Conservation Spillovers: The Effect of Rooftop Solar on Climate Change Beliefs

Inaccurate or biased beliefs about environmental problems may lead to under or over-regulation of environmental externalities. We study a new channel by which the public form beliefs about climate change: visible mitigation actions. Exploiting the rapid growth of rooftop solar panels, a large repeated cross sectional survey and an instrumental variables strategy, we find evidence that visible mitigation actions have a small positive impact on belief in climate science. However, we also find that higher solar penetration reduces concern about the impacts of climate change which may dampen demand for additional mitigation policy and individual abatement effort. Our results suggest that government policies that incentivize technology adoption can have subtle but important spillover effects to beliefs and behavior.