Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Executive Director James C. Arnott. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online. 

For many climate advocates preparing for this year’s COP29 in Baku, it might be a surprise to learn that a different annual Conference of Parties (COP) just wrapped in Cali, Columbia. This recent COP, also a pillar of global progress on sustainability, focused not primarily on climate change but on biological diversity.

Unfortunately, the climate crisis and biodiversity loss are too often considered separately from one another. As a result, the science about and potential solutions for each are typically explored through distinct channels, sometimes even competing with one another for attention and resources rather than navigating toward a more holistic path to sustainability.

Climate change presents a growing threat to biodiversity. Yet healthy and diverse living systems can play an important role in reducing future climate impacts by drawing down carbon in the atmosphere or helping communities build resilience. Accordingly, it’s worth looking at recent research for fresh insights on climate change and biodiversity, which can demonstrate the value of more integrated solutions.

At the most basic level, greater awareness of climate change impacts on nature heightens the case for urgency on reducing emissions. Some long-considered policies for biodiversity protection, like land use protections, may be emboldened or tweaked to capture benefits for climate solutions. But moving in this direction will require a more integrated approach to both policy and research. Though this has been largely missing in recent decades, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Pinning down the magnitude of climate impacts on biodiversity

Historically, humans have impacted biodiversity in myriad ways, from land use change (e.g., clearing natural habitats for cropland) and resource extraction (e.g., fishing or logging) to the spread of invasive species (e.g., Burmese pythons in Florida overconsuming local fauna) and the introduction of pollution and toxins (e.g., PFAS and other “forever chemicals”).

Climate change aside, the consequences of these impacts on biodiversity is profound: The rate of species extinctions in the 20th century alone has been estimated at 30 to 120 times the rate in the previous 66 million years (based on the fossil record), on par with past mass extinction events.

Climate change now presents an added threat to the diverse web of life. Rising temperatures can shrink suitable habitats, drought can spur tree mortality, imperiling forest health, and ocean acidification, driven by elevated ocean uptake of CO2 emissions, intensifies damage to coral reefs and other marine species around the globe.

Studies attempting to quantify how much climate change will affect species extinction –– just one aspect of biodiversity –– have a hard time finding agreement or high confidence owing to the underlying difficulties in monitoring, let alone predicting, the health and interactions between the estimated nine million species on Earth. However, a new review by John J. Wiens and Joseph Zelinka from the University of Arizona examined a range of studies over the past several decades that estimated the climate impacts on species loss for plant and animal species.

Considering a worst-case, high-end climate change scenario, Wiens and Zelinka estimate a potential 16 percent of species loss due to climate change (Figure 1). But even if the planet avoids worst case projections or if species manage to be more climate-resilient than current models anticipate, nearly any magnitude of species loss is sobering given the finality that accompanies extinction and the oftentimes unknown ripple effects that the removal of even a single species can have on the web of life.

Combining existing tools yields fresh insights

Thinking about climate change and biodiversity together can help us transcend the bleak tally of potential damages. Modeling tools developed to explore climate change and biodiversity loss can be combined and compared to assess the issues as a more dynamic problem set, thus illuminating the connections.

An important study led by Portuguese conservation biologist Henrique Pereira and published earlier this year in Science conducted an extensive comparison of climate and biodiversity models. This analysis covered the period from 1900 to 2050, allowing for both historical and future-oriented exploration.

To simplify matters, the authors compared biodiversity impacts solely due to land use change (a predominant historical driver of biodiversity loss) with the combined impacts of land use change and climate change. The comparison included three different emissions and socioeconomic scenarios representing different storylines of global progress on sustainability and climate action. Unlike the Wiens and Zelinka review, this study looked across multiple aspects of biodiversity, not just the total number of different species. Other metrics of biodiversity included the intactness of habitat and the extent of habitat per species, offering a more multidimensional picture of biodiversity.

An initial encouraging insight from the Pereira et al. study is that declines in biodiversity from land use change alone may be expected to diminish, or even reverse, in the remaining first half of the century in response to land protection efforts assumed in the global sustainability scenario (see red bars Figure 2a). However, when climate change is added to the equation, all climate change scenarios continue to exacerbate biodiversity losses, with greater losses on higher emissions trajectories (see all color bars, Figure 2b).

What we can also glean from this kind of analysis is how increasingly dependent society is on nature, not just for resource extraction but also for nature’s healthy functioning. In Figure 3, under all scenarios, models show increased human demand for material ecosystem services — the things we depend on practically from nature, like timber, food, and bioenergy (notably, bioenergy dependence greatly increases in the more global, sustainability-oriented scenario). By contrast, the functions nature relies on to provide those services (so-called “regulating ecosystem services”) are expected to decline in almost every area, including coastal resilience, a growing area of concern.

Pereira et al.’s study helps to showcase how scientists and policymakers can draw upon existing modeling tools to better assess the impacts of climate change on biodiversity as well as the co-benefits (and tradeoffs) of pursuing solutions to both in tandem. The researchers’ results show the diminishing effects of land use change under the Global Sustainability scenario (see red bars in both Figures 2 and 3) and are encouraging in that sustainability policies aimed at a specific challenge, like land use conversion, can meaningfully impact that goal on a global scale, with co-benefits for climate. At the same time, the models show how sustainability pathways that include aggressive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to stave off further impacts to biodiversity.

A glimmer of hope

As with mitigating climate change, reversing biodiversity loss is a daunting social task requiring well-designed policies, strong governance, and the more diffuse elements of social transformation, such as changes in norms, mindsets, and individual behavior. It’s easy to be discouraged that humans may fall short of achieving such a monumental undertaking. But what if lessons from human history show us the key to unlock our innate potential to rise to this challenge?

In a new perspective piece in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, ecologist and scholar of the Anthropocene Erle Ellis argues we underestimate the power of human aspirations to change how people relate to nature. As evidence, Ellis looks to humanity’s long history of dramatic interactions with nature, both for better and for worse. He cites examples from irrigation and granaries to the development of social norms to the more recent formation of environmental protection agencies and international environmental agreements.

For Ellis, the entry point to understanding how we can better relate to nature is recognizing these past examples where humans have devised and implemented transformational solutions to problems of our own making. “When these transformative capabilities to shape environments are coupled with sociocultural adaptations enabling societies to more effectively shape and live in transformed environments, the social–ecological scales and intensities of these transformations can accelerate,” Ellis wrote.

The underlying driver of successful transformation, for Ellis, is the power of culture and social learning, which in his view undergirds technological innovation (and adoption), good policy, and governance. Culture, then, becomes pivotal for progress at speed and scale.

Entry points

If Ellis is even partly correct about our latent potential, where are the most promising areas to focus attention? A team of scientists led by Brazilian ecologist Cássio Cardoso Pereira (2024) suggests six synergistic focus areas that would help to mitigate climate warming emissions while enhancing biodiversity.

