Responsibility for Historic Carbon Emissions and Public Support for Climate Aid

Responsibility for Historic Carbon Emissions and Public Support for Climate Aid | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Responsibility for Historic Carbon Emissions and Public Support for Climate Aid Volha Charnysh, Jared Kalow, Evan Lieberman, Erin Walk This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4281604/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Published Journal Publication published 11 Dec, 2024 Read the published version in Climatic Change → Version 1 posted 4 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Over the past several years, international climate negotiations have concluded that the wealthiest countries should make significant financial contributions towards solutions to the climate crisis owing to their disproportionate responsibility for global warming. However, in democratic countries such as the United States, public opinion is divided about whether to use taxpayer money in this manner. We conducted a pre-registered survey from a national online pool (N = 5,065) with a built-in experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of different motivational frames associated with historic carbon emissions for increasing support for climate aid. We find that specific attribution claims that reflect a climate justice perspective do boost support for more generous climate aid, but their effects are mostly limited to Democrats. We also find that global solidarity frames had no effect on support for climate aid. Such results have important implications for climate advocacy and our understanding of climate-related attitudes. climate change responsibility foreign aid public opinion United States climate attitudes Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 1 Introduction Representatives from various developing countries have argued that because countries in the Global North developed through industrialization processes that caused global warming, those governments should finance the costs of adaptation for the poorer countries of the Global South (Hockenos, 2022). At the recent COP28 meetings held in Dubai, the leaders of several wealthy countries made pledges for financial contributions in tacit acceptance of such appeals. However, concrete action on such commitments may depend on public support. Will their citizens embrace this “climate justice”- based justification for climate aid to the developing world? Such a question is particularly salient in the United States, given its relative wealth, out-sized contribution to emissions, and increasing polarization over the issues of climate change and foreign aid (Ansah et al, 2023). In this article, we report the findings of an original national survey from an online pool, in which we embedded an experiment that examines the causal effects of alternative messages on American citizens. There is good reason to believe that reminding citizens of their country’s historic emissions might be motivating. In other contexts, researchers have shown that believing that one’s group is responsible for the harm done to others can produce collective guilt and increase support for corrective measures (Wohl et al, 2006). While most studies on collective guilt have focused on intergroup conflict, several recent studies applied this framework to climate change. Ferguson and Branscombe (2010)find that Americans can feel collective guilt for the U.S. contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and that collective guilt increases their willingness to conserve energy and pay green taxes. Other studies have yielded important preliminary evidence that such a “historic responsibility” principle has substantial motivating effects. For example, Gampfer (2014) studied the resonance of fairness principles by having pairs of respondents, a proposer and a responder, decide how to share climate mitigation costs in an ultimatum game. They experimentally assigned the ability to pay, vulnerability, and historical emissions to each player in order to understand the extent to which various principles for allocating the cost of climate change mitigation resonate with citizens. The study found that contributions to climate risk mitigation increased with historical emissions and ability to pay. Anderson et al (2017) also used an ultimatum game in an online environment, and found that individuals responded more generously to proposals to pay when their historic emissions were relatively higher. Ponte et al (2023) added further nuance to this line of research by attempting to model the historic development of industrial development and emissions over generations in yet another experimental game. They assigned players to identities of developed or developing countries and to a first or second generation. In the game, the first generation generates wealth, but does so with a large carbon footprint. They found that second-generation players whose predecessor was responsible for the high carbon output were willing to pay more for climate mitigation, relative to players with low-carbon predecessor. Thus, a substantial body of careful experimental research concludes that the historic responsibility principle should be a motivating factor for generating public support. However, an important question not asked in these studies – but one that is central for politics in the critical American case – is the potentially heterogeneous effects of appealing to such a principle in a polarized political environment. In fact, the aforementioned studies tend to be based on samples that do not allow for such an investigation. For example, Gampfer (2014) largely