i think it really highlights the importance of multi-level or polycentric governments governance and you know we kind of consistently need to fight that pull to focus on the national spotlight where the debates are big and large and you know um can kind of sort of push out some of the more local um action that's going on on climate change and i think the main takeaway that i got from this is that what we're really looking for here when we look at municipal governance is smart practices rather than best practices because there's not going to be necessarily one best practice but we can learn potentially from what some municipalities have done so with that brief introduction i'm going to turn it over to eric and chris to provide some comments and reflection on their paper they will then be followed by uh cirrus okay thanks um thanks for that introduction brendan um first i want to thank josh and barry and everyone involved in developing this nac project it's been a lot of fun to be part of this great group of scholars and i'm very happy to be here today to present some neat comparative data that this project is a part of so for over more than a decade or so chris and i have done extensive cross-border comparative polling across canada and the united states under the guise of the american and canadian surveys on energy and the environment so chris is located at muhlenberg college and myself at the universidad real so these comparative polls have uh happen at least once every fall and they have taken on a number of different iterations depending on the year and what's going on in climate policy and climate politics we might focus on carbon pricing we did a few deep dives i guess you could call them on carbon pricing looking at the effects of weather adaptation for example but each year we always ask a standard set of questions on beliefs and policy support that help us track the state of attitudes uh in canada and in the united states with respect to climate change and so our project is very much in line with the spirit of this north american colloquium forum i'd like to start today maybe by situating at a high level our contribution to this colloquium in the broader context of research on attitudes towards climate and energy issues as many of you know much of the research so of course not all on public attitudes toward climate change is conducted in the united states and there's a large growing literature um exponentially so uh on u.s climate attitudes but also other parts of the world such as the uk australia advanced countries and we know from this research that one of the underlying factors that structure attitudes on energy and climate is partisanship in line with this research and others we also find that a defining feature of climate attitudes in canada and the united states is partisanship and i think this is important because we're able to kind of see to what extent do the dynamics we see in the united states to what extent are these found in other areas of the world and so partisanship is an important feature of canadian climate attitudes in fact what strikes me most about the work chris and i have done over the past 10 years is just how similar public dynamics are in both countries or the public opinion dynamics are in both countries so let's take for example climate change beliefs which we we we look at in this particular paper for a long time uh we saw that american attitudes were more prone to short-term shifts while canadian attitudes were much more consistent over time so in canada you'd have relatively straight levels of of beliefs and in the united states you kind of see this up and down but there's a general trend but but much more volatile in the in the case of the united states and um but the striking feature looking at the comparative angle is it wasn't uncommon to find the same percentage of canadians believing in global warming over time um while the average in the us fluctuated but but sorry what really comes out is the enduring difference between canadian and american beliefs with respect to climate change with each poll we'd see substantively larger proportions of canadians believing in climate change science relative to americans but looking at the data we found that the average canadian held views much more in line with the average democrat so the real outliers here were republicans but at the aggregate level we would find that a substantial 20 percentage points difference was not uncommon so in in canada you'd have maybe 80 or 85 percent of the population that believes climate change is happening and that would be you know about 20 percentage points lower in the united states and that was kind of a consistent feature over time on the flip side if we look at climate change denial or skepticism we similarly found large differences as you might expect americans particularly republicans were much more likely to outright deny that the average temperature on earth is warming nearly half of republicans held this view at the beginning of the decade not so long ago today republicans views have shifted quite a bit in an interesting way with fewer denying the existence of climate change and more of them viewing climate change as something that's real but a natural phenomenon so uh republicans in the united states are less in denial about the existence of a warming planet than they are of human activity as the primary cause and this is an important shift i would argue in the politics of climate change in the united states and we try and flesh that out a little bit at least in the paper and happy to discuss that in the q a in canada we have a similar dynamic but with important nuances as in the united states we also find that right-leaning voters are more likely to deny the existence of climate change as well as its anthropogenic origins but in canada contrary to what we saw in the united states or what we see in the united states conservative attitudes have changed very little no less than a third of right-leaning voters in canada deny the existence of climate change while one in five believe it's