Conserve carbon stocks and sinks. Land and ocean systems have naturally sequestered over half of humans’ historical emissions. Priorities for protection are likely in the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, which have high levels of carbon storage and biodiversity.
Restore degraded lands. Marginal lands, or lands degraded from historical practices, can be repaired to enhance their carbon sequestration capacity. Designing restorations to repair ecosystem connectivity and cultivate rich, diverse native species can enhance biodiversity and associated ecosystem services.
Integrate conservation with local fauna and flora. Ecosystems that help sequester carbon and provide resilience depend on healthy interactions between plants and animals. Thus, climate-oriented conservation strategies should take these interactions into account.
Use only existing areas of agriculture, pasture, and silviculture. Although this area is in tension with other goals around livelihoods and food security, a direct path to avoiding additional emissions and biodiversity loss from land conversion is to establish strong policies that confine agriculture to already converted land.
Incorporate biodiversity into business models. While many companies promote values and goals around the protection of nature and are increasingly attaching themselves to science-based targets for climate action, corporate plans tend to lack specificity about biodiversity. Corporations can reduce the net impact of their activities by quantifying the impact of corporate activities on biodiversity loss and committing to measurable and verifiable actions to mitigate those impacts.
Convene joint biodiversity-climate COPs. Although both link to the pathbreaking 1992 Rio Conference on Sustainable Development, separate “Conference of Parties” currently address climate change and biodiversity issues on the international stage. Bringing these conversations together could further harness the synergies between them.

Such areas of attention require actionable science to inform good decisions where the details matter. One upcoming effort along these lines in North America is the Biodiversity and Climate Chang­­e Assessment. This report, with participation from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, will be released sometime next year. Importantly, it will help to bridge communities of researchers who have previously contributed to either climate change-specific or biodiversity-specific assessment processes.

Ultimately, the systems that regulate both climate and life on Earth are deeply interwoven, and it’s impossible to consider the sustainability of either without looking at them together.

Featured research

Pereira, H. M., Martins, I. S., Rosa, I. M. D., Kim, H. J., Leadley, P., Popp, A., … Alkemade, R. (2024). Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050. Science, 384(6694), 458–465. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn3441

Wiens, J. J., & Zelinka, J. (2024). How many species will Earth lose to climate change? Global Change Biology, 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17125

Ellis, E. C. (2024). The Anthropocene condition: Evolving through social-ecological transformations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1893). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0255

Pereira, C. C., Kenedy-Siqueira, W., Negreiros, D., Fernandes, S., Barbosa, M., Goulart, F. F., … Fernandes, G. W. (2024). Scientists’ warning: six key points where biodiversity can improve climate change mitigation. BioScience, 74(5), 315–318. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae035

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Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Executive Director James C. Arnott. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online.  For many…
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This post is part of an ongoing “What Is” series from Energy Innovation that answers some of today’s most pressing climate policy questions. The first in this series answered the question–What is Net-Zero?, and the second answered the question What is The Inflation Reduction Act?.

What is Clean Energy?

Fighting climate change is the challenge of our time—cutting emissions at the speed and scale science deems necessary will determine the future of nearly all living things on the planet for generations. It’s an overarching problem that impacts every corner of our society and economy, and it requires.

However, as complicated as the problem seems, the solution to cleaning up climate pollution is straightforward: Use clean energy to make electricity and use that clean electricity to power equipment like vehicles, factories, and appliances that currently burn fossil fuels.

But what counts as clean energy?

The answer to that question varies depending on who is responding, muddying the landscape, diverting resources from the best solutions, and costing precious time in the effort to cut climate pollution. But the bottom line is clear – energy isn’t clean if it generates greenhouse gas emissions or air pollution.

To set the record straight, here’s a guide that walks through the clearly clean energy technologies and those requiring more nuance.

The obvious candidates: Renewable energy

 Renewables—wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower—are universally recognized as clean energy. To generate electricity, they harness natural processes like wind, the sun’s rays, the earth’s heat, and the flow of water. And because they don’t burn any feedstock like coal or natural gas, they emit no air or climate pollution, qualifying them as clean energy. These sources currently generate about 20 percent of U.S. electricity.

Renewables are a bedrock climate solution, they’re the cheapest form of power today and will keep getting cheaper over time, and we know how to reliably manage an electric grid with a high share of renewable energy.

Clean but not pollution-free: Nuclear power 

Nuclear power currently supplies 20 percent of the United States’s electricity, making it one of our largest sources of power free from climate pollution. Nuclear plants can provide around-the-clock zero-carbon power, meaning they’re an important part of a clean grid. While constructing new nuclear plants is a timely and expensive process, maintaining the operating nuclear fleet is critical to meeting climate goals, because if they aren’t online, fossil fuel power could fill that required generation capacity.

We consider nuclear power to be “clean” on the basis that it does not emit pollution, although it must be acknowledged nuclear plants do create nuclear waste, which has complicated storage requirements and can be hazardous. The lack of greenhouse gas emissions is the key distinction in this analysis.

Hydrogen: It’s complicated

 Hydrogen has long been discussed as a potential climate solution, and it has certain use cases where it will be needed to provide energy free from climate pollution in a way electrified processes cannot like steel production, aviation, and long-haul maritime shipping.

However, even though burning hydrogen only emits water vapor, it’s complicated from a climate perspective. Hydrogen on its own scarcely exists in nature—generally it must be separated from other molecules using energy-intensive equipment called electrolyzers. If electrolyzers are powered by fossil fuels, the hydrogen they produce isn’t considered clean, since pollution occurs during the creation of that hydrogen, even if it only water vapor is emitted when the hydrogen itself is subsequently burned.

To be considered clean, hydrogen must be produced by electrolyzers powered by another clean energy source, ideally wind or solar. This is called green hydrogen.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS): Theoretically clean, absent in the real world

 CCS entails burning fossil fuels at a facility like a coal power plant or steel mill, and then sequestering the resulting climate pollution in an underground geologic formation or substance like limestone. While theoretically possible, this process is not and has not been used anywhere in the world at scale. Failures and cost overruns have plagued CCS demonstration projects. And while CCS captures carbon dioxide, it doesn’t capture traditional air pollution like soot, NOx, or Sox, all of which harms human health.

Natural gas: A bridge to nowhere

 Many industry groups have worked for years to brand natural gas as clean with the narrative of gas as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future often pushed by fossil fuel interest groups. But this is resoundingly false. Although natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, it still generates substantial amounts of climate pollution when burned.

And natural gas wells, pipelines, and appliances often leak methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and is responsible for an estimated 20-30 percent of global warming since the Industrial Revolution.

There is no credible scenario in which natural gas can be considered clean from a climate perspective.

How policy can bring more clean energy online, faster

Because of clean energy’s superior economics, state and federal policy, and corporate climate goals, nearly all new additions to the U.S. electric grid are now clean.

In 2024, 96 percent of the new capacity added in the U.S. will consist of wind, solar, storage, and nuclear, all free from climate pollution. While this is a hopeful development, we’re still not adding clean energy fast enough.

Headwinds such as high interest rates, local siting challenges, supply chain constraints, and long wait times to connect to the grid are among the factors adding sand to the gears of the clean transition. Instituting smart policy can help ease the friction, including:

Improving regional and interregional transmission planning.
Accelerating interconnection by reducing the requirements on interconnection studies to only those necessary to connect the project to the grid.
Upgrading transmission lines using affordable technology to get big capacity increases in short timelines.
Implementing state and national clean electricity standards to mandate the transition to clean energy.
Improving regional sharing of electricity to improve reliability and resiliency.
And enabling demand-side solutions to meet peak loads quickly and affordably.