recruit university students from Zurich, Switzerland; Anderson et al (2017) recruit 414 American respondents from a Qualtrics panel, in which just 17.6% of those reporting their political ideology described themselves as being on the right or “mostly right” (their appendix). In their regression estimates, they do not find a significant effect for the role of politics, let alone estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. Finally Ponte et al (2023) did not measure political attachments, and the mean and maximum age of participants in their experiment was 22.3 and 34 years, respectively. In short, none of these studies was particularly representative of the current American context. Our study seeks to contribute to this body of research on the effects of messaging about historic emissions on climate aid generosity by filling this important gap with a large survey of Americans (N = 5,065), representative on gender, geography, and age. 1 While our treatment is “thinner,” in the sense that exposure to information about emissions is relatively fleeting and does not take the form of strategic play, it is arguably more realistic. Virtually no citizens actually engage in strategic international negotiations, but most are routinely exposed to information about climate change in various media outlets, in a manner that is akin to our study’s treatment. Importantly, we test the impact of simple, realistic messages that leverage information about historic emissions on attitudes toward climate aid among distinct segments of the American population, which has been highly polarized in both climate attitudes as well as support for foreign aid (Ansah et al, 2023). In our study, we consider two variants of a historic emissions message. The first, which we call a “climate justice” frame, follows closely from the extant literature in highlighting the uneven legacy of emissions from a few countries that has helped to propel their industrialization, and the implication that such countries (especially the United States) have a special responsibility to contribute more to combating the effects of climate change. We also consider an alternative motivational frame that reflects a shared or “solidaristic” approach to the climate crisis. We note that even some leaders from the Global South have endorsed solidaristic framing over emphasizing differential responsibility for climate change. For example, at the 2023 Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in France, Kenya’s President, William Ruto, criticized the narratives that portray Africans as “victims,” and emphasized the need to shift the narrative from one that focused on blame to one that emphasized shared responsibility (Sheldrick, 2023). From such a perspective, the disproportionate financial burden of the richest countries might be attributable simply to their relative size and wealth, but with the expectation that everyone will “pay their fair share.” Moreover, an experimental study demonstrates that highlighting collective responsibility increases monetary donations to climate change advocacy and intent to reduce carbon emissions, relative to messages that emphasize personal responsibility (Obradovich and Guenther, 2016). While distinct from the alternatives being tested here, our study raises the question of whether a shared responsibility might be more effective than one that emphasizes differentiated responsibility from the historical record. In the remainder of this article, we detail the findings of a study we designed and implemented to test the relative impact of the two frames of historic emissions – climate justice and solidarity – on Americans willingness to use taxpayer money for climate-related foreign aid. We investigate how such impact might vary across various segments of society, especially those segments well understood to have different views about the climate crisis. 2 We find modest positive effects for a climate justice frame, but only among Democrats. 2 Methods In order to learn about attitudes towards climate-related foreign aid, and the specific impact of alternative motivational frames, we fielded a national online survey of 5065 American respondents on Prolific, a platform for online subject recruitment designed for researchers. 3 Researchers have concluded that respondents on Prolific were “more likely to pass various attention checks, provide meaningful answers, follow instructions, remember previously presented information, have a unique IP address and geolocation, and work slowly enough to be able to read all the items” when compared to other online platforms as well as university undergraduates (Douglas et al, 2023). Individuals recruited into the online panel were told they would participate in an approximately 10-minute survey, and would be asked about their views about a number of challenges facing the US government. After providing consent and confirmation that they were 18 and older, they began the questionnaire. The study contained a number of attention checks, and we randomized the order of some questions in order to mitigate against priming effects. We asked a battery of demographic questions, including about race, income, gender, and partisan attachment. 