a natural phenomenon and this has remained consistent over the entire decade the last example i i'll speak to before handing things over is the carbon tax now the carbon tax is interesting for a number of reasons first because it represents a major policy difference between canada and the united states as as you probably already know canada has had a federal carbon tax policy in place since 2019 while it's been very very difficult to institute carbon taxes in the united states second another reason why the carbon tax example is so interesting it's also an area in which public opinion arguably plays a greater role in explaining this difference between canada and the united states now i'm not going to argue that public opinion is the primary determining factor but i would argue that public opinion is a major constraint on policy in general and on a carbon tax policy in particular uh and and especially because uh as policies are more salient public opinion becomes more salient and this is the case of the carbon tax so we can point to several examples in the united states where public opinion has played a determining role in um in in in in killing carbon tax proposals such as a a few in washington state whereas in canada public opinion was was played a pretty important role in in in the durability of uh the federal carbon tax by allowing the uh trudeau liberals to continue um governing the country uh following uh two elections two-thirds of the canadian electorate voted for a political party that supports a carbon tax so the dynamics are pretty interesting there but before handing things over to chris i maybe want to shift to the implications of some of the some of the patterns i've sketched out one of canada's two largest political parties the conservative party of canada needs to appeal to mainstream voters if it wants to win an election the problem is that the vast majority of mainstream voters in canada are onside with basic climate change science they see climate change as a problem they believe temperatures are warming they want governments to come up with credible solutions and as climate change becomes more salient as it has in the past few elections in canada this has hurt the conservative party or any party that denies climate change for that matter or has a hard time proposing credible solutions so the question for uh conservative parties across the country becomes how do they appeal to mainstream voters while not alienating their base and that's something i think is is a crucial uh question for conservative parties in this country moving forward uh with that i'll hand things over to chris great thank you so much uh eric and i'll join you in thanking uh josh and barry and everybody um that's involved with the project it really is was an amazing opportunity for us as as eric mentioned uh we've been at this now uh for a decade uh and it really was a great time to kind of take stock if you will about what we've done over that decade and and these broad takeaways on comparative us and and canadian beliefs acceptance policy preferences saliency on the issue uh so i was very happy to to uh to have the opportunity to to be engaged uh with the project and as as eric said you know over the decade we've seen some some shifts in attitudes and acceptance largely both canadians and americans uh compared to a decade ago uh are more accepting of the the problem more reporting that they're experiencing the problem more acknowledging the the nature of the of the the issue and its um and its its impact uh the changes in the u.s as eric noted uh over this last decade when we started this um you know barry and i actually were you know started a us version of this a few years before uh we we aligned with eric um and we had seen some major shifts uh over a three-year period where there was a 20 drop in acceptance in climate change in the us uh by the time we were starting uh this project with uh with eric and in some ways we i think the divide that we saw at that point was the high water point and division and beliefs uh between canadians and americans and so that's narrowed a little bit but as uh eric noted a number of those things remained consistent um in terms of the differences with canadians largely being more acceptance so so you might look and think okay have we have we entered a new stage as we took this on in 2020 with acceptance in both countries being higher uh belief um in the problem uh experiencing the problem which a lot of our surveys have shown um and of course the the juxtaposition of beliefs and acceptance with marginal progress not not inconsequential but marginal progress and things like mitigation it starts to raise the questions of of divergence between opinion and policy does does does opinion lead does it matter does it shift uh the the efforts in these two countries and it's a big question and one of the things there's a couple factors that i think our our paper and other research calls attention to on the policy front um and that's you know the the underlying um acceptance of anthropogenic factors as as as eric noted uh you know we have a a large majority in fact in our latest poll three quarters of americans say they're solid evidence of climate change significant group within that um that that uh cohort says that it's either completely a natural cycle or that it's it's a combination those groups are strikingly different with those that believe it's anthropogenic at its sources um if you think it's um a you know a natural cycle which a significant portion does your policy preferences your concern levels um the issue saliency are very different uh than those and those divides i think are are worthy of of consistent um focus in in in this study and and others um and one of the major factors i believe and eric has you know shared and and perhaps why we don't see more movement in terms of the policy front the other uh uh part of the puzzle is eric noted issue saliency and saliency has increased but relative saliency of climate in both of our uh studies uh the us and the canadian version remain lags