Home page for Endre Tvinnereim


Welcome to my personal home page.
I work as Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bergen.

I am interested in finding out how people around the world can get together to fix the climate challenges.

Photo of Endre M. Tvinnereim More specifically, my main research interests are comparative public opinion on climate policies, quantitative text analysis in survey research and evidence-based evaluations of cap-and-trade and other CO2 pricing mechanisms.

My public opinion research using quantitative text analysis and public opinion surveys has been published in journals such as Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change and Energy Policy. I rely primarily on survey questions and survey experiments run by my team on the Norwegian Citizen Panel, a probability-sample online infrastructure for collecting people's views on current matters.

I have also used data from other opinion surveys and countries in my publications, including China and Bangladesh. Using more traditional survey questions, I find that people working in the fossil fuel industry are less likely to support climate policies that imply high costs to their industry, but are as likely as everybody else to support policies with lower costs.

My second stream of research involves the political origins, practical operations and effects of cap-and-trade systems and other forms of emission pricing. One of my key findings is that systems with emission caps often experience greater emission cuts than initially expected, which in turn leads to lower permit prices and public criticism, but which also implies that greater cuts are possible at a reasonable price.

At the same time, my co-author Michael Mehling (MIT) and I find that taxes on emissions rarely lead to absolute emission reductions, which means that additional instruments are needed if deep decarbonization is the goal. We summarise our argument in the article "Carbon pricing and the 1.5°C target : near-term decarbonisation and the importance of an instrument mix," which was cited in the 1.5°C IPCC report (chapter 2).