Clean energy is foundational to the fight against climate change—other solutions like electrification of transportation, buildings, and industry will only reach their fullest potential if clean energy supplies the electricity those technologies run on, rather than coal and natural gas.

Therefore, it’s crucial that policymakers, regulators, advocates, and businesses understand what energy sources are truly clean and which are imposters. Otherwise, they risk offering incentives, investments, and support to the wrong technologies that might only make our climate progress worse.

The post What Is Clean Energy? appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.

This post is part of an ongoing “What Is” series from Energy Innovation that answers some of today’s most pressing climate policy questions. The first in this series answered the question–What is Net-Zero?, and the second answered the question What is…
The post What Is Clean Energy? appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]

By Energy Innovation’s Modeling and Analysis Team

The free and open-source Energy Policy Simulator (EPS) computer model developed by Energy Innovation has become one of the most widely used tools to inform policymakers and regulators about which climate and energy policies will reduce greenhouse gas emissions most effectively while creating the largest economic and public health benefits.

With EPS models now available for dozens of countries and subnational areas, including 48 U.S. states, we’re often asked how the EPS works and what peer review it has undergone through its development.

The EPS is a System Dynamics computer model created in Vensim, a tool produced by Ventana Systems for the creation and simulation of System Dynamics models. The model can be run via the free Vensim Model Reader or through a web interface Energy Innovation developed. Directions on obtaining Vensim Model Reader and the EPS are available on the Download and Installation page and users can access the model online via the energypolicy.solutions website.

Users can access advanced features or modify input data by downloading the EPS and running it locally on their Mac or Windows PC. All input data is meticulously cited, publicly available, and freely accessible and editable. Users can run the model in Vensim Model Reader and instantly see how changes in input assumptions change the model’s outputs.

The EPS is an economy-wide, single region model that runs in annual time steps. It can be configured to run to 2100, though it is most often configured to run to 2050. The EPS includes bottom-up stock turnover tracking in several sectors and a profit-maximizing least-cost optimized electricity model, including 24 hours across six different time slices. It also has local cost minimization for certain sectors and technologies, for example it selects the lowest cost mix of new vehicles sold in a given year based on demand for new vehicles.

The EPS is designed to model dozens of policies affecting energy use and emissions. The model first builds a business-as-usual case based on input data and current policies. From there, the EPS allows users to model any combination of included policies and to customize the policy stringency and timelines of those policies. These policies include, for example:

Renewable portfolio standards or clean energy standards
Fuel economy standards for vehicles
Zero emissions vehicle standards and incentives
Industry methane standards
Incentives for clean energy technologies like those in the Inflation Reduction Act
Accelerated R&D advancement of various technologies

The EPS features an embedded downstream input-output model that translates changes in spending from policy to changes in economic outcomes, such as jobs, GDP, and worker wages. Changes in demand for services and goods that result from macroeconomic changes are fed back into the model on a one-year time delay, allowing the model to adjust energy demand and emissions based on the economy’s evolution.

The EPS also includes a simplified downstream health module that translates changes in health-damaging pollutants into changes in health outcomes. The health module relies on benefit-per-ton estimates from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency modeling and follows standard practices for converting changes in emissions to changes in health outcomes.

Thousands of outputs are available in the model, but some key metrics include:

Emissions of 12 different pollutants including carbon dioxide, methane, N2O, fluorinated gases, NOx, SOx, PM2.5, PM10, black carbon, organic carbon, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.
Changes in spending on capital, fuel, maintenance, taxes and subsidies.
Direct, indirect, and induced impacts on jobs, GDP, and employee compensation as a whole or disaggregated into 42 sectors.
Premature mortality and 10 other avoided health-related outcomes from reduced primary and secondary particulate pollution.
Detailed electricity sector information including hourly demand and supply, generation, capacity, and retail electricity rates.
Sales and stock of different vehicles and vehicle technologies, such as battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and gas-powered vehicles.
Energy used by different services and technologies across the economy, broken down by fuel type
Breakdowns of how each policy within a policy package contributes to total abatement and the cost-effectiveness of each policy (e.g., wedge diagrams and cost curves).
Fuel imports and exports, and associated expenditures or revenues.
Detailed accounting of energy used by 25 different industry sectors, including construction and agriculture, end use (e.g., boiler, low/medium/high temperature heat, machine drive) and fuel type.

Core methodologies and structures in the EPS have undergone extensive peer review as they were developed, and we continually seek input from outside experts to modify the methodologies and address concerns that are raised. Components of the model have been reviewed by individuals from prestigious institutions including:

American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy
Argonne National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
RMI
Stanford University
Tufts University
University of Chicago
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
World Resources Institute

The post How Energy Innovation’s Energy Policy Simulators Work And Are Developed appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.

An overview of how the Energy Policy Simulator works and what peer review it undergoes during model development.
The post How Energy Innovation’s Energy Policy Simulators Work And Are Developed appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]

Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Climate Social Scientist Rebecca Rasch. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online. 

In the year 2050, we may look back on the events of December 5, 2022, as game-changing for the clean energy landscape. This was the day that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) produced using nuclear fusion technology. Unlike nuclear fission, which splits atoms to generate energy, nuclear fusion combines, or “fuses,” atoms to generate energy.

Fusion technology likely won’t be readily available for commercialization until mid-century, and even then, some argue it may prove too expensive to ever become commercially viable. Nevertheless, the milestone at LLNL is significant given the technology’s long-recognized potential. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, fusion, the same process that powers the sun and other stars, could produce “four million times more energy than burning oil or coal” (Barbarino 2023).

Beyond the hurdles of technological readiness and financial viability, there is a looming question of whether fusion technology would face similar hurdles as nuclear fission technology in the court of public opinion given the tumultuous history of support for nuclear energy development in the United States (Gupta et al. 2019).

What is the state of public support for nuclear power and fusion energy?

New social science research by Gupta and colleagues published in the journal Fusion Science and Technology utilizes a unique empirical lens to answer this question. The team surveyed a representative sample of U.S. households to understand current perceptions of and attitudes toward nuclear technologies, including feelings about the balance of risks and benefits, and support for or opposition to the construction of new nuclear energy power plants in the United States. They use an experimental design, randomly assigning respondents to reflect on three terms: “fusion energy,” “nuclear energy,” and “nuclear fusion.” While “fusion energy” and “nuclear fusion” are terms describing the same technology, “nuclear energy” refers to current nuclear fission technology.

By gathering public sentiment on each term, the researchers can distinguish how sentiment varies based on both the technology itself (i.e., fusion vs. fission energy technology) and feelings around the term “nuclear,” in general. The authors focus on understanding people’s emotional response by asking respondents to list three words or phrases that come to mind when they think about the given term (Figure 1). Next, they ask respondents how each word or phrase makes them feel, on a five-point scale ranging from very negative to very positive (Figure 2).

