Public climate change agreement and GHG emissions in the US

Scientists have a broad consensus on climate change. Yet, this consensus has not passed to the public opinion in the United States (US). A significant percentage of the US population does not agree that climate change is happening, or that it can cause harm to people. We call this a public climate change agreement gap. In this paper, we estimate the quantitative effect of increasing public climate change agreement on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the US. We find a significant relationship between higher public agreement and lower subsequent GHG emissions. Then, we estimate the welfare impact of closing the public climate change agreement gap. We find that closing this gap can result in welfare gains up to $4.75 trillion through the expected decreases in GHG emissions.