4 The experimental intervention consisted of three conditions. In the control condition, we introduced the idea that Americans might use taxpayer money for climate-related foreign aid using the following text: Some say that Americans should contribute to helping poor countries adapt to the changing climate. In the two treatment conditions, we supplemented this text with additional information, designed to deliver one of two frames. In the climate justice frame, respondents were shown an image of cumulative CO2 emissions over-time, which highlights that the United States has emitted exponentially more than a few key middle-income countries and the low-income countries in total, along with text that refers to the United States as “the biggest polluter in history.” In the solidarity frame, respondents were also shown a figure depicting historic carbon emissions. However, in this figure, the data were aggregated for the entire world. Moreover, the text highlighted that, “we are all in this together. We must act in solidarity as we all face the current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as shown in the figure.” The overall look and text length of these treatments were similar (see Fig. 1 ). Following the presentation of the assigned motivational frame, we measured respondents’ support for climate-related foreign aid with two questions that we pre-registered to combine into a single index (responses to the questions are correlated at R = .68, p < . 001). First, respondents were asked, “Do you believe that the United States should contribute to helping poor countries adapt to the changing climate?” and offered a 5-point scale ranging from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. (All responses were subsequently recoded on a 0–1 scale, where 0 and 1 represented the realized minimum and maximum pro-climate responses, and fractions were assigned in equal proportions based on the number of options.) Second, respondents were asked a question that detailed specific possibilities for U.S. government aid with a vignette that reflected actual news / policy developments: On April 20, 2023, the President pledged $1 billion per year to a global Climate Fund to help the poorer countries suffering most from climate change. The President had previously pledged $11.4 billion per year in climate aid to poorer countries. Some highlight that this is much less than what was originally pledged; while others say that the U.S. should not be providing this aid at all. What do you think the U.S. government should provide? For that question, respondents were offered 6 response options, anchored at the extremes of, “No aid,” and “More than $ 15bn.” 5 In addition, as a supplementary question about private support, we asked respondents about their propensity to make personal climate-related donations: Imagine that you received $100 today. You have the option to donate this money to a leading charity fighting climate change in poor countries. About how much would you personally donate to counter the effects of climate change in the developing world? [Response options from $0 to $100 in increments of $10.] We also asked a series of questions about possible hypothesized mechanisms and conditioning variables (see details in the appendix). 3 Findings First, we detail our observational (non-experimental) analyses, both as a strategy for validating our approach – confirming partisan differences in attitudes – and in turn, to highlight the critical need to distinguish experimental effects across audiences. Second, we report on our experimental findings for the overall sample, including heterogeneous treatment effects across audiences. In Figs. 2 , 3 , and 4 , we report the distribution of responses to our three outcome variables by party. The tables corresponding to these figures are available in Appendix A.1. Consistent with conventional wisdom and the findings reported by Ansah et al (2023), partisan differences are extremely large and in the expected direction, with much higher levels of generosity among Democrats. More than five times as many Democrats strongly agreed that the US should provide climate aid to poor counties as Republicans, and over 80% of Democrats agreed, compared with just under 33% of Republicans. On the question about the preferred size of the US contribution to a Global Climate Fund, over 38% of Republicans said there should be no aid at all compared with just 4% of Democrats. By contrast, the modal response in the Democratic sample (29.4%) was to support the original, much larger climate aid proposal. Even in terms of hypothetical personal donations, just under 50% of Republicans said they would contribute $ 0, while less than 19% of Democrats selected that option. In Fig. 5 , we report estimates of the effect of the climate justice frame relative to the appeal only /control frame and a solidarity frame on our primary outcome, the index of support for climate-related foreign aid. 6 The points indicate point estimates and lines indicate 95% confidence intervals for each comparison for the indicated samples; the asterisk indicates estimates from the models with a full set of covariates. The first four plots demonstrate that the climate justice frame indeed has a positive Average Treatment Effect (ATE) on the support for climate aid index – both relative to the solidarity frame and the control condition (appeal only). In the 5th to 8th plots, we plot estimates of treatment effects separately for supporters of the two major political parties. Among Democrats, we find that the effects are somewhat stronger and more precisely estimated as compared with the full sample, while among Republicans, we find estimated effects that are closer to and not statistically distinguishable from zero. In Fig. 6 , we repeat these analyses for our secondary outcome with respect to private donations, and while that outcome is relatively strongly correlated with our primary outcome ( R = .42), and many of the same control variables are associated with that outcome in a similar manner as for our primary outcome, we observe no treatment effects for our alternative