behind other issues um if when people ask me why isn't policy and and an opinion aligning more on this issue i'll go to saliency time and time again uh as the lead uh in that we tested in the 2020 elections in canada uh or in the us and canada the last federal elections how this issue plays and certainly significant portions of the electorate identified in both countries the issue as important and salient but relative to other issues we tested again it lagged this mirrors lots of other studies that we've seen you know the usp has done a number of these placing climate uh in a in a a laggard position if you will and i think that still remains uh one of the driving factors in in why we might not see more convergence with policy preferences and actual policy in both uh countries yeah the last thing i'll say is you know we're kind of at this interesting um point and eric and i are kind of our next stage of where we're leaving this is to look a little bit at um and maybe where the public turns as we can we continue to struggle in both countries to achieve a really consequential mitigation that might align with the the the science on this issue just to really slow um the growth of of climate change to a a manageable level where does the public turn do they turn um to a greater focus on adaptation do they turn uh to the possibility of geo-engineered um approaches to dealing with the with the problem in our last few iterations of our of our project we're starting to explore those those possibilities and where a public that accepts the issue is concerned about the issue uh is met with with policy struggles i think you know the moment we're in the u.s right now uh this spring in terms of climate policy and the biden agenda uh is another example of of perhaps the the public's beliefs and acceptance on the issue you know meeting with uh a policy uh situation that doesn't doesn't deliver so plenty of of more to come we'll we hope to uh share that we're gonna be in uh in montreal uh eric no did uh before we're in uh at apsa in this fall and we'll hopefully have some updated versions of this but we were really excited to be able to put a lot of this into uh into forum and share in this project so so thanks so much okay thank you both uh for that presentation um and so just before i turn it over to sarah i will mention for the audience that if you have questions uh what you can do is put them in the chat and then i will choose i'll try to get to as many questions as i can i've got some of my own as well that i'll do first but then we'll try to quickly get to audience questions and i'll try to do my best to get as many uh red and and to the presenters as possible but before we do that let's turn it over to sarah to get some comments on her paper on on urban climate governance great thank you very much and um thank you to josh and barry from me as well for the invitation to participate in this effort it really has been a fantastic experience um and i was realizing it's it's been a little over a year too i think so um it's just been great and i'll say thank you as well to heather and brendan for their comments on uh the first version of this paper too which were very helpful so the paper is about urban climate mitigation policy and governance looking at the city level and the sort of background for the paper it's based on research i've been doing related to urban climate governance broadly but also specifically some field work i had done in new york los angeles and toronto that was the basis for a book project and this paper then was a really nice opportunity opportunity to think more explicitly about how specifically the authority and jurisdiction of city governments in a comparative context shapes the successes that cities can or do or should have in meeting their greenhouse gas emissions goals so this has been an ongoing interest of mine is you know what does it look like to actually implement some of the goals we have for our cities and so it was a nice opportunity to think really explicitly about that comparative institutional piece so let me say a little bit about why we should care about cities and climate change or sort of position cities within this conversation a little bit there's a couple of reasons i often use to motivate this and one is that cities are responsible for a big chunk of our of global fossil fuel emissions so they're a key source of emissions nearly 75 of global fossil fuel emissions um globally come from cities and a lot of this is driven by emissions from large wealthy cities like the ones we have many of the ones that we have in the us and canada so especially north american u.s and canadian cities have large carbon footprints relative to other parts of the world and so in a way then it means we're not to a certain extent you know addressing these emissions and the kind of urban origins of these emissions are is necessary to meet our broader goals for climate change um the second motivation then too is that you know chris was asking where does the public turn one place they turn is to their local governments to see if they might have some better success there and they often do and as a result cities and north american cities again in particular have been something of policy leaders at the global and regional levels in terms of you know setting greenhouse gas emissions targets um making plans making efforts to reduce uh greenhouse gas greenhouse gas emissions in that way and u.s and canadian cities in particular have been the real leaders since the 90s even in adopting you know kyoto targets adopting paris targets and things like this so um there is policy leadership happening and at this point um well such a thing so that leadership has has played out in a couple of ways i mean on one hand we have a whole host of individual city plans hundreds if not thousands of cities that have plans in place to reduce their emissions and it's also led to this formation of different types of city coalitions and transnational networks of cities and things like this and another so some of their some of their policy