The most common terms people associated with “nuclear energy” were “dangerous,” “clean,” and “scary.” The mean response score to “nuclear energy” was 2.92 out of 5, where 3 is the midpoint, indicating neutral feelings. This result suggests that, on average, people tended to attach neutral or even slightly negative feelings to the term “nuclear.” Similarly, the most common terms associated with “nuclear fusion” were “dangerous,” “energy,” and “clean.”

The mean favorability score for “nuclear fusion” was 2.97, only slightly higher than the score for “nuclear energy.” Conversely, “fusion energy” tended to evoke more positive feelings, with a mean response score of 3.36. The terms associated with “fusion energy” were more benign, with only 2.5 percent associating fusion energy with “dangerous.”

The authors highlight the clear bias that respondents tended to hold against the term “nuclear,” especially given their lack of familiarity with fusion energy. According to this research, more than half of Americans (63 percent of respondents) are not familiar with fusion energy technology. Yet once presented with the concept of fusion energy, 58 percent of respondents said they would support the “construction and use of fusion reactors to generate electricity in the United States.” This is in contrast to the amount of support for current nuclear fission technology, which only 48 percent of those surveyed support. The researchers find that support for construction of fusion reactors is higher among those aged 18 to 34, those more familiar with the technology, and those concerned about the environment.

This generational difference in support for fusion energy is not surprising, considering the history of public support for nuclear energy development in the U.S. In the 1970s and 1980s, public support for nuclear power was significantly eroded due to accidents related to nuclear waste disposal and explosions at nuclear fission facilities, most notably the Three Mile Island nuclear plant explosion in Pennsylvania in 1979 (Gupta et al. 2019). A new generation has come of age since that time, and Gupta et al. (2024) find that those born in the 1990s and later are less likely to attach negative feelings to or oppose nuclear energy.

What drives public sentiment around nuclear power in the United States?

In a separate study published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Kwon and colleagues (2024) at the University of Michigan used large language models (LLMs) to classify the sentiment of approximately 1.26 million English-language nuclear power-related tweets posted from 2008 through 2023. The LLMs categorized both key themes of the tweets as well as which tweets were most associated with positive, neutral, and negative sentiment. This novel approach allowed the authors to go beyond simply identifying sentiment to provide visibility into the drivers of those emotions.

The authors chose to use Twitter/X as a data source for public sentiment over alternatives like Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn for several reasons, including “the platform’s concise text format and its widespread use for discussing both scientific and non-scientific topics.” The team further segmented the data by city and state for 300,000 of the 400,000 tweets originating in the U.S. to understand geographic variance in support for nuclear power.

The authors found that nuclear power-related tweets tended to fall into two distinct categories: those pertaining to nuclear energy and those pertaining to nuclear policy. Nuclear energy-related tweets referenced nuclear power generation and related processes (including nuclear waste). Below are examples of tweets that typify negative, positive, and neutral nuclear energy tweets, respectively.

“Nuclear power generates dangerous radioactive wastes, and the U.S. should stay away from this energy source.’’
“The U.S. should build more small modular reactors to ensure a clean energy transition.’’
“There are 440 nuclear power plants operating in the world.’’

Tweets classified as nuclear policy referred to geopolitics, world leaders, and/or nuclear weapons. Words and phrases in tweets classified as policy tweets included references to nuclear warheads, nuclear deal, North Korea, Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Hillary Clinton.

The researchers utilized GPT-3.5 to determine that a majority of tweets (68 percent) were policy-related, and 26 percent were energy-related (Figure 3). Favorability sentiment varied considerably by topic, with most policy-related tweets classified as negative and energy-related tweets as mainly neutral. Where energy-related posts were not neutral, there was a roughly even split between positive and negative sentiments associated with energy tweets, with slightly more positive tweets. This suggests that the bulk of negative-sentiment tweets related to nuclear power is associated with geopolitical concerns, not energy development.

To understand the themes driving the sentiments associated with energy-related tweets, the authors used LLM topic models to identify frequent keywords. Based on keyword frequencies, the authors grouped tweets into six main themes: Nuclear Science, Other Energy Sources, Environment and Health, Nuclear Technology, Errors and Misuse, and General.

The authors grouped tweets that mention “fusion” and “fission” into the Nuclear Science theme. Figure 4 shows the distribution of sentiments of energy-related tweets by keyword for the Nuclear Science theme. The bulk of positive tweets in this theme contain the keywords fusion or reactor, suggesting fusion technology is partially responsible for the positive-sentiment tweets associated with nuclear energy-related tweets overall. Additionally, tweets in the Nuclear Technology theme skewed positive, further suggesting that advances in technology are driving positive sentiment tweets.

Interestingly, the distribution of sentiments of tweets mentioning fusion and fission aligns well with Gupta and colleagues’ (2024) survey results, which show similar distributions of sentiments for fusion and nuclear (i.e., fission) energy (see Figure 2). Both studies show a majority of neutral or positive sentiment for fusion, and a larger proportion of negative sentiment for fission, compared to fusion.

Concern for the environment is driving public support for nuclear power

Tweets grouped into the Environment and Health theme and that contain the keywords clean and renewable also skew positive, suggesting that positive-sentiment tweets around nuclear power are also driven by concern for the environment and an interest in clean energy development. This finding aligns well with Gupta and colleagues’ (2024) finding that those concerned about the environment are more likely to support nuclear energy development.

The notion that nuclear power is more appealing to those concerned about the environment is a distinct shift in public motivation for nuclear power generation, which historically was driven by industrialists interested in lower energy costs. This suggests an evolution of environmental concern in the past decade, where climate change mitigation efforts are taking precedence over more traditional environmental interests of biodiversity loss, environmental contamination, and degradation.

In a recent perspective piece for WIREs Energy and Environment, “Nuclear power and environmental injustice,” Höffken and Ramana (2024) argue that nuclear power is wholly incompatible with environmental justice, pointing to a legacy of nuclear reactor siting and waste disposal in socially marginalized communities. Fusion energy, which theoretically would not produce the type of radioactive waste that the fission process generates (as it does not rely on uranium or plutonium), could help address this perception of incompatibility. As fusion technology advances, it will be important to include the environmental justice community in planning and implementation to ensure transparency, procedural justice, and a more equitable distribution of environmental benefits, risks, and impacts than we have seen historically with nuclear energy development.

LLM-based analysis tracks with survey data, demonstrating the power of AI to categorize sentiment 

Gupta et al. (2024) and Kwon et al. (2024) both focus on understanding U.S. public sentiment around nuclear power. Although their methods for gathering public sentiment differ substantially, their findings converge. Based on both a representative sample of the American public and 300,000 U.S.-based tweets, the research suggests a lack of majority opposition to nuclear power, in general, and fusion technology, in particular. In the case of fusion energy, the data indicate a slight majority of support.

Featured research and references

Barbarino, Matteo. 2023. “What is Nuclear Fusion?” International Atomic Energy Agency. Retrieved July 29, 2024. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-is-nuclear-fusion.

Cooke, Stephanie. 2024. “The Fantasy of Reviving Nuclear Energy.” The New York

Times Opinion. The New York Times. Retrieved July 24, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opinion/nuclear-power-fantasy-climate.html.