frames. The regression table for these outcomes is available in Appendix Table A.3. Finally, we consider some possible mechanisms in terms of how the climate justice framing, in particular, may have affected attitudes and orientations that led us to observe treatment effects in the Democratic sub-sample. In Fig. 7 , we present estimates of our framing treatments on responses to four questions that are themselves all correlated with our support for climate aid index, and do so separately for supporters of the Democratic and Republican parties. Our basis of comparison is the Global Solidarity treatment, and comparing the Climate Justice treatment to the Appeal Only condition does not yield significant results. We consider the first two questions regarding guilt and social proximity separately and condense the two climate related questions into a single index of global warming concern. The full table of these results is in appendix A.4. We only recover statistically meaningful results for the question about American’s perceived similarity to people in poor countries, and only among Democrats. We find, in fact, that the climate justice frame decreased agreement with the statement that “[p]eople in poor countries and Americans are more similar than different.” Interestingly, this is exactly the concern expressed by the Kenyan president with respect to this framing. On the other hand, it is plausibly a sense of difference – including differential responsibility – that provided a sufficiently compelling message to motivate (Democrats) to be more generous in their support for climate-related foreign aid. 4 Discussion Our survey confirms that attitudes about climate-related foreign aid are extremely polarized along partisan lines in the United States. No individual factor comes close to being as important as a predictor for general support for aid, for the size of specific proposals for aid, or for willingness to contribute privately as one’s self-described party attachment. Such findings stand up in models that include a wide range of covariates. In this context, we have investigated the effects of framing foreign aid appeals in terms of historic carbon emissions, varying the nature of responsibility as either disproportionately on the shoulder of the United States or shared by “everyone.” We find moderate positive effects overall for the Climate Justice frame relative to both the control condition and the Solidarity frame. These appear to be driven almost entirely by Democrats. Although that frame does lead Democrats to feel a decreased sense of shared perspective with people from the Global South relative to those in the control and solidarity conditions, the frame may be contributing to a sense of differential responsibility that leads to generosity. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the strong associations between party and other individual-level characteristics with virtually all climate-related attitudes, the magnitude of the estimated framing effects is not very large. For example the estimated difference between Republicans and Democrats is thirteen times as large as the estimated effect of the climate justice treatment relative to our control condition of Appeal Only. And yet, the climate justice framing effect is still about as large as the estimated average difference between those reporting having experienced 1 or 2 days of extreme heat in the past 12 months compared with those who experienced zero days of such heat. Our study contributes to the body of evidence that concludes that communicating the historic responsibility of the largest carbon emitters is a useful motivation for some to feel a greater sense of generosity towards the common good. We contribute to the external validity of such findings, but also highlight that this framing does not seem to move the crucial Republican subset of the population. As voters, such citizens tend to support political leaders who either deny climate change altogether or object to climate-related foreign aid. Thus, while such messages may “do no harm,” they also may not be nearly enough to do much good in a polarized political environment. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that Republicans are a monolithic group when it comes to climate attitudes. We find a great deal of variation among Republican party-identifiers and -leaners in responses to questions about worries about global warming and support for climate aid, with younger citizens being much more likely to express pro-climate concerns. Future research should consider the effects of messaging not just across parties, but especially among Republicans based on likely variation in receptivity to motivational appeals. Declarations Supplementary information. We include an appendix (below) intended for more detailed consideration of our results. Acknowledgements. (To be added) Funding: This study was funded by the Global Diversity Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Conflict of interest/Competing interests: No conflict of interests. Ethics approval and consent to participate: On March 27, 2023, the protocol E-4863, American Attitudes Towards Climate-Related Foreign Aid, was determined by the MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) to be exempt from full human subjects review because the study involved only a benign behavioral intervention, and involved a low-risk survey. Consent for publication: Yes Data and code availability: All data and code will be made available at the Harvard Dataverse. Footnotes As we detail in the appendix, our sample is disproportionately Democratic, but our Republican sample is large enough with which to conduct