leadership has also come from that collective voice as well and a third piece i'll highlight is that a lot of cities now at this point too are working to incorporate and emphasize social justice in their climate planning with many cities including the three that i'm focusing on in the paper rebranding their climate planning and under the green new deal type language and and framing um so at this point the sort of entry point for this then is we have these plans cities are important um there's there are there's a lot of policy activity happening um but you know what do these plans all add up to in a way uh we have like i said hundreds if not thousands of individual commitments and targets and cities have in place but what does it mean to really implement these and have have you know real um meaningful reductions in emissions as a result and in a lot of ways there's a lot of different uh pieces of evidence that point to an implementation gap in cities so i won't go through all the details of that but that that's that's a part of the narrative is that we have these plans they're beautiful the graphic design is getting really sophisticated um but that there's the most common result when you start to really unpack some of it is the implementation has been slow implementation lags behind where we would like it um and so that's that's that's a big question in in the larger book project as well um but what i highlight in this paper then is that one of the key reasons i think that implementation is so challenging for cities is because of the complex sets of and over complex and overlapping sets of jurisdiction that that are in place surrounding urban sources of greenhouse gas emissions and so cities are not operating local governments aren't operating with a complete jurisdiction over their emission sources and that creates some unique obstacles and governance challenges to then moving from you know having a plan to reduce your missions 80 by 2050 to actually seeing seeing those those those goals realized achieving those kinds of deep reductions in emissions really requires a whole of city approach right deep transformations to urban infrastructures and economies especially if we're also talking about incorporating social justice aims and so state provincial federal government space these all play a role in determining what cities what local governments can and cannot do what they're incentivized to do where there's funding available other types of incentives and it also shapes the broader political economic environment that they're operating within and that their potential partners are operating within as well so the implementation story for cities then is not so straightforward and i think it also raises questions about how we should be evaluating and um uh what's the word i'm searching for grading if you will you know the the successes that city governments are have are having um so thinking really specifically then in the paper about what role cities do play in the us and canada uh the way i i kind of unpack this is to look specifically within the three largest sectors that cities are working within when they're looking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and that's energy production energy use and transportation systems so those three sectors are where most urban greenhouse gas emissions come from and where cities are typically looking to act in order to meet their greenhouse gas reduction goals and so in the paper i outline some examples of how the role that cities play city governments play in those three sectors can vary can be highly variable both within and between the us and canada so there's no sort of clear answer to what role city governments play in the energy in energy production in the u.s and there's no clear answer to what role they play in energy production in canada um and so it's just it's really a mix but when it comes to actually understanding you know the implementation and governance process that's what we have to be um unpacking so i give some examples of you know municipally owned energy utilities provincially driven energy generation schemes privatization or municipalization efforts in the u.s i also talk about the variation in terms of how cities can govern energy demand through things like municipal building codes where in some cases particularly in the u.s cities can play a large role it can set really aggressive and kind of climate oriented building codes that can make a big difference for energy demand that's not often the case in canada they have to find other ways to incentivize energy efficiency retrofits besides the building codes and then in in terms of the transportation sector one of the big uh pieces or one of the big changes cities would often like to see is expanding public transportation opportunities getting people out of cars and this kind of thing um but here too jurisdiction gets particularly complicated in both countries in part because of the need for large capital investments for a lot of these big projects you know for the new a new light rail line new subways even bus rapid transit a lot of these take a lot of upfront costs um to put in place so even if the city has a lot of control over their transit system that's different than having the capital necessary to um you know make a big change um so making sense of all this or kind of taking some so some key points away from from the comparison then i try to highlight a few things and one is like brendan was hinting at in the intro is that um there isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all either within or between the countries different policy strategies will work differently in different contexts and i think that what i really try to emphasize is that there should be more emphasis on learning about governance strategies partnership building leveraging resources how to kind of get the movement of how to get the machinery of urban governance moving toward a project rather than you know how to write the perfect municipal building code because that might not be relevant everywhere for that