Attention, sentiments and emotions towards emerging climate technologies on Twitter

Creators: Müller-Hansen, Finn; Repke, Tim; Baum, Chad M.; Brutschin, Elina; Callaghan, Max W.; Debnath, Ramit; Lamb, William F.; Low, Sean; Lück, Sarah; Roberts, Cameron; Sovacool, Benjamin K.; Minx, Jan C.

Abstract

Public perception of emerging climate technologies, such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and solar radiation management (SRM), will strongly influence their future development and deployment. Studying perceptions of these technologies with traditional survey methods is challenging, because they are largely unknown to the public. Social media data provides a complementary line of evidence by allowing for retrospective analysis of how individuals share their unsolicited opinions. Our large-scale, comparative study of 1.5 million tweets covers 16 GGR and SRM technologies and uses state-of-the-art deep learning models to show how attention, and expressions of sentiment and emotion developed between 2006 and 2021. We find that in recent years, attention has shifted from general geoengineering themes to specific GGR methods. On the other hand, there is little attention to specific SRM technologies and they often coincide with conspiracy narratives. Sentiments and emotions in GGR tweets tend to be more positive, particularly for methods perceived to be natural, but are more negative when framed in the geoengineering context.

Copyright and License

Acknowledgement

We thank Keywan Riahi and participants of the GENIE meetings in November 2021 and May 2022 for fruitful discussions and for sharing their ideas.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme as part of the project “GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe” (GENIE) [grant agreement No. 951542]. R.D. thanks Quadrature Climate Foundation and Keynes Fund [JHVH] for the support.

Contributions

Finn Müller-Hansen: Methodology, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Formal analysis, Data curation, Validation, Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Tim Repke: Formal analysis, Data curation, Validation, Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Chad M. Baum: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Elina Brutschin: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Max W. Callaghan: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Ramit Debnath: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. William F. Lamb: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Sean Low: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Sarah Lück: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Cameron Roberts: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Benjamin K. Sovacool: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition, Supervision. Jan C. Minx: Funding acquisition, Supervision, Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data Availability

As per Twitter’s Terms of Service, sharing the full tweet data is not feasible. However, to allow for reproducibility, we provide the search queries in the supplementary material and the ids of retrieved tweets with categorizations as well as our code in an archive on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10008167.

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