meaningful analyses of heterogeneous effect sizes. For example, in our pre-registered analysis plan, we predicted that the climate justice frame would have a greater positive impact on Democrats; and the solidarity frame would have a greater positive impact on Republicans. Note that in our pre-analysis plan, we indicated that we would analyze the data for this study for Whites only, but that sub-setting was intended only for a separate study focused on race attitudes. In this article, we report findings for the full sample, but for the sake of transparency, we report White only estimates of our main findings in the appendix. Ethics approval details anonymized for peer review. Although the survey contained two experimental interventions in the form of randomized presentation of images and text, we consider only the second experiment here. The first experiment investigated the role of race and nationality in support for climate aid for poor communities by randomizing the identity (Black or White) and location (United States or Brazil) of a family displaced by climate-related flooding. We include controls in our analyses for treatment assignment in the first study. Other options included, “Between $ 0.5bn and $ 1.5bn(the recent proposal);” “Between $ 2bn and $ 5bn;” “Between $ 6bn and $ 10bn;” “Between $ 11bn and $ 15bn (the original proposal).” We present full regression estimates in Appendix Table A.2 Supplementary Files Messagingappendixanon.pdf Cite Share Download PDF Status: Published Journal Publication published 11 Dec, 2024 Read the published version in Climatic Change → Version 1 posted Reviewers agreed at journal 28 May, 2024 Reviewers invited by journal 23 May, 2024 Editor assigned by journal 22 Apr, 2024 First submitted to journal 18 Apr, 2024 You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. 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At the recent COP28 meetings held in Dubai, the leaders of several wealthy countries made pledges for financial contributions in tacit acceptance of such appeals. However, concrete action on such commitments may depend on public support. Will their citizens embrace this \u0026ldquo;climate justice\u0026rdquo;- based justification for climate aid to the developing world? Such a question is particularly salient in the United States, given its relative wealth, out-sized contribution to emissions, and increasing polarization over the issues of climate change and foreign aid (Ansah et al, 2023).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn this article, we report the findings of an original national survey from an online pool, in which we embedded an experiment that examines the causal effects of alternative messages on American citizens. There is good reason to believe that reminding citizens of their country\u0026rsquo;s historic emissions might be motivating. In other contexts, researchers have shown that believing that one\u0026rsquo;s group is responsible for the harm done to others can produce collective guilt and increase support for corrective measures (Wohl et al, 2006). While most studies on collective guilt have focused on intergroup conflict, several recent studies applied this framework to climate change. Ferguson and Branscombe (2010)find that Americans can feel collective guilt for the U.S. contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and that collective guilt increases their willingness to conserve energy and pay green taxes.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOther studies have yielded important preliminary evidence that such a \u0026ldquo;historic responsibility\u0026rdquo; principle has substantial motivating effects. For example, Gampfer (2014) studied the resonance of fairness principles by having pairs of respondents, a proposer and a responder, decide how to share climate mitigation costs in an ultimatum game. They experimentally assigned the ability to pay, vulnerability, and historical emissions to each player in order to understand the extent to which various principles for allocating the cost of climate change mitigation resonate with citizens. The study found that contributions to climate risk mitigation increased with historical emissions and ability to pay. Anderson et al (2017) also used an ultimatum game in an online environment, and found that individuals responded more generously to proposals to pay when their historic emissions were relatively higher. Ponte et al (2023) added further nuance to this line of research by attempting to model the historic development of industrial development and emissions over generations in yet another experimental game. They assigned players to identities of developed or developing countries and to a first or second generation. In the game, the first generation generates wealth, but does so with a large carbon footprint. They found that second-generation players whose predecessor was responsible for the high carbon output were willing to pay more for climate mitigation, relative to players with low-carbon predecessor.