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Presenting balanced geoengineering information has little effect on mitigation engagement

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Abstract

“Moral hazard” links geoengineering to mitigation via the fear that either solar geoengineering (solar radiation management, SRM) or carbon dioxide removal (CDR) might crowd out the desire to cut emissions. Fear of this crowding-out effect ranks among the most frequently cited risks of (solar) geoengineering. We here test moral hazard versus its inverse in a large-scale, revealed-preference experiment (n ~ 340,000) on Facebook and find little to no support for either outcome. For the most part, talking about SRM or CDR does not motivate our study population to support a large US environmental non-profit’s mission, nor does it turn them off relative to baseline climate messaging, except when using extreme messengers and framings. Our results indicate the importance of actors and reasoned narratives of (solar) geoengineering to help guide public discourse.

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Data availability

All replication data available upon request.

Notes

  1. We used the large US environmental NGO’s Facebook page for this set of experiments in exchange for us compensating the NGO for the ad purchases, and under the condition of anonymity.

  2. While it might have been good to be able to distinguish genuine interest in geoengineering from conspiratorial content, social media discourse on geoengineering appears to be dominated by the latter (Tingley and Wagner 2017). Hence, we analyze this group separately and excluded either form of prior engagement from the other groups.

  3. Merk et al. (2019), in a stated-preference survey, shows that laypeople exhibit moral hazard behavior, while experts do not.

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Acknowledgements

We thank David Lazer, Kaitlin Raimi, Jesse Reynolds, Dustin Tingley, Elke Weber, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Columbia Business School, and Princeton University for discussions and feedback, and Karen Pittel and the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich for hosting us during the writing phase of this project.

Funding

The research was supported by the German Research Foundation Priority Program 1689 Climate Engineering and by the Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, which G. W. co-directed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel, Germany

    Christine Merk

  2. Columbia Business School, New York, NY, USA

    Gernot Wagner

Authors
  1. Christine Merk
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  2. Gernot Wagner
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Both authors contributed equally to the study.

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Correspondence to Gernot Wagner.

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Merk, C., Wagner, G. Presenting balanced geoengineering information has little effect on mitigation engagement. Climatic Change 177, 11 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03671-5

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