reason i think too this collaboration is going to be really critical of the at the urban scale and the last point i'll highlight too is also going back to some of what brendan was saying is that um while cities are playing a leadership role in some ways on climate policy um and taking some steps to try to you know move things forward um state provincial national governments are going to be really key i think in a lot of places that's the lever we're kind of waiting for to help scale things up to help um you know kind of take things to the next level in a lot of places and so um you know the role of cities will vary in in different sectors and from place to place but we know that supportive state and national policies are are consistently found to really underpin effective urban climate mitigation efforts so that kind of um that sort of vertical collaboration i guess as well is going to be quite important thank you very much all right thank you um so yeah as you can see lots of great um lots of great content here that we can dig into i guess what i'll do is i will ask one question of my own um to each of the um of the presenters and then we'll sort of turn it over to see if there are any questions from the audience um so my first question is for uh for eric and christopher um and and sarah actually mentioned the the green new deal and i guess i'm just wondering if this has signaled in the u.s particularly amongst maybe democrats in the democratic party a move away from market-based instruments to instruments that you know have a greater role for government or greater government involvement as opposed to market-based instruments and so i guess i'm interested in your sense of whether the support for carbon tax we've always thought of it as you know the sort of uh concern you know the movement of conservatives to become more and more accepting over time and that kind of you know people on the left side were already there but is it possible we might see a degradation or a reduction in the support for carbon tax or did you come across any evidence of this uh from people that are now thinking we need to do what some would consider more or would you know have a larger involvement govern government in terms of the policy instrument selection i think that's a great question chris did you want to go i i have things to say but if you wanted to go first give the u.s perspective or go ahead you could lead eric yeah well i mean i think your your questions in particularly i think points to like the green new deal discussions were much more prominent in the united states uh in canada it was uh the green um forget how it was framed in french right the green uh recovery i guess from kovid so i think one of one of the things covert did and it's done a lot of the pandemic has had a lot of um implications political ramifications is i think it's shifted the baseline uh in terms of you know i think there's the public appetite for more government policy has has changed right or the public acceptability of government role uh has has increased it's always been larger in canada that's something we've actually been able to track in some of our surveys going back in the earlier surveys we looked at you know who's whose responsibility should climate change be federal government provincial government municipal governments and in canada it's like all of the above and way higher than whatever you're going to find in the united states so there's always been a larger appetite in canada for for government intervention but i do think that the carbon tax um is is uh especially with the increases um well the increase it increased in april um the cost of living concerns are very much on the rise in canada i can there's some recent polling i've done that really shows that and i think market-based instruments to the extent that they they work through putting a price uh through the price signal towards consumers and working on the demand side um they're gonna be facing uh uh maybe a bit stiffer opposition than they than they you know they've always been controversial uh they raise very important distributional uh justice questions um in terms of you know who they affect more uh and what not and so i think that you're absolutely right to to to pose that question i think it's it's really interesting to see uh you know we're going back to discussions we've actually had uh a few years ago when we were when market-based instruments were still up for debate it's as if in the last few years it's they're taken as a given uh but initially they were much more uh controversial uh and we looked at the relative um popularity i guess you could call it of market brace instruments versus uh government regulations and government regulations tended to be more popular until you put a price tag on them of course but nevertheless government regulations have always been more popular that and i think this increased appetite for um or this increased acceptance of government playing a role in addressing these broad collective action problems and these broad crises could open the door for uh more more government type regulations and and and less uh market-based insurance but curious to see what chris has to say yeah i i it was great uh response um uh eric and and brandon i love the question and you know as you could tell by all all the grey in my beard i've been around for a long time and it's interesting to see the kind of the evolution of these market-based policies in terms of public acceptance right you know back when they emerged they were often hailed as as more conservative um avenues to dealing with with problems right by putting prices on on on aspects of you know externalities through cap and trade or carbon taxes or other other means like that and we've really seen we we picked this up you know a lot of our polling work right at the end of 2008 uh 2009 when those issues were being put into the policy attempts in the us and and through degree you know in in canada uh and the reframing of those uh as as as these government intrusions uh through things like in that cap