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThus, a substantial body of careful experimental research concludes that the historic responsibility principle should be a motivating factor for generating public support. However, an important question not asked in these studies \u0026ndash; but one that is central for politics in the critical American case \u0026ndash; is the potentially heterogeneous effects of appealing to such a principle in a polarized political environment. In fact, the aforementioned studies tend to be based on samples that do not allow for such an investigation. For example, Gampfer (2014) largely recruit university students from Zurich, Switzerland; Anderson et al (2017) recruit 414 American respondents from a Qualtrics panel, in which just 17.6% of those reporting their political ideology described themselves as being on the right or \u0026ldquo;mostly right\u0026rdquo; (their appendix). In their regression estimates, they do not find a significant effect for the role of politics, let alone estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. Finally Ponte et al (2023) did not measure political attachments, and the mean and maximum age of participants in their experiment was 22.3 and 34 years, respectively. In short, none of these studies was particularly representative of the current American context.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOur study seeks to contribute to this body of research on the effects of messaging about historic emissions on climate aid generosity by filling this important gap with a large survey of Americans (N\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5,065), representative on gender, geography, and age.\u003ca class=\"FNLink\" href=\"#Fn1\" id=\"#FNLinkFn1\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e While our treatment is \u0026ldquo;thinner,\u0026rdquo; in the sense that exposure to information about emissions is relatively fleeting and does not take the form of strategic play, it is arguably more realistic. Virtually no citizens actually engage in strategic international negotiations, but most are routinely exposed to information about climate change in various media outlets, in a manner that is akin to our study\u0026rsquo;s treatment. Importantly, we test the impact of simple, realistic messages that leverage information about historic emissions on attitudes toward climate aid among distinct segments of the American population, which has been highly polarized in both climate attitudes as well as support for foreign aid (Ansah et al, 2023).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn our study, we consider two variants of a historic emissions message. The first, which we call a \u0026ldquo;climate justice\u0026rdquo; frame, follows closely from the extant literature in highlighting the uneven legacy of emissions from a few countries that has helped to propel their industrialization, and the implication that such countries (especially the United States) have a special responsibility to contribute more to combating the effects of climate change.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWe also consider an alternative motivational frame that reflects a shared or \u0026ldquo;solidaristic\u0026rdquo; approach to the climate crisis. We note that even some leaders from the Global South have endorsed solidaristic framing over emphasizing differential responsibility for climate change. For example, at the 2023 Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in France, Kenya\u0026rsquo;s President, William Ruto, criticized the narratives that portray Africans as \u0026ldquo;victims,\u0026rdquo; and emphasized the need to shift the narrative from one that focused on blame to one that emphasized shared responsibility (Sheldrick, 2023). From such a perspective, the disproportionate financial burden of the richest countries might be attributable simply to their relative size and wealth, but with the expectation that everyone will \u0026ldquo;pay their fair share.\u0026rdquo; Moreover, an experimental study demonstrates that highlighting \u003cem\u003ecollective\u003c/em\u003e responsibility increases monetary donations to climate change advocacy and intent to reduce carbon emissions, relative to messages that emphasize personal responsibility (Obradovich and Guenther, 2016). While distinct from the alternatives being tested here, our study raises the question of whether a \u003cem\u003eshared responsibility\u003c/em\u003e might be more effective than one that emphasizes \u003cem\u003edifferentiated\u003c/em\u003e responsibility from the historical record.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn the remainder of this article, we detail the findings of a study we designed and implemented to test the relative impact of the two frames of historic emissions \u0026ndash; \u003cem\u003eclimate justice\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003esolidarity\u003c/em\u003e \u0026ndash; on Americans willingness to use taxpayer money for climate-related foreign aid. We investigate how such impact might vary across various segments of society, especially those segments well understood to have different views about the climate crisis.\u003ca class=\"FNLink\" href=\"#Fn2\" id=\"#FNLinkFn2\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e We find modest positive effects for a climate justice frame, but only among Democrats.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"2 Methods","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn order to learn about attitudes towards climate-related foreign aid, and the specific impact of alternative motivational frames, we fielded a national online survey of 5065 American respondents on Prolific, a platform for online subject recruitment designed for researchers.\u003ca class=\"FNLink\" href=\"#Fn3\" id=\"#FNLinkFn3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e Researchers have concluded that respondents on Prolific were \u0026ldquo;more likely to pass various attention checks, provide meaningful answers, follow instructions, remember previously presented information, have a unique IP address and geolocation, and work slowly enough to be able to read all the items\u0026rdquo; when compared to other online platforms as well as university undergraduates (Douglas et al, 2023).