[Sosfbay-discuss] fwd: Lifestyles of the green and Californian

[Tian Harter]

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/12/17/hummers_or_hybrids/index.html

Lifestyles of the green and Californian

After poring over the evidence, UCLA's Matthew Kahn concludes that
environmentalists practice what they preach.

Should this come as a surprise? When first directed to Kahn's paper,
published in the September issue of the Journal of Environmental
Economics and Management, I was uncertain why anyone should care. Where
I come from, Prius drivers abound, and everybody is nuts about
recycling. But that's what one would expect from Berkeley. It seems only
natural that environmentalists would make different choices about their
consumption patterns than people of different political or philosophical
bents.

But it is one thing to know something anecdotally, and it is another to
prove it empirically. And in a political environment where the charge of
hypocrite is always waiting to be flung (as Al Gore learned all too
well), it might be useful to say, well, actually, environmentalists do
use less gasoline than "normal" people. There's also the fact, as Kahn
notes, that "standard consumption theory focuses on income and relative
prices as key determinants of choice." Maybe it's time to give ideology
its due, too.

Kahn's methods for investigating his thesis in "Do greens drive Hummers
or hybrids? Environmental ideology as a determinant of consumer choice"
are interesting in and of themselves, albeit convoluted. He determines
whether a given community in California can be considered a hotbed of
greenies by looking at the percentage of Green Party registered voters
in that community. (California, he observes, has the most Green Party
members of any state.) Then he cross-checks that indicator by comparing
it to how the community votes on environmentally-themed ballot
initiatives in California.

Having established to his satisfaction that census tracts and voting
precincts with relatively greater percentages of Green Party members are
indeed brimming over with environmentalists, Kahn correlated that
information with available data on gasoline consumption, car purchases,
access to railway stations, and decided that yes, people who live in
those communities are more likely to use public transit and drive hybrid
cars. Such communities also feature denser clusters of stores that
represent themselves as "green" in those neighborhoods.

But not every hybrid is alike:.

      The Toyota Prius' predicted count vastly stands out. The average
census tract's Prius predicted count increases from 2.2 to 46.2 as the
Green Party share increases from 0 percent to 4 percent. For the other
makes, the predicted increase in registration counts is tiny. For
example, the Honda Civic Hybrid's predicted count increases from 0.51 to
1.61 when the share of Green Party voters increases. The huge "Prius"
effect relative to other almost equally green vehicles suggests that the
social interactions effect may dominate the private utility effect from
not polluting. Through marketing and celebrity endorsements, the Prius
is widely recognized as the "Green Car." Anticipating that their
"Greenness" will be acknowledged when they drive this vehicle down their
block may encourage households to buy this vehicle.

Seems like it would be cheaper to just ride a bike.

-- Andrew Leonard