Continuously increasing consumption of material goods drives current resource and environmental crises, including climate change and loss of biodiversity. Although technology offers solutions, their development and adoption is not at the speed required to address these crises. Therefore, demand side responses have to be triggered using policies, with economists suggesting mainly the use of price signals. However, both the effectiveness and the political acceptability of taxation have been questioned, especially since increases in fuel prices during the last decade in both Europe and North America have not yielded the expected reductions in the fuel economy and after the vigorous opposition to the ambitious increases in fuel taxes, for example in France. The present paper offers an explanation for the reduced effectiveness of environmental taxation by focusing on relatively high-income individuals whose consumption of highly polluting material goods is driven by motivations to improve their social status. Furthermore, the paper shows that complementing the tax with information provision aiming at moderating status seeking overconsumption improves social welfare. Decoupling consumption of highly polluting material goods from social status in individuals’ well-being, through informative advertisement campaigns, could have a substantial environmental effect directly and also indirectly by improving the effectiveness of taxation.

不断增加的物质商品消费引发了当前的资源和环境危机，包括气候变化和生物多样性的丧失。虽然技术提供解决方案，但它们的开发和采用速度没有达到解决这些危机所需的速度。因此，必须通过政策来触发需求方的反应，经济学家建议主要使用价格信号。然而，税收的有效性和政治上的可接受性都受到质疑，特别是因为过去十年欧洲和北美的燃料价格上涨并没有产生预期的燃料经济性下降，并且在强烈反对雄心勃勃的增加之后燃油税，例如在法国。本文通过关注相对高收入的个人来解释环境税的有效性降低，这些人的高污染物质商品的消费是出于提高社会地位的动机。此外，该文件表明，通过提供旨在缓和寻求过度消费的地位的信息来补充税收可以提高社会福利。通过信息丰富的广告活动，将高污染物质商品的消费与个人福祉的社会地位脱钩，可以通过提高税收效率直接和间接地产生重大的环境影响。