Carbon taxes evoke a variety of public responses, often with negative implications for policy support, implementation, and stringency. Here we use topic modeling to analyze associations of Spanish citizens with a policy proposal to introduce a carbon tax. This involves asking two key questions, to elicit (1) citizens’ associations with a carbon tax and (2) their judgment of the fairness of such a policy for distinct uses of tax revenues. We identify 11 topics for the first question and 18 topics for the second. We perform regression analysis to assess how respondents’ associations relate to their carbon tax acceptability, knowledge, and sociodemographic characteristics. The results show that, compared to people accepting the carbon tax, those rejecting it show less trust in politicians, think that the rich should pay more than the poor, consider the tax to be less fair, and stress more a lack of renewable energy or low-carbon transport. Respondents accepting a carbon tax emphasize more the need to solve environmental problems and care about a just society. These insights can help policymakers to improve the design and communication of climate policy with the aim to increase its public acceptability.

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公众对碳税及其公平性的看法：计算语言学分析

碳税引发了各种公众反应，通常对政策支持、实施和严格性产生负面影响。在这里，我们使用主题建模来分析西班牙公民与引入碳税的政策建议的关联。这涉及提出两个关键问题，以获取 (1) 征收碳税的公民协会和 (2) 他们对这种政策对税收收入不同用途的公平性的判断。我们为第一个问题确定了 11 个主题，为第二个问题确定了 18 个主题。我们进行回归分析以评估受访者的关联如何与他们的碳税可接受性、知识和社会人口学特征相关。结果表明，与接受碳税的人相比，拒绝碳税的人对政客的信任度较低，认为富人应该比穷人多付钱，认为税收不太公平，并更多地强调缺乏可再生能源或低碳交通。接受碳税的受访者更强调解决环境问题和关心公正社会的需要。这些见解可以帮助政策制定者改进气候政策的设计和沟通，以提高其公众的接受度。