Law Commons^™

Promoting Recycling: Private Values, Social Norms, And Economic Incentives, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Individual behaviors that benefit the environment are potentially influenced by personal values of environmental quality, social norms that encourage proenvironmental actions, and economic incentives. Economic incentives often loom particularly large, including those that result from environmental policies. Less well understood are the respective roles of private values and social norms. Do people undertake proenvironmental actions more out of their personal valuations of the environment that might be characterized as warm glow effects or from the social norms that reinforce proenvironmental behaviors?

Energy And Climate Change: Key Lessons For Implementing The Behavioral Wedge, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Paul C. Stern, Gerald T. Gardner, Thomas Dietz, Jonathan M. Gilligan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The individual and household sector accounts for roughly 40 percent of United States energy use and carbon dioxide emissions, yet the laws and policies directed at reductions from this sector often reflect a remarkably simplistic model of behavior. This Essay addresses one of the obstacles to achieving a “behavioral wedge” of individual and household emissions reductions: the lack of an accessible, brief summary for policymakers of the key findings of behavioral and social science studies on household energy behavior. The Essay does not provide a comprehensive overview of the field, but it discusses many of the leading studies that demonstrate …

The Carbon-Neutral Individual, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Anne C. Steinemann

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Reducing the risk of catastrophic climate change will require leveling off greenhouse gas emissions over the short term and reducing emissions by an estimated 60-80% over the long term. To achieve these reductions, we argue that policymakers and regulators should focus not only on factories and other industrial sources of emissions but also on individuals. We construct a model that demonstrates that individuals contribute roughly one-third of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. This one-third share accounts for roughly 8% of the world's total, more than the total emissions of any other country except China, and more than several …

Order Without Social Norms: How Personal Norm Activation Can Protect The Environment, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article tackles a leading problem confronting norms theorists and regulators: how can the law induce changes in behavior when the material costs to the individual outweigh the benefits and there is no close-knit community to impose sanctions for failure to change? Because private individuals and households are now surprisingly large contributors to environmental problems ranging from toxic pollution to climate change, environmental policy makers face compelling examples of these negative-payoff, loose-knit group situations. This Article suggests that internalized personal norms, rather than social norms, are the most important initial target of opportunity for influencing this kind of behavior.

Drawing …

From Smokestack To Suv: The Individual As Regulated Entity In The New Era Of Environmental Law, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A debate between advocates of command and control regulation and advocates of economic incentives has dominated environmental legal scholarship over the last three decades. Both sides in the debate implicitly embrace the premise that regulatory measures should be directed almost exclusively at large industrial polluters. This Article asserts that for many pollutants the premise is no longer supportable, and that much of the focus of regulation in the future should turn to individuals and households. Examining a wide range of empirical data, the Article presents the first profile of individual behavior as a source of pollution. The profile demonstrates that …