What Do Environmental Economists Actually Think About the Environment?

The experts mostly agree on climate change. But ask them what to do about it and things get messy.

Apr 20, 2026

Every year on April 22nd, the world pauses to think about the environment. And every year, the same questions come up. Is climate change as bad as they say? Should the government do more? Are stricter environmental regulations good or bad for the economy?

Most Americans have opinions on those questions. Nearly half think they will see catastrophic effects of climate change in their lifetimes. Majorities want the U.S. to do more. More Americans think stricter environmental standards would help the economy than hurt it.

But what do the experts think? There’s an old joke that if you put 10 economists in a room, you’ll get 11 opinions. It’s a good joke, but it’s also (at least sometimes) wrong. A team of researchers recently surveyed members of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) to find out where they actually stand.

They wanted to know: where does the profession agree? Where doesn’t it? And has anything changed since they ran the same survey back in 2012? With Earth Day just around the corner, the timing felt right to dig in. But before we do, here’s a question that even the experts couldn’t agree on. What do you think?

The Things They Agree On

So what did they find? Let’s start with where they agree, because on some questions, they really do. When someone has spent their entire career studying what happens when markets are left alone to manage the environment, you might expect them to have strong opinions. It turns out they do.

Nearly 97% agreed that unregulated markets are bad at handling public goods. Think clean air or national defense. These are things everyone benefits from, whether they pay for them or not. Since there’s little profit motive to offer them, private markets tend to underprovide them. Nearly every economist in the survey agreed that this is a problem.

The same skepticism applies to common resources. Think fisheries, groundwater, and forests. These are things anyone can use, but that disappear if overused. Economists call this the tragedy of the commons. Almost 88% agreed that without regulation, that’s exactly what happens.

Then there are externalities. When a factory dumps waste into a river, the people downstream pay a price they never agreed to. That cost doesn’t show up in the factory’s books. About 83% of economists said unregulated markets handle these situations poorly, too.

The pattern is hard to miss. Markets, left alone, struggle with anything shared. Environmental economists are almost unanimous on that.

That skepticism carries over into specific policies, too. About 91% agreed that pollution and hazardous waste sites are disproportionately located near low-income and minority communities. Nearly 89% said they were concerned about climate change. And 81% disagreed that weakening the EPA would improve economic efficiency.

There’s also strong agreement on how to fix pollution. Around 90% favored emissions taxes or tradable permits over rigid emissions standards. The logic is straightforward: set a carbon price and companies figure out the cheapest way to cut emissions. Mandate a specific standard and you lose that flexibility. Economists, as a rule, like flexibility.

The Things They Don’t Agree On

Ask economists whether to tax carbon. Near-consensus. Ask what to do with the money, and the room falls apart. Should the revenue go back to citizens as direct dividends? Reduce the national debt? Fund clean energy programs? No consensus was formed on any of those options. The mechanism is settled, but the politics of redistribution are not.

A lot of the other disagreements follow a similar pattern. There weren’t disputes about whether something is a problem, but about exactly what to do about it. Fisheries were a good example. Economists couldn’t agree on whether ocean fisheries should be managed for maximum sustainable yield or maximum economic yield. Both goals sound reasonable, but they lead to very different places.

Then there were questions gauging their concern on different topics. Economists couldn’t reach a consensus on how worried they were about land conservation, forest conservation, renewable energy, and drinking water quality. That might be a reflection of who’s in the survey. After all, environmental economics is a big field. A researcher who spends their career studying water rights has probably thought deeply about groundwater and less deeply about forest conservation. The results may be capturing specialization, not indifference.

And remember that poll question from the beginning about whether a higher population inevitably means more environmental degradation? No clear majority formed in any direction. It’s not as simple a statement as it may sound.

How Things Have Changed Since 2012

The authors ran a similar survey nearly 15 years ago, which means they can see whether attitudes have changed in that time. Let’s pause for a second to think about what’s happened since 2012. Superstorm Sandy. The Paris Agreement. A global pandemic. Electric vehicles went from novelty to mainstream. You might be wondering whether the people who study the environment for a living have changed their minds in light of all that.

Mostly, no. And that might be the most interesting finding in the whole study.

The authors compared questions that appeared in both surveys and found the results to be remarkably stable. The consensus around energy taxes, sustainable resource management, and international environmental agreements barely moved. A decade of dramatic world events, and the core positions of the profession stayed essentially the same.

There is one notable shift. Economists have grown more skeptical of free market environmentalism, which is the idea that property rights, markets, and tort law are the best tools for protecting the environment. In 2012, about 60% disagreed with that view. By 2023, it was 73%. The profession is moving, slowly but clearly, away from markets as the primary solution. Support for weakening the EPA, already low in 2012, dropped even further.

Whatever is changing in the world, the fundamentals of the profession are holding. Except, it seems, for how much faith economists place in markets to solve the problem on their own.

Final Thoughts

There are a few more things from the study worth sitting with before we close out. The researchers noted that their survey respondents were 70% male, 81% white, 90% PhD-educated, and 77% politically liberal. These are the experts whose research shapes environmental policy. But it’s fair to ask whether a more diverse group of researchers might see some of these questions differently, especially when the details of implementation are exactly where policy gets made.

There’s also one other question the authors raise that I haven’t been able to shake: is too much consensus actually a problem? When a profession agrees on most things most of the time, you have to wonder whether that’s rigorous analysis all pointing in the same direction, or something closer to groupthink. The authors can’t answer that with a survey. But they’re honest enough to ask it.

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