Authors
Sharon Shewmake, Abigail Okrent, Lanka Thabrew, Michael Vandenbergh
Publication date
2015/11/1
Journal
Ecological Economics
Volume
119
Pages
168-180
Publisher
Elsevier
Description
Providing carbon footprint labels for all food products is a daunting and potentially infeasible project. Knowing how consumers substitute away from high carbon goods and what they choose as substitutes is essential for understanding which goods are likely to result in meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. This paper proposes a model to systematically estimate how consumers will respond to information from a carbon footprint label. Our model uses consumers' value of their individual carbon footprint with own- and cross-price elasticities of demand data on carbon emissions from life cycle analysis to simulate shifts in consumer demand for 42 food products and a non-food composite, and subsequent changes in carbon emissions from different labeling schemes. Our simulation results have several findings, including: (1) carbon labels can reduce emissions, but labeling only some items could lead to perverse …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
S Shewmake, A Okrent, L Thabrew, M Vandenbergh - Ecological Economics, 2015