Gupta, Kuhika, Hank Jenkins-Smith, Joseph Ripberger, Carol Silva, Andrew Fox, and Will Livingston. 2024. “Americans’ Views of Fusion Energy: Implications for Sustainable Public Support.” Fusion Science and Technology 1–17. doi: 10.1080/15361055.2024.2328457.

Gupta, Kuhika, Matthew C. Nowlin, Joseph T. Ripberger, Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, and Carol L. Silva. 2019. “Tracking the Nuclear ‘Mood’ in the United States: Introducing a Long Term Measure of Public Opinion about Nuclear Energy Using Aggregate Survey Data.” Energy Policy 133:110888. doi: 10.1016/j.enpol.2019.110888.

Höffken, Johanna, and M. V. Ramana. 2024. “Nuclear Power and Environmental Injustice.” WIREs Energy and Environment 13(1):e498. doi: 10.1002/wene.498.

Kwon, O. Hwang, Katie Vu, Naman Bhargava, Mohammed I. Radaideh, Jacob Cooper, Veda Joynt, and Majdi I. Radaideh. 2024. “Sentiment Analysis of the United States Public Support of Nuclear Power on Social Media Using Large Language Models.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 200:114570. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2024.114570.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Ignition.” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Retrieved August 1, 2024. https://www.llnl.gov/news/ignition.

Peters, Adele. 2022. “Nuclear fusion will be a gamechanger—in the future. Wind and solar are critical right now.” Fast Company. Retrieved August 1st, 2024. https://energyinnovation.org/article/nuclear-fusion-will-be-a-gamechanger-in-the-future-wind-and-solar-are-critical-right-now/.

Terrapower. 2024. “Wyoming.” Terrapower.com. Retrieved August 1, 2024

https://www.terrapower.com/wyoming/.

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Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Climate Social Scientist Rebecca Rasch. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online.  In the…
The post Will A New Climate-Conscious Generation Embrace Advances In Nuclear Technology? appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]

Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Climate Science Fellow Dr. Tanya Petach. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online. 

In April 2024, residents in Bogotá, Colombia, began rationing water due to critically low water levels in the Chingaza Reservoir System. The rationing system, which impacts over 9 million people living in the capital city, involves rotating 24-hour intervals for household water deliveries, scheduled by neighborhood.

Some 2,000 miles north of Bogotá, residents of Mexico City are grappling with similar water shortages. Water cuts in Mexico City were implemented in May of this year, when the Cutzamala system of reservoirs, which supplies a substantial portion of drinking water to the city’s 22 million residents, reached historic lows. The impacts of water cuts like these often fall disproportionately on lower-income areas.

Both Bogotá and Mexico City are taking drastic actions to avoid a potential “Day Zero” scenario, wherein taps run dry—not temporarily, but in a systemic collapse—due to depleted water supplies. So why are cities increasingly facing such extreme water shortages? Recent research shines a light on the compounding effects of anthropogenic (human-caused) and climate drivers on lake storage. This research provides foundational knowledge that can inform responses to water stress in water supplies.

The stakes of shrinking lakes and reservoirs

The term “Day Zero” was coined in South Africa. From 2015 to 2017, dwindling reservoir storage for Cape Town’s water supply brought the city perilously close to this dreaded scenario. However, in 2018, Cape Town narrowly averted the crisis by severely cutting water consumption to just 50 percent of 2015 levels, coupled with the return of seasonal rains. The city’s experience drew international attention to the vulnerability of urban water systems and the imperative for proactive water conservation measures.

The water availability crises in Cape Town, Bogotá, and Mexico City are all inextricably linked to dependence on lake and reservoir water storage systems. And these municipalities are not alone in facing declining lake and reservoir storage. Globally,  the amount of water stored in lakes has drastically and steadily decreased over the last three decades. Every single year during that period, freshwater lakes around the world have collectively lost water storage equivalent to 17 times the volume of Lake Mead, the largest lake in the United States.

A recent, comprehensive study in Science, led by Fangfang Yao of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, examined nearly 2,000 lakes around the world and revealed that 53 percent experienced significant declines in water storage between 1992 and 2020.

While the decline of lake water storage alone is staggering, the research went a step further, attributing declines to either anthropogenic or climate-related causes. Yao’s study identifies three primary drivers of dwindling water levels: unsustainable water consumption, increasing temperatures and evaporation rates, and changes in precipitation patterns and runoff.

By distinguishing between human-caused (overuse) and climate-driven (evaporation, loss of precipitation) decline, the research provides crucial insights for policymakers, hydropower operators, and water resource managers. In cases where lake drying is predominantly driven by unsustainable water use, sustainable withdrawal rates should be prioritized, along with demand management measures and efficiency improvements. Conversely, in cases where climate change emerges as the primary culprit, adaptation strategies such as water conservation, diversification of water sources, and infrastructure resilience may take precedence. The attribution of causality in the dataset produced by Yao and co-authors may help lay a global foundation framework for identifying targeted and effective interventions for diminishing lake water storage.

Lake losses due to overuse: The Aral Sea

Along the Uzbekistan/Kazakhstan border, a vast expanse of 5.5 million hectares of desert now covers the historic lakebed of the Aral Sea. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea has shrunk by a staggering 88 percent since 1920, with subsequent desertification and dust storms impacting surrounding communities. The lake’s decline has been largely attributed to human overuse, a finding supported by Yao’s attribution work. Despite multinational efforts to prevent further lake decline, water levels have not increased in recent years, prompting ongoing reforestation projects to  introduce drought- and salt-tolerant species, such as tamarisk and saxaul, to the region for dust mitigation.

While the Aral Sea has become a poster child for overuse of water in arid regions, it is far from the only example. From the Maipo River in Chile to the Colorado River in the United States, unsustainable water use continues to dry up lakes and stress water supplies. When overuse is the root cause of lake desiccation, the toolbox for solutions expands: in addition to infrastructure changes, overuse can often be addressed through behavioral changes. Yao and his coauthors highlight Lake Sevan in Armenia as an example where enforcement of water conservation and withdrawal limits has led to increases in lake storage in a previously overused basin. Examples like these may have enormous potential to guide strategies for the Aral Sea and many comparable basins.

Lake Losses due to evaporation: Lake Khyargas

Even in river basins with well-balanced water use and demand, climate-related changes in precipitation and evaporation rates can impact lake levels and water availability. In western Mongolia, a steady rise in evaporation, fueled in large part by underlying increases in temperature, has emerged as a primary cause for declining lake levels. This phenomenon is exemplified by the substantial water loss observed in the saline Lake Khyargas, but similar trends of evaporation-driven lake declines are echoed across much of central and western Mongolia.

The climate-driven increase in evaporative losses experienced in Mongolia is reflected in many arid and semi-arid regions around the globe, and recent studies indicate that global mean lake evaporation rates are expected to increase 16 percent by 2100. These exacerbating evaporative losses have sparked creative and innovative infrastructure-based solutions. A floating photovoltaic array covering the Passaúna reservoir in Brazil was found to reduce evaporation by 60 percent, and covering water bodies in thin films can dramatically reduce losses. Other innovations, including thin chemical films, plant coverings, and bubbling cold water from the depths of reservoirs to the surface, have also successfully reduced evaporative losses.

