Keeping Up at the Planet’s Expense: Longitudinal Evidence on Relative Concerns and Environmental Attitudes

We examine whether income comparisons are associated with environmental concern using SOEP data for 2000–2020. We argue that pressure to keep up with others may redirect attention from environmental protection as a collective good toward private positional concerns. Individual fixed-effects linear probability models with detailed reference-group definitions show that higher reference-group income is linked to a lower probability of reporting high concern about environmental protection or climate change, while the own-income estimate is small and statistically imprecise. A 10% increase in others’ mean income corresponds to a decline of about 1–2% of the mean level of environmental concern. The association is stronger among individuals with lower environmental awareness, lower patience, weaker prosocial orientation, and limited political engagement. It is also more pronounced in contexts with higher pollution exposure and more intensive environmental-protection efforts, consistent with normalisation and moral-licensing mechanisms. The results are robust to nonlinear models, income-rank measures, median reference income, alternative comparison goods, and alternative reference groups.