Governments can now measure how to get people to support pollution taxes

Many governments use environmental standards instead of more efficient market-based tools like pollution taxes. It turns out, people prefer these standards because they misunderstand how different policies affect their electricity bills.

Governments have long defaulted to less efficient environmental standards, even when market-based tools could achieve the same goals for less money. This paper shows that public resistance isn't just about ideology; it's about a measurable misunderstanding of basic economics. It means that if governments want to use tools like carbon taxes, they now have a roadmap for how to talk about them.