Levers for change

When observed at a global scale, the supply of freshwater is hundreds of thousands of times larger than human water demands — but on local scales, the mismatch between available water resources and needs is dramatic. And water availability issues reach beyond the physical scarcity of water resources. Local demographic and economic factors, such as income disparities and local regions of water poverty, further exacerbate the challenge. In many areas, access to water is compounded by the cost of water itself, creating an additional barrier for low-income communities and contributing to increased water insecurity. The increased incidence of drying lakes is an indicator of future shifts in the complexity of who can access water and how often.

In the face of complex water uncertainty, developing and utilizing a toolbox of adaptive management strategies is crucial. In basins around the globe, creative management strategies are being employed and implemented in myriad ways, from withdrawal limits to shading of reservoirs. These basins can serve as case studies for one another, exemplifying different response strategies and enabling basin managers to expand their toolbox of solutions.

The attribution of case-by-case causes of declining lake storage doesn’t necessarily add another tool to this toolbox, but rather increases the finesse with which these tools can be wielded. Lakes drying in response to increased evaporation require different responses than desiccation caused by human overuse. The ability to tease apart these differences (and sometimes identify cases where both occur simultaneously) can suggest a path forward to address declining lake storage.

Featured research

Duan, Z., Afzal, M. M., Liu, X., Chen, S., Du, R., Zhao, B., … & Awais, M. (2024). Effects of climate change and human activities on environment and area variations of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, 21(2), 1715-1728.

Genova, P., & Wei, Y. (2023). A socio-hydrological model for assessing water resource allocation and water environmental regulations in the Maipo River basin. Journal of Hydrology, 617, 129159.

Gleick, P. H., & Cooley, H. (2021). Freshwater scarcity. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 46(1), 319-348.

Mady, B., Lehmann, P., & Or, D. (2021). Evaporation suppression from small reservoirs using floating covers—Field study and modeling. Water Resources Research, 57(4), e2020WR028753.

Orkhonselenge, A., Komatsu, G., & Uuganzaya, M. (2018). Climate-driven changes in lake areas for the last half century in the Valley of Lakes, Govi Region, Southern Mongolia. Natural Science, 10(7), 263-277.

Santos, F. R. D., Wiecheteck, G. K., Virgens Filho, J. S. D., Carranza, G. A., Chambers, T. L., & Fekih, A. (2022). Effects of a floating photovoltaic system on the water evaporation rate in the passaúna reservoir, Brazil. Energies, 15(17), 6274.

Schmidt, J. C., Yackulic, C. B., & Kuhn, E. (2023). The Colorado River water crisis: Its origin and the future. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 10(6), e1672.

Wescoat Jr, J. L., Headington, L., & Theobald, R. (2007). Water and poverty in the United States. Geoforum, 38(5), 801-814.

Yao, F., Livneh, B., Rajagopalan, B., Wang, J., Crétaux, J. F., Wada, Y., & Berge-Nguyen, M. (2023). Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage. Science, 380(6646), 743-749.

Youssef, Y. W., & Khodzinskaya, A. (2019). A review of evaporation reduction methods from water surfaces. In E3S web of conferences (Vol. 97, p. 05044). EDP Sciences.

The post How Cities Run Dry: Drivers Of Water Shortages And Policy Implications appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.

Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from AGCI Climate Science Fellow Dr. Tanya Petach. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online.  In…
The post How Cities Run Dry: Drivers Of Water Shortages And Policy Implications appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]

This post is part of an ongoing “What Is” series from Energy Innovation that answers some of today’s most pressing climate policy questions. The first in this series answered the question–What is Net-Zero?.

What Is The Inflation Reduction Act?

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the most important climate legislation in United States history. President Biden’s signature climate achievement is giving Americans the choice to stop burning fossil fuels, cutting energy bills, kick-starting a domestic manufacturing boom, cleaning the air and water, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs.

Clean energy incentives in the IRA empower the U.S. to transition off fossil fuels through $369 billion in new spending that bolsters clean energy projects, which Goldman Sachs estimates will catalyze $2.9 trillion cumulative investment by 2032. This all happens by investing in agriculture, clean energy, manufacturing, and forest management.

These investments are paying off. Initial modeling by Energy Innovation forecast IRA provisions could create more than a million net new jobs in 2030 and increase GDP by up to $200 billion in 2030. To date, clean energy investments catalyzed by the IRA have created more than 313,000 new jobs and more than $360 billion in project announcements, primarily in rural and low-income communities. Every $1 of federal funds invested in clean energy is stimulating $5-$6 in private investment, and analysis shows more than three-quarters of all factory and mining investments since the IRA was signed is flowing into Republican congressional districts.

The IRA has helped more than double America’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction pace compared to 2020, put the country within striking distance of its national climate goals, and fueled a homegrown clean energy boom. That means Americans can breathe cleaner air today, and will experience a safer climate future tomorrow.

What Benefits Has the Inflation Reduction Act Already Created?

No matter what city or state they live in, every American wants to breathe clean air, drink clean water, have affordable energy bills, and have a good job. The IRA enables the federal government to work closely with local, state, and tribal governments to help resolve community concerns like pollution, reliable energy access, clean air and water, and provide employment.

IRA provisions help unique community needs across the U.S. by empowering states to create bespoke solutions for their citizens. These include investments to add new clean energy generation, build clean manufacturing facilities, deploy affordable clean vehicles, strengthen America’s electric grid, and make our homes more resilient against extreme weather.

The IRA is also generating consumer benefits. Supporting a cleaner grid cuts energy costs: Families that take advantage of clean energy and electric vehicle tax credits will save more than $1,000 per year. Resources for the Future reports the IRA will save American households $170-$220 annually on electricity bills, and the U.S. Treasury reports it has already saved consumers $1 billion on electric vehicle sales.

This clean energy economic boom proves combating climate change is profitable. In the last two years private companies have invested hundreds of billions into U.S. clean energy and transportation projects. Most of these projects are located in five states – Michigan, Texas, Georgia, California, and South Carolina.

Actions That Have Maximized IRA Benefits

In the two years since it was signed, U.S. Treasury data shows implementing IRA provisions has significantly benefited local economies, spurring hundreds of millions in manufacturing investments:

81 percent of clean investment dollars since the IRA passed land in counties with below-average weekly wages.
70 percent of clean investment dollars since the IRA passed are in counties where a smaller share of the population is employed.
78 percent of clean investment dollars since the IRA passed flow to counties with below-average median household incomes.
86 percent of clean investment dollars since the IRA passed are landing in counties with below-average college graduation rates.
The share of clean investment dollars going to low-income counties rose from 68 percent to 78 percent when the IRA passed.
The IRA has provided more than $720 million in support for Tribal communities as they transition to renewable energy enabling them to become more climate resilient.

IRA provisions have jump-started clean transportation as America’s vehicle fleet transitions from expensive fossil fuels to affordable electric power.

Income-eligible consumers receive a credit of up to $7,500 to purchase new electric vehicles, including light- and medium-duty trucks along with personal vehicles, and new electric vehicles are now more affordable than conventional gas cars.
Electric vehicle sales have accelerated to more than 9 percent of total U.S. vehicle sales – up from roughly 2 percent in 2020.
Automakers and battery manufacturers have announced $88 billion in new domestic factories to produce electric vehicles and their supply-chain components, enhancing our global competitiveness by building a “Battery Belt” across the Midwest and Southeast U.S.