and trade with cap and tax right and um and so we really have seen a persistent um and strong um divide ideological partisan divide on market-based instruments that were once hailed as conservative options right to do this they've always remained unpopular and i haven't uh eric maybe could add on this we haven't seen a gigantic shift in that we have seen kind of you know rise and fall of you know support among uh individuals ideologically for various various options the um the the conservatives i think eric is right we've actually seen support some of those more regulatory means uh comparative to some of the market-based options um uh you know as you start putting you know regulatory means on there and and um uh those types of policies to to increase uh energy efficiency so it is a fascinating um kind of development that's been permeated our work over the last you know 15 years yeah i think that's really really interesting i think obviously measuring public opinion and how it shifts around the instruments is really fascinating and how it connects to the you know to actual saliency and awareness of climate change is really interesting so yeah so uh eric and christopher both kind of touched on um the idea of inflation and whether that's going to have an impact on on carbon pricing so and i actually was thinking about in the this in the context of sarah's paper as well so my question for sarah is you know your paper talked about coalition building and framing as being uh you know really important and i found that to be like really interesting and valuable and what i was thinking was given the importance of inflation concerns do you see this as something that could really increase support for things like energy efficiency programs and then how would we structure those programs and communicate them to address those concerns and try to as opposed to being a roadblock an opportunity to say look you know we can do more efficiency in you know with buildings and in other other things as well but uh based on you know people's like eric mentioned people's real concern about inflation particularly in canada i'm not sure about the debate in the us but i assume it's important there as well yeah that's a great question and i think that um i think that when when energy efficient the the sort of successful energy efficiency programs i've seen i'm thinking about toronto in particular actually um they're they're typically framed as money-saving programs rather than you know a climate program or this kind of thing like i always this is one of my favorite examples but i mean in toronto rob ford signed an energy uh efficiency rebate program as a kind of you know get government off the gravy train kind of kind of program um so i think that yeah it's a good point i think that will help that that kind of narrative or you know help just be more motivation toward that idea that energy efficiency helps you know kind of ease the pain um you know takes the burden off and that kind of thing i wonder i'm just speculating i i still also hear things we just had this sustainability ambassadors training in ann arbor that i was part of and you still people you still hear people concerned about the upfront costs and so i still wonder about that you know the getting the upfront cost to buy the new water heater or the you know the window replacement um i think people i still get the sense people want government to play a role in that you know you want us to do xyz um you know help help me make it happen kind of thing um but maybe maybe this helps meet in the middle a little bit more you know or it you know helps at the margins kind of thing at least right yeah that example of uh of doug ford really stood out to me in your paper too as well right yeah not something that you would expect to see but you do have you know conservative politicians in canada at least going around the country trying to make just inflation and to try tie inflation to justin trudeau and the liberal government they're trying to make that happen so you know i think that really politicians seem to and eric maybe confirm this is that that's a big it's a big issue on people's minds right now and hopefully it doesn't become a detraction to climate action as opposed to hopefully it becomes an opportunity sure yeah right um so let's move to some of the audience questions the first one i have is for david bernstein and i so i guess i didn't ask if you could put maybe who this is for as well i think i can probably tell who it's for um or or if it's for both people that would help as well but i think you know i'll open it up obviously for anybody to any of the presenters to comment on it so the first one from david bernstein is is there a partisan divide in co2 emissions per capita in the u.s or elsewhere it you know i'll i'll think i'll jump in enough i get it right you know obviously if you look at at states you know as kind of the unit of analysis you know i'm sure we could do this with uh with urban areas too right you see some some some significant differences right across um states in the u.s and i'm eric you could jump in on the on the provincial aspect of this you know if you measured on a per capita basis i think the answer is yes right we see considerable differences uh across it's not a perfect kind of linear relationship between you know states and per capita uh emissions but certainly i think there's a there's a relationship eric is that true for canada yeah i mean so we've never it's an interesting angle i think we never really explicitly looked at in that way but i mean there's there's clearly uh some relationship between the greenhouse gas intensity of the province somebody lives in and the average level of uh belief in climate science for instance and so you know it's not true for all of alberta and it's important to make those distinctions right there are differences uh within provinces but at the aggregate level places like alberta which have a high per capita emissions in saskatchewan as well are very different uh in terms of public attitudes towards climate change