Delaying the Point of No Return: Discounting Evident in Climate Change Policy Preference

We sought to empirically evaluate delay discounting of the point of no return (PNR) within participants' climate change policy preferences. Three-hundred one college student participants completed 2 discounting tasks. The first was a monetary loss task where participants chose between losing a smaller sum of money now and a larger sum of money later. The second was a climate change discounting task where participants chose between preferred policies that either imposed or did not impose constraints on access to carbon dioxide-emitting commodities. Results suggest that most participants discount money and climate PNR hyperbolically, although subject-level differences in discounting rates were observed between the 2 tasks. On average, participants were willing to forego access to high-emission commodities to delay climate PNR. These results have potential implications for future research aiming to inform policy development toward slowing global warming resulting from anthropogenic causes.