A recent behavioural economics literature argues that people are more likely to make ‘should’ choices rather than ‘want’ choices when the decision is scheduled in the future. We investigate this concern in the case of a soil conservation tax. Surveying both a convenience and randomly-selected samples of individuals in a French region suffering from soil degradation, we test whether the suggestion of a future implementation of a soil conservation tax increases public support, compared to an ‘as-soon-as-possible’ implementation. Our results show that scheduling the implementation in the future does not matter, since the support of the considered tax is similar in both samples, regardless of the time perspective of its implementation.