The effects of climate change and environmental regulation analysing U.S. citizens' typology

Abstract

This study analyses the relationship between the effects of climate change and environmental regulation for the first time, considering how some individuals' socioeconomic characteristics affect the different types of Americans' perceptions. A panoply of fuzzy set methods, including Fuzzy Hybrid TOPSIS, Fuzzy Clustering and Fuzzy Clustering ECO-Extended Apostle, are applied to a dataset of 10,156 respondents representing the USA. The latent variables are measured by two scales using an answer format based on how likely different effects of climate change and environmental regulation will happen within the next 30 years. The study determines the following respondents' categories: neither convinced of climate change and environmental regulation effects, convinced only of climate change, convinced only of environmental regulation, and convinced of both effects. The results indicate that Americans are more prone to be more convinced of both (73.8 %) than only environmental regulation effects (13.6 %), climate change effects (10.1 %) or none (2.5 %). Some socioeconomic, demographic, and other segmentation variables will be studied to analyse their impact on Americans' categorisation. The segmentation variables are mainly based on environmental attitudes, societal and political views, and political ideology. The implications and limitations of our results will be further discussed.