Rebates for buildings and homes are helping U.S. households lower energy costs, improve housing affordability, cut carbon emissions, and enhance social equity.

The IRA allocated $8.8 billion in federal funding for home and building rebate programs, targeting the one in seven U.S. families who live in energy poverty.
The Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates (HEAR) program dedicates $4.5 billion to help low- and middle-income households adopt energy-efficient equipment like heat pumps and water heaters, as well as energy efficiency measures like insulation and air sealing.
The Home Efficiency Rebates (HOMES) program provides $4.3 billion for energy-saving retrofits for single-family and multi-family households, with double the incentives for low- and middle-income homes or dwelling units in multifamily buildings.
The 45L Energy Efficient Home Credit offers incentives for builders to construct U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-certified Energy Star and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-certified Zero Energy Ready homes, while the HEAR and HOMES programs offers dedicated incentives for contractors that do the work, provided the installation is done in a disadvantaged community.

Electricity is having an infrastructure renaissance as much of the expected IRA impact is from the electricity sector, especially the tax credits.

Depending on the project, the IRA’s clean electricity production and investment tax credits could cover more than half the cost of clean power plants.
Since August 2022 when the IRA was signed, electric utilities have announced $488 billion to build 320 gigawatts of clean energy generation across the country, which will save their customers $4.5 billion in costs.
The new 45V clean hydrogen production tax credit provides a ten-year incentive program to create a domestic clean hydrogen industry that can provide clean fuel options to reduce emissions from manufacturing and transportation.
IRA funding, combined with Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding, represent the largest single investment into rural electrification since the 1930s.

U.S. industrial emissions are on track to be the country’s biggest polluter within a decade, but IRA provisions are powering a Made-in-America clean industrial renaissance.

IRA funding includes a nearly $6 billion dollar investment to transform America’s industrial sector through the U.S. DOE’s Industrial Demonstrations Program. This funding will commercialize new technologies meant to cut industrial emissions.
The IRA also allocates more than $4 billion dollars to green public procurement programs for low carbon materials like asphalt, concrete, cement and glass.
The new 45X advanced manufacturing production tax credit expands domestic production of specific components for wind, solar, and batteries. It also covers the production of thermal batteries, which can eliminate emissions from industrial process heating and cut its costs by two thirds.
The new 48C project credit directly incentivizes emissions reduction by offering a 30 percent investment tax credit for projects that retrofit an industrial facility with equipment that reduces emissions by at least 20 percent. It also offers a 30 percent investment tax credit to projects that retrofit, expand, or establish new industrial facilities to manufacture clean energy technologies or critical minerals.
The IRA granted additional loan authority to DOE’s Loan Programs Office, enabling financing for early deployments of innovative industrial technologies.

The post What Is The Inflation Reduction Act? appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the most important climate legislation in United States history giving Americans the choice to stop burning fossil fuels, cutting energy bills, kick-starting a domestic manufacturing boom, cleaning the air and water, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs.
The post What Is The Inflation Reduction Act? appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]

Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from Crux Alliances’s Sarah Spengeman, PhD. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online. 

Authors of a recent study on climate change communication tested the hypothesis that people will be more likely to act when they believe a particular place that they care about and is a part of their identity (such as the Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, pictured above) is threatened by climate change.

Nearly every country in the world has committed to the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, but global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) continue to rise. The past year has been the hottest on record, and severe heatwaves in South and Southeast Asia recently caused tens of thousands of people to suffer heat illnesses. As long as the world continues to rely on fossil fuels for energy, temperatures will continue to rise.

As global climate change accelerates, studies in the United States and Ecuador show people are experiencing a range of emotions in response to present impacts as well as to the future projections of loss. The biggest ever stand-alone survey of climate opinion, conducted by the United Nations and the University of Oxford, found more than half of people globally are more worried about climate this year than they were last year.

Scholars who study climate communications are trying to understand how best to motivate people to adopt more sustainable practices and to support government action to transition the economy to clean energy. Varying messages and modes of communication can either increase or decrease the likelihood that people will act. Motivating a larger segment of society to support climate solutions will then increase the likelihood of reducing climate catastrophe.

According to studies of human psychology, emotions such as fear, anger, hope, guilt, and sadness play an important role in shaping human behavior. Recently, a growing number of studies are examining which emotions are more likely to motivate climate policy support, and they’ve found that how we feel about climate does indeed shape whether and how we act. As rapid, large-scale action is desperately needed to halt the current crisis, this kind of research can help advocates hone their messages to reach more people.

Will different emotions produce differing policy support?

In a March 2024 research article entitled “Emotional Signatures of Climate Policy Support,” published in PLOS Climate, Teresa Myers (George Mason University), Connie Roser-Renouf (George Mason University), Anthony Leiserowitz (Yale University), and Edward Maibach (George Mason University) assess how the strength of specific emotions affects an individual’s support for different pro-climate actions. As the authors note, emotional reactions “prime” people to act because they help humans perceive how a situation is relevant to us The scholars are interested to know whether certain emotions might trigger support for particular types of policies. To find out, they examine the effect of four emotions (guilt, anger, hope, and sadness) and support for four different policy types.

The authors posit four hypotheses about how these emotions might function based on previous research findings. First, they hypothesize that because guilt arises when a person feels responsible for a negative outcome, people who feel guilty about climate change will more strongly support “personally costly policies” (e.g., a tax on gasoline). Second, they hypothesize that because anger arises when a person views someone else responsible for a negative situation, people who feel angry about climate change will more strongly support “regulatory policies” (e.g., rules to limit pollution from factories or power plants). Third, the authors hypothesize that because people feel hope when they believe a problem can be solved, people who feel hopeful about climate change will more strongly support “proactive policies” (e.g., new investments in solar). Fourth, the authors hypothesize that because sadness arises when people feel a sense of loss, people who feel sad about climate change will be more likely to support “climate justice policies” that provide restitution for losses.

In addition, the authors examine how fear affects support for each policy type, based on previous research findings that confirm fear can strengthen support for both regulatory and proactive policies.

To test their hypotheses, the researchers used data from a nationally representative, cross-sectional survey of U.S. adults designed to measure attitudes and beliefs about climate change, administered approximately every six months since 2010. Respondents were asked how strongly they felt each of the four emotions, and then presented with a range of policy-related questions to gauge support for each of the four policy types.

The authors found that feelings of guilt did indeed lead people to support personally costly actions as predicted, while feeling hopeful about climate change led people to support proactive climate policies. However, the analysis did not support their hypotheses about anger or sadness. Rather, people who reported feeling sad about climate change were more likely to support proactive policies (not climate justice), while people who felt angry were more likely to support proactive climate policies (not regulatory). The researchers also found that people who felt fear were more likely to support regulatory policies. The authors reason this may be because people view regulatory policies as a way to protect themselves from harm. Interestingly, people who felt fear, as compared to the other emotions, were more likely to support all four kinds of policies.

Can negative emotions produce positive outcomes?