than somewhere like quebec which has the lowest per capita emissions in the country if i'm reading the question correctly then yes there's there's that kind of a correlation we also in a recent paper um with some colleagues and at ubc and at the university of california california santa barbara um this was raised by one of the reviewers in the paper and and so we were looking at the extent to which um conservatives versus liberals uh loosely like small liberals small c conservatives in canada to what extent are they exposed to the carbon tax like their cost exposure and to what extent might that be a reason why they oppose carbon taxes and we actually found no difference in the cost exposure between between the two but that's at the individual level not at the aggregate level i'll say one thing i'm this isn't i know this wasn't for me but i feel like there's a there's a pretty good evidence that um emissions are tied to income and uh i wonder if kind of what what drives what um because there's also maybe income and in partisan relationships but that's that's that's been some of the strongest patterns i've seen in terms of explaining the spatial variation of the mission yeah that's interesting i'm out here in alberta and uh yeah it's interesting we get people that will make the argument that of course we don't you know consume all of the emissions per capita so there's a difference between like personal emissions and then just the per capita of dividing you know the number of people by the emissions but i'm not i'm not trying to uh to let alberta off the hook in any if any respect at all um so let's i have another question here um this one is to sarah said great this is from purity and it said to sarah great paper there i'm just wondering if clients climate science contestation is also influ influencing the urgency of climate change mitigation action in cities that's a great it's a great question and um so what i've seen is that i think there is some evidence that the partisan um affiliations such that they exist of of local government leaders does have an influence on the types of policies and the ambitions that the city has related to climate change but i think that i don't think we typically see the same kind of of animosity and partisan kind of driven debate around climate change at the local level and i think it's because a lot of the time we're talking about an energy efficiency program or a new subway line or um solar power and this kind of thing and i think i don't i don't imagine that it doesn't come into play at all but um i think it does look different at the local level for that reason so even some of the climate ambitions cities have they might call the plan itself um a sustainability plan or a resilience plan or a community of the future plan or something like this um so i think it just i think it does play out a little bit different and term differently in terms of the actual um you know kind of public debate and the public conversation but like i said there is some the dimension where some element of the the ideology of elected decision makers that that has also been shown to to play a role too i will say they're the the other the the other place i think to look for this or to think about it i remember uh barry bringing this up last year too is um when the sort of city versus state kind of dynamic too so i think that that's where another place where partisan differences on climate change can play out and affect what the city does but but still kind of in a different way in an intergovernmental dynamic thanks yeah thanks for that um okay so the next question i'm going to read because i actually had this as one of my questions as well this is from pam jordan and she says um chris and eric do you have recent canada u.s public opinion data for specific regions such as the great lakes and the northeast and i was interested in this as well uh yes the answer is yes we do um we you know we code our data our responses by a number of geographic indicators including state um and zip codes or postal quotes um depending on where where you live and so you're able to um to do those uh segmentations uh across and we've done a lot of that uh over the years you know sometimes we're we're limited by sample size um for a particular region so if we wanted to look just for example at great lakes states or zip codes of people within a certain distance from the lakes um you might have have modest uh samples uh to play with but uh one of the cool things you can do is is pool them over time for some some longitudinal questions that we ask and so we've we've done that in a number of projects i think eric um obviously you've done this and with the canadian data uh in in in certain things you want to say anything about that yeah um so um we we downscaled the canadian data and you can look that up on dot www.umontreal.ca backslash clima not climate but clima in french so climate without the e um but also there was that was there was that great lakes project chris that you worked on with chris gore as well that kind of rang a bell i don't know if um if that might be relevant uh for for pam yeah pam you could uh reach out to me and then some folks are buried uh deborah uh is here folks that worked on that uh that project we did some polling particularly on the on the great lakes region in both the us and uh and canada uh and it might be if you haven't seen it um we can make sure that you get your hands on that one last thing to kind of dovetail with what eric said we've over the years the nsee we've um stored our data and made it available through i uh ipcsr at the university of michigan i think we're a couple of waves waves behind catching up um with getting it all clean but there's lots of it there uh and you could break it up um i think we don't have zip codes on that because of some um confidentiality uh uh concerns but you definitely have them by state okay yeah thanks for that um so yeah i'll do maybe one more audience question and then i'll kind of also if any questions have jumped out at the presenters um if from the