Click here to read the full paper at RPubs.
In this ongoing project, we tried to discover if people CARE more about the environment and DO something for sustainability as they get richer. To gauge whether they CARE, we explored data from a survey of thousands of battery electric vehicle (BEV) owners in the US state of California. They are already helping the environment by owning an electric vehicle but we found that BEV owners with higher incomes CARE about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they CARE less than lower-income BEV owners. To assess whether people DO something for environmental sustainability as they got richer, we explored the relationship between GDP per capita and CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita) over the years with data available from every country in the world. We found that when people get richer, their CO2 emissions decrease.