Two other recent surveys further test the role of emotions in motivating pro-climate behavior—one focused on the emotions elicited by threats to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia, and the other on how fear of climate and air pollution dangers plays a role in electric vehicle (EV) adoption in growing cities in India. Both shed light on how “negative” emotions, such as distress and fear, can transfer into action to protect the climate.

In the first study, published recently in Environmental Science and Policy, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland researchers Yolanda L. Waters, Kerrie A. Wilson, and Angela J. Dean wanted to see if communicating about risks to natural wonders that are near and dear to people could inspire action to protect those places. Following “Protection Motivation Theory” (PMT), which suggests that people are motivated to act when they perceive a threat to themselves and also have the capability to mitigate it, the scholars hypothesize that people will be more likely to act when they believe a particular place that they care about and is a part of their identity (such as the GBR) is threatened by climate change.

To set the context for their study, the authors note that most Australians “feel a sense of identity and pride towards the GBR, regardless of physical proximity, and agree that ‘all Australians should be responsible’ for protecting it” (p. 3). At the same time, rising ocean temperatures due to climate change threaten the GBR. Half the reef is already dead or dying, and the IPCC projects 90 percent loss by 2030 without dramatic action to cut global GHG emissions. For these reasons, the GBR offers a “unique opportunity” to test the efficacy of climate change communication.

To test GBR-focused climate messages on climate engagement, the researchers first compared the effect of reef-focused to non-reef focused climate messages. Through an online survey, they first attempted to “activate” reef identify through messages such as “the Great Barrier Reef is a place that shapes who we are.” They then compared respondents’ self-identified likelihood to engage in personal energy reduction behaviors and public pro-climate behaviors. The researchers further assessed what specific emotions people experienced (negative: sadness, worry, or anxiety; positive: hopefulness, encouragement, and optimism) and how each emotion affected behavior.

The results confirmed that GBR- focused climate messages increase pro-climate personal behaviors such as personal energy usage—even among political conservatives. However, the GBR messages did not influence support for civic action such as advocating to elected officials. Messages that emphasized “collective efficacy”—e.g., “climate can be solved through group action”—did increase the likelihood that a person would support climate policies. Furthermore, this increased support for climate policies was only associated with negative emotions and not positive ones.

Another study that examines the role of emotions on pro-climate behavior was recently published in Cleaner and Responsible Consumption, authored by Chayasmita Deka (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Indian Institute of Technology), Mrinal Kanti Dutta (Indian Institute of Technology), Masoud Yazdanpanah (University of Florida and University of Khuzestan), and Nadejda Komendantova (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis). The research tested the effect of fear on personal climate action—defined, in this case, as a person’s intention to purchase an EV in three rapidly urbanizing cities in the Indian state of Assam.

As the researchers point out, previous studies have found that fear of environmental risks can motivate EV adoption, but research has only been conducted in Western countries and not in the “Global South.” With a majority of young people in Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Nigeria recorded as worried about climate change, the authors seek to close the gap in geographic research coverage. Studies of residents in emerging cities is particularly opportune, as such locales do not yet have high-quality, comprehensive transportation infrastructure. Additionally, the climate threat in India is severe. India is increasingly experiencing more frequent weather extremes as a result of climate change, including worsening heat waves, droughts, and floods. Vehicle emissions have also significantly contributed to major air pollution problems in India’s cities. Even so, demand for personal internal combustion vehicles (ICE) in India only continues to grow.

As in the study of the effect of the GBR on action, the researchers use PMT to test whether people’s perception of the threat of climate and air pollution, alongside  a self-perceived ability to respond to the threat, affects their intention to purchase an electric vehicle.

In this study, the authors surveyed 992 middle-class individuals between the age of 18 and 60 across three cities. The results found that general awareness of the threat of air pollution and climate change had only a small effect on a person’s intention to buy an EV. Respondents who felt personally threatened by climate change impacts were three times more likely to indicate an intention to purchase an EV than respondents who were merely aware of the climate threat.

Additionally, greater understanding of the role an EV plays in improving air quality magnified the effect on purchase intentions—regardless of the respondent’s perception of the personal cost to themself. The authors note that studies of Western consumers found that threat assessment was more important in determining behavior, while in the case of India, knowledge of the efficacy of an EV as an air pollution and climate solution was more influential. As the authors explain, this means that not all messages encouraging pro-environmental behavior will be effective across differing cultural and economic contexts.

Messaging for action

To halt accelerating climate change, more people must be concerned enough that they are prompted to act. The good news is that research on emotions and pro-climate behavior demonstrates that communicators can effectively tailor messaging to motivate people to support personal and public solutions. The first study in PLOS Climate implies that communicators advocating for a particular policy can develop messages to elicit the emotion most likely to produce greater support for that policy type. However, the study only measured strength of emotions and the associated support for policy; it did not test specific messages to see what emotions those messages could elicit. For this reason, advocates should test messages among target audiences before launching a campaign.

Notably, this study found that fear was the emotion most closely associated with support for all policy types. The two narrower studies also found negative emotions to play an important role in motivating behavior. But a few important conditions are worth emphasizing. In the GBR study, negative emotions only increased support for policy action when they were accompanied by messages about the potential to prevent harm to the reef through collective action. This could be because respondents viewed policy change as possible only when many people are civically engaged. In the study of EV adoption in India, fear of harm was also a significant motivator. However, a general awareness of the threat was not sufficient. Respondents had to feel more personally connected to impacts and also believe the proposed action would be effective in mitigating risks.

The lesson for communicators is that communicating about the dire nature of our current climate reality and the immense danger we all face if we do not act now can be effective in spurring action. However, communicators should be specific about the unique threats faced by different communities. For example, those aiming to reach coastal communities may want to emphasize health risks associated with sea level rise, while communicators in farming regions may want to emphasize threats to crops and livelihoods, and regional pests. The more one can tailor the message, the better. Additionally, as the studies imply, messages about climate threats should be paired with concrete guidance for how acting with others can prevent great harm. Though the threat is great, solving this existential climate crisis is entirely possible, and informed communications is critical to motivating action.

Featured Research

Deka, C., Dutta, M.K., Yazdanpanah, M. and Komendantova, N., 2024. When ‘fear factors’ motivate people to adopt electric vehicles in India: An empirical investigation of the protection motivation theory. Cleaner and Responsible Consumption, 13, p.100191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clrc.2024.100191

Myers, T.A., Roser-Renouf, C., Leiserowitz, A. and Maibach, E., 2024. Emotional signatures of climate policy support. PLOS Climate, 3(3), p.e0000381. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000381

Waters, Y.L., Wilson, K.A. and Dean, A.J., 2024. The role of iconic places, collective efficacy, and negative emotions in climate change communication. Environmental Science & Policy, 151, p.103635.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2023.103635

The post Climate Crisis and Emotional Responses: Insights for Effective Communication appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.

Energy Innovation partners with the independent nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) to provide climate and energy research updates. The research synopsis below comes from Crux Alliances’s Sarah Spengeman, PhD. A full list of AGCI’s updates is available online.  Authors of a…
The post Climate Crisis and Emotional Responses: Insights for Effective Communication appeared first on Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology.[#item_full_content]