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIndividuals recruited into the online panel were told they would participate in an approximately 10-minute survey, and would be asked about their views about a number of challenges facing the US government. After providing consent and confirmation that they were 18 and older, they began the questionnaire.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe study contained a number of attention checks, and we randomized the order of some questions in order to mitigate against priming effects. We asked a battery of demographic questions, including about race, income, gender, and partisan attachment.\u003ca class=\"FNLink\" href=\"#Fn4\" id=\"#FNLinkFn4\"\u003e4\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe experimental intervention consisted of three conditions. In the control condition, we introduced the idea that Americans might use taxpayer money for\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eclimate-related foreign aid using the following text:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eSome say that Americans should contribute to helping poor countries adapt to the changing climate.\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn the two treatment conditions, we supplemented this text with additional information, designed to deliver one of two frames. In the \u003cem\u003eclimate justice\u003c/em\u003e frame, respondents were shown an image of cumulative CO2 emissions over-time, which highlights that the United States has emitted exponentially more than a few key middle-income countries and the low-income countries in total, along with text that refers to the United States as \u0026ldquo;the biggest polluter in history.\u0026rdquo; In the \u003cem\u003esolidarity\u003c/em\u003e frame, respondents were also shown a figure depicting historic carbon emissions. However, in this figure, the data were aggregated for the entire world. Moreover, the text highlighted that, \u0026ldquo;we are all in this together. We must act in solidarity as we all face the current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as shown in the figure.\u0026rdquo; The overall look and text length of these treatments were similar (see Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFollowing the presentation of the assigned motivational frame, we measured respondents\u0026rsquo; support for climate-related foreign aid with two questions that we pre-registered to combine into a single index (responses to the questions are correlated at \u003cem\u003eR\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.68, \u003cem\u003ep\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.\u003c/em\u003e001).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFirst, respondents were asked, \u0026ldquo;Do you believe that the United States should contribute to helping poor countries adapt to the changing climate?\u0026rdquo; and offered a 5-point scale ranging from Strongly agree to Strongly disagree. (All responses were subsequently recoded on a 0\u0026ndash;1 scale, where 0 and 1 represented the realized minimum and maximum pro-climate responses, and fractions were assigned in equal proportions based on the number of options.)\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSecond, respondents were asked a question that detailed specific possibilities for U.S. government aid with a vignette that reflected actual news / policy developments:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eOn April 20, 2023, the President pledged $1\u0026nbsp;billion per year to a global Climate Fund to help the poorer countries suffering most from climate change. The President had previously pledged $11.4\u0026nbsp;billion per year in climate aid to poorer countries.\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eSome highlight that this is much less than what was originally pledged; while others say that the U.S. should not be providing this aid at all. What do you think the U.S. government should provide?\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFor that question, respondents were offered 6 response options, anchored at the extremes of, \u0026ldquo;No aid,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;More than \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e15bn.\u0026rdquo;\u003ca class=\"FNLink\" href=\"#Fn5\" id=\"#FNLinkFn5\"\u003e5\u003c/a\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn addition, as a supplementary question about private support, we asked respondents about their propensity to make personal climate-related donations:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eImagine that you received $100 today. You have the option to donate this money to a leading charity fighting climate change in poor countries. About how much would you personally donate to counter the effects of climate change in the developing world? [Response options from $0 to $100 in increments of $10.]\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWe also asked a series of questions about possible hypothesized mechanisms and conditioning variables (see details in the appendix).\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"3 Findings","content":"\u003cp\u003eFirst, we detail our observational (non-experimental) analyses, both as a strategy for validating our approach \u0026ndash; confirming partisan differences in attitudes \u0026ndash; and in turn, to highlight the critical need to distinguish experimental effects across audiences. Second, we report on our experimental findings for the overall sample, including heterogeneous treatment effects across audiences.