A meaningful CO2 mitigation policy is unlikely at the national level in the United States. What is currently happening and what is much more likely to occur in the future are city and regional level efforts of mitigation and adaptation. This paper aims to understand the geographic and socioeconomic characteristics of metropolitan areas and regions that lead to engagement with the issue of climate change. We use geographically explicit, internet search data from Google to measure information seeking behavior, which we interpret as engagement, attention, and interest. Our spatial Hot Spot analysis creates a map that potentially could be harnessed by policymakers to gauge mitigation support or adaptation potential. The results of our multivariate analysis suggest that socioeconomic factors are the strongest determinants of search behavior and that climate and geography have little to no impact. With regard to political ideology, we find evidence of a nonlinear, inverse-U relationship with maximum search activity occurring in metropolitan areas with a near even political split, suggesting that parity may be good for engagement. 1. Introduction The United States has failed to achieve meaningful carbon legislation to limit emissions and mitigate damage. For many Americans and certainly politicians, the whole idea of climate change remains contentious, and therefore a path leading to meaningful legislation is difficult to envision. Despite the stasis at the federal level, cities and regions are finding the political will to take action on both mitigation and adaptation. Nine states in the Northeast have banded together in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and implemented a cap-and-trade policy to reduce emissions from electricity generation. Similarly, California recently enacted the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) that will use market mechanisms to reduce all emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. New York City’s PlaNYC and Boston’s Climate Action Plan focus both on reducing emissions and improving resiliency in the face of rising sea levels and other climate change impacts. These local and regional actions are consistent with the ideas of Kahn [1], who argues that cities will drive adaptation in an effort to compete for footloose residents. Thus, understanding the characteristics of metropolitan areas that make them more or less likely to engage in climate change policy is critically important. This paper seeks to add to that understanding by utilizing internet search data from Google Trends. Specifically, we examine how the characteristics of
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Another concern with Google Trends is the extent to which it can represent the general population to the same degree as survey takers. The research examining this concern has been done in developing countries, where survey data are more prevalent and internet access is limited to a much smaller proportion of the population than in the United States, seemingly increasing the burden on search data. Carrière-Swallow and Labbé [33] and Mellon [22] validate search data as an equal or better indicator of a broad range of topics.
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These comparisons were made using the whole United States for the time period January 2008 through November 2012.
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The Getis-Ord local statistic is given as where is the attribute value for feature is the spatial weight between feature and is equal to the total number of features, and The statistic is a -score, so no further calculations are required. The statistic returned for each media market in the dataset is a -score. For larger and statistically significant positive -scores, intense clustering of high values or a hot spot is indicated. For smaller and statistically significant negative -scores, intense clustering of low values or a cold spot is indicated.
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An analysis of temporal trends suggested that search interest did not change upon passage of either RGGI or AB32, which indicates that the results of the Hot Spot analysis are not a product of those policies.
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As an additional validity check, we downloaded data for the search term “Mars,” which we view as a scientific search term, but without any political bend. If the determinants of Mars GSI were similar as those for global warming GSI and climate change GSI, it would question whether the results were specific to climate change or just search terms in general. The results indicate that only income and log population are determinants of Mars GSI, suggesting that global warming/climate change is somewhat unique and using Google Trends may lead to important insights about spatial disparities in engagement.
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