Morality and Climate Policy Attitudes

This paper studies the moral roots of climate policy attitudes. We fielded a survey with a representative sample in the US to study the predictive power of moral universalism in explaining heterogeneity in specific climate policy attitudes. Our results reveal that universalism significantly relates to support for various policy measures that prevail in current policy debates in most countries, including domestic policies such as a carbon tax and a green infrastructure program, as well as international policies such as international burden-sharing. This pattern is replicated in simple bystander allocation decisions where respondents are asked to decide “who should pay” to fight climate change or to mitigate the adverse consequences of global warming. Open-text elicitations further corroborate these results and identify moral universalism as a key aspect of how people reason about climate policies.