chat if you look in there if there's anything that i didn't get to that you want to answer we could you could also you know speak to that as well but i think there's one from ben lefle here that i think is interesting and this is actually for both for all three of the speakers so the question is does public opinion matter for urban climate action and so the context here is that um ben and co-authors found that in the u.s county level proportion of population that believe climate change is a threat is associated strongly with corporate facility level ghg reductions and so belief is also strongly associated with the adoption of climate action planning at the city level and they have a strong direct effect on ghg reductions and so i guess this would be for everybody in terms of the statistics but then also sarah in terms of your research and looking at the big cities whether that played a role as well yeah no i think um just like um ben said that we public opinion or all kinds of different measures right belief in climate change uh partisan leanings those those kinds of measures of public opinion definitely have been consistently found to be associated with the likelihood of a city adopting a climate plan um this kind of thing and i think it gets back to kind of what we're saying before that i think in some ways local governments are an outlet for people's uh desires to see action take action on climate change and it's also in a lot of ways a level that makes sense right there's things that cities can legitimately do um and that they need to do in order to meet some of these goals too so um that's definitely the case i think that um it's interesting to think about sort of where where and how it matters you know beyond let's say predicting you know adopting a plan or um or some of these uh emissions reductions sort of where where it fits in and i think when i think about some of the implementation challenges a lot of times it is kind of mobilizing resources and you know um getting the the money flowing getting a line item in the city's budget you know getting the staff in place and that kind of thing i think that is a an area where public opinion would really help a city as well i remember i can't remember if this is in there or not but um again an example from toronto there was a moment when the city was considering um cutting its um its program its climate program and people i remember people showed up at city hall and stayed until like three in the morning you know people really rallied um and and i don't imagine that was the only um deciding factor but the city did end up keeping it you know so i think it's not it certainly matters um i think that um like in most policy other things matter too you know especially when it comes to getting you know a big chunk of money from the state or getting uh the eds and meds on board or um this kind of thing but i think it does play a big role eric or christopher did you want to to add that from your sort of um your perspective of your data yeah i think we're we're a bit short on time i think it's a fascinating question i do think that public opinion matters for uh urban climate action um but i really think it raises some fascinating question the reasons why raised some fascinating questions about um the quality of representation uh in a representative democracy the reasons why municipalities the reasons why it ought to matter more for municipalities i think raised some really interesting questions of representation so i think it's a great question yeah i'll just add i think it's a fascinating space that sarah is working in right here with with looking at this and obviously from the public opinion perspective what's what what's one frame to think about right a lot of urban municipal governments they don't have the same benefit as national governments the same for states of deficit spending uh or at least you know they can do through bonds and other things but there's constraints right so as we kind of move into this space right now where they're feeling more of the effects of climate change especially coastal cities lots of other areas and they have to address um you know the the problem through this you know the the frame of options adaptation mitigation right those types of of things i'm fascinated to see where public opinion goes right you know you could of course you know through an ideological lens want to to take on at a local level um more mitigation policies but but is does adaptation become prioritized right in in in local urban governance right now because it's one thing you can control and you have a limited budget without those options for deficit spending to kind of do it so there's this really cool place to that sarah's occupying right now good stuff yeah totally great that's uh really interesting and yeah i mean the the connection the last question really does connect both papers right and shows how they uh can speak to each other in some ways even though they're focused on you know different things and different methodology and everything so so um i want to thank our presenters for their sharing their expertise and their work with us today and stimulating a really great conversation i want to thank everybody for attending um and making this a great session and for your questions we didn't necessarily get a chance to get to them all but thank you for putting them out there and you know i've read them all they look very interesting um and yes also thank you to josh and barry and their team for organizing all of this um uh because it's been really interesting and really valuable work and i'm interested to see where it goes in the future so yeah um i think josh is there anything else i just wanted to thank you brendan um as i did in the chat because um not only did he do a great job moderating but he's also been part of this project as a reviewer and uh also of course my thanks to barry for whom without whom i would not be here either so yeah i'm happy to be part of it so thanks everybody and have a good day

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