Europe is an ideal setting for this study. Countries in Europe enacted dozens of education reforms in the twentieth century, expanding the number of years of education legally mandated through compulsory schooling laws. At the same time, Europe has large, harmonized multi-country surveys, enabling credible within- and cross- country analyses, with recent climate modules added to the European Social Survey (ESS), which we analyze in this study. Moreover, Europe has a robust green party movement, which has an explicit environmental agenda.<sup>3</sup> We codify a novel dataset of green party voting outcomes, enabling identification of pro-climate voting behavior.

Our analysis focuses on outcome indices as well as on specific indicators within each index, including comparisons between correlations and causal estimates. We find significant impacts on nearly all pro-climate measures. Our headline results show that an additional year of education leads to an increase of 4.0 percentage points (PP) in pro-climate beliefs, 5.8 PP in behaviors, 1.0 PP in policy preferences, and 3.6 PP in green voting. Relative to status quo rates, these impacts are non-trivial, translating into 6.3% increase for beliefs, 8.5% for behaviors, 1.7% for policy preferences, and a striking 35.0% increase for green party voting.

These results are notable since education has been conspicuously absent from most major climate change discussions.<sup>4</sup> Our findings suggest expanding general education should be added to the menu of approaches considered in tackling one of the greatest modern threats to human well-being. Indeed, human capital accumulation may be vital in shaping beliefs about the costs and benefits of policies to reduce emissions (Dechezleprˆetre et al., 2022) and extend directly to consequential outcomes such as policy preferences and voting.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section describes our data. Section III details our empirical strategy and Section IV presents our results. Some brief concluding remarks are offered in Section V.

# **II Data**

Data on pro-climate outcomes – including beliefs, behaviors, policy preferences, and voting outcomes – come from the European Social Survey (ESS).<sup>5</sup> The ESS is conducted biannually across dozens of European countries using stratified random sampling with a total sample size ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 individuals per round. The ESS is a large microdata set capturing information on a host of social issues and is harmonized over time and across countries. In 2016, the ESS introduced novel questions on climate outcomes, such as “how often do you do things to reduce energy use?” and “how likely are you to buy energy efficient appliances?” Moreover, the ESS collected data on policy preferences such as “to what extent are you in favour or against using public money to subsidise renewable energy such as wind and solar power?” Finally, we include

> 3Green political parties’ environmental focus includes climate change, pollution, and industrial agriculture.

> 4A recent analysis showed that only 24% of countries mention youth education in the context of the Paris Agreement (Kwauk, 2021) – a historic international treaty on climate change.

> 5European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC). (2020). ESS8 - integrated file, edition 2.2 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ESS8E02 ~~2~~

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