Political ideology and views toward solar geoengineering in the United States
Creators
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
University of Cambridge
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3.
Harvard University
Contributors
Editor:
Abstract
Political polarization remains a significant barrier to effective climate action in the United States. Conservatives often express skepticism toward climate change policies emphasizing government intervention, while liberals are generally more supportive of these efforts. Solar geoengineering (SG), an emerging technology proposed to cool the Earth's atmosphere, offers a climate intervention that may transcend entrenched ideological divides. SG remains relatively unknown to the public and has not yet been widely framed in partisan terms. Moreover, its perceived nature as a technological solution could appeal to conservatives resistant to traditional climate measures. This study investigates the relationship between political ideology and public attitudes toward SG, conditional on respondents' familiarity with the technology. Using a nationally representative sample of 2,109 American voters and applying linear probability and multinomial logistic regression models, we find that greater familiarity with SG is associated with reduced political polarization regarding SG's perceived effectiveness, associated risks, and preferred climate strategies. Our findings suggest that increasing public awareness of SG could foster bipartisan engagement with climate policy, helping bridge the ideological divide.
Copyright and License
© 2025 Magistro et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding
RMA and BM's work is supported by Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. DE's work on this project was originally supported by Caltech's Resnick Sustainability Institute while he was a PhD Candidate at Caltech. RD's work is supported by the Cambridge Arts, Humanities and Social Science (AHSS) Grants and the Bill \& Melinda French Gates Foundation (OPP1144).
Data Availability
Data availability statement: All codes and data needed for replication of this study can be found here: https://github.com/rmichaelalvarez/pol_ideology_solar_geoengineering.
Supplemental Material
S1 File. Political Ideology: respondents self-identified political belief. Gender: respondents self-identified gender as man, woman or others. Education: respondent’s self-reported education level. Subjective Income: respondents self-reported financial status. Religion: respondents self-reported religious belief. Environmental knowledge: respondents self-reported weather and climate knowledge.
Additional Information
Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review
process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and
author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000643
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Additional details
Related works
- Is supplemented by
- Supplemental Material: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000643.s001 (DOI)
- Dataset: https://github.com/rmichaelalvarez/pol_ideology_solar_geoengineering (URL)
Funding
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
- University of Cambridge
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- OPP1144
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-05-13