Climate Change, Energy and Social Preferences on Policies: Exploratory Evidence for Spain

Spain faces a complex situation regarding its climate change policies. On the one hand, greenhouse gas emissions have shown an important increase since 1990, being far from the Kyoto commitments. On the other hand, Spain is likely to suffer important impacts from climate change. However, there has been a rather limited application of corrective policies, particularly in the field of energy prices. Indeed, although Spanish citizens generally show a large concern towards climate change, price increases in energy goods have been traditionally opposed. In this paper we try to offer an explanation to this phenomenon, and a possible hint for future policies in the field, by showing how Spanish households strongly favour the application of a green electricity program that makes electricity more expensive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In particular, with data from a phone survey representative of the Spanish population, the mean willingness to pay per month and household is 29.91€ over the current electric bill. Our results also show that younger individuals who live in the Mediterranean area are more likely to pay for this green electricity program.