Following-up my point 2, you might be interested in the 2008 Liberal ‘Green Shift’ plan, which really tries to emphasize how the new taxes will not be extra taxes …

http://www.cbc.ca/newsatsixns/pdf/liberalgreenplan.pdf

page 22. “The Green Shift will shift Canada’s tax system away from income and towards pollution in a revenue-neutral way. That means by law, every penny that is raised in pollution taxes will be returned to Canadians through tax cuts.”

A bit of background, James Ambler and I met with Chris Goodall a few weeks ago and we agreed to send some data through to Chris for this article. But Chris is not representing Haddock at all (and I am not speaking for Chris in this comment). It’s been totally up to Chris what angle he chose to take on the article, and we didn’t ask to see it before he posted it etc.

If you would like to see the material we have, please consider the ‘Political Space’ series of articles on our website – http://www.haddock-research.com.

As on overall ‘backgrounder’ of our Environmental Choices study, see our Interim Highlights downloadable PDF at http://www.haddock-research.com/EC2008_interim_highlights

Some comments about some of your points:

1. I absolutely agree that question wording can make a big difference (and I’ve seen some interesting studies demonstrating the differences it can cause). Therefore, I am a strong believer in proving the exact methodology and statements on data charts (as you can see from our press releases), and allowing people to interpret what the data means.

2. I would disagree that it is just/mainly a matter of trust that would make carbon taxes popular (or at least acceptable). The October 2008 federal election in Canada was fought on a revenue neutral ‘Green Shift’ platform by the Liberals, but it really wasn’t popular with a great proportion of voters – especially as positioned as a ‘Carbon Tax’ by the Conservatives. But I suspect there is a complex cultural/political dynamic here, and what is possibly in (say) Denmark (which already has high car taxes) is not possible in Canada.

3. From our Interim Highlights (page 8), we write about airport expansion:

In England, there is greater public approval for restrictions on airport expansion than in either Canada or the US. This approval for airport restriction is well correlated with both ‘concern about climate change’ and ‘whether someone personally flies or not’. If you are a ‘Climate Citizen non-flyer’ in England, you would be pretty likely to resist further airport expansion! This demonstrates that a powerful segmentation approach often combines ‘attitudes towards climate change’ and ‘behaviour/incentives within a particular sector’. Page 8,

Peter

The problem here is not that green taxation is unpopular; it’s that politicians aren’t trusted not to finagle the tax take. That’s a different problem. Equally people respond differently to increases in fuel duty if they believe it is part of a policy of rebalancing vehicle taxation by reducing vehicle tax.

I’m assuming your final summary above is taken from their work, but it’s not actually supported by the data. For example: the summary says ‘choice editing’ has limited support when 56% on average are in favour (the last time I looked, 56% was a majority). And this reflects the findings in the SDC research as well. People don’t mind choice editing.

Finally, although the research no doubt positioned the response on the question about airports as ‘limited support’ or somesuch, from a research point of view they have asked a strong question (I like the idea of restricting the further expansion of airports) which goes against the entire weight of public policy on transport, and yet its supported by 47%, This is strikingly high figure.

Generally, polls which try to identify these sorts of political affiliation questions tends to have limited value without some attempt to probe strength of feeling as well – both around the policies and around the level of party affiliation. Often undecided or unaligned voters are likely not to vote at all.

Andrew