Delaying the Point of No Return: Discounting Evident in Climate Change Policy Preference

Abstract

We sought to empirically evaluate delay discounting of the point of no return (PNR) within participants’ climate change policy preferences. Three-hundred one college student participants completed 2 discounting tasks. The first was a monetary loss task where participants chose between losing a smaller sum of money now and a larger sum of money later. The second was a climate change discounting task where participants chose between preferred policies that either imposed or did not impose constraints on access to carbon dioxide–emitting commodities. Results suggest that most participants discount money and climate PNR hyperbolically, although subject-level differences in discounting rates were observed between the 2 tasks. On average, participants were willing to forego access to high-emission commodities to delay climate PNR. These results have potential implications for future research aiming to inform policy development toward slowing global warming resulting from anthropogenic causes.