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn Figs.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan refid=\"Fig3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e, and \u003cspan refid=\"Fig4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e, we report the distribution of responses to our three outcome variables by party. The tables corresponding to these figures are available in Appendix A.1. Consistent with conventional wisdom and the findings reported by Ansah et al (2023), partisan differences are extremely large and in the expected direction, with much higher levels of generosity among Democrats. More than five times as many Democrats strongly agreed that the US should provide climate aid to poor counties as Republicans, and over 80% of Democrats agreed, compared with just under 33% of Republicans.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOn the question about the preferred size of the US contribution to a Global Climate Fund, over 38% of Republicans said there should be no aid at all compared with just 4% of Democrats. By contrast, the modal response in the Democratic sample (29.4%) was to support the original, much larger climate aid proposal. Even in terms of hypothetical personal donations, just under 50% of Republicans said they would contribute \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e0, while less than 19% of Democrats selected that option.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig5\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e, we report estimates of the effect of the \u003cem\u003eclimate justice\u003c/em\u003e frame relative to the \u003cem\u003eappeal only\u003c/em\u003e/control frame and a \u003cem\u003esolidarity\u003c/em\u003e frame on our primary outcome, the index of support for climate-related foreign aid.\u003ca class=\"FNLink\" href=\"#Fn6\" id=\"#FNLinkFn6\"\u003e6\u003c/a\u003e The points indicate point estimates and lines indicate 95% confidence intervals for each comparison for the indicated samples; the asterisk indicates estimates from the models with a full set of covariates. The first four plots demonstrate that the climate justice frame indeed has a positive Average Treatment Effect (ATE) on the support for climate aid index \u0026ndash; both relative to the solidarity frame and the control condition (appeal only).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn the 5th to 8th plots, we plot estimates of treatment effects separately for supporters of the two major political parties. Among Democrats, we find that the effects are somewhat stronger and more precisely estimated as compared with the full sample, while among Republicans, we find estimated effects that are closer to and not statistically distinguishable from zero.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig6\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e6\u003c/span\u003e, we repeat these analyses for our secondary outcome with respect to private donations, and while that outcome is relatively strongly correlated with our primary outcome (\u003cem\u003eR\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.42), and many of the same control variables are associated with that outcome in a similar manner as for our primary outcome, we observe no treatment effects for our alternative frames. The regression table for these outcomes is available in Appendix Table A.3.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFinally, we consider some possible mechanisms in terms of how the climate justice framing, in particular, may have affected attitudes and orientations that led us to observe treatment effects in the Democratic sub-sample. In Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig7\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e7\u003c/span\u003e, we present estimates of our framing treatments on responses to four questions that are themselves all correlated with our support for climate aid index, and do so separately for supporters of the Democratic and Republican parties. Our basis of comparison is the Global Solidarity treatment, and comparing the Climate Justice treatment to the Appeal Only condition does not yield significant results. We consider the first two questions regarding guilt and social proximity separately and condense the two climate related questions into a single index of global warming concern. The full table of these results is in appendix A.4.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWe only recover statistically meaningful results for the question about American\u0026rsquo;s perceived similarity to people in poor countries, and only among Democrats. We find, in fact, that the climate justice frame \u003cem\u003edecreased\u003c/em\u003e agreement with the statement that \u0026ldquo;[p]eople in poor countries and Americans are more similar than different.\u0026rdquo; Interestingly, this is exactly the concern expressed by the Kenyan president with respect to this framing. On the other hand, it is plausibly a sense of difference \u0026ndash; including differential responsibility \u0026ndash; that provided a sufficiently compelling message to motivate (Democrats) to be more generous in their support for climate-related foreign aid.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"4 Discussion","content":"\u003cp\u003eOur survey confirms that attitudes about climate-related foreign aid are extremely polarized along partisan lines in the United States. No individual factor comes close to being as important as a predictor for general support for aid, for the size of specific proposals for aid, or for willingness to contribute privately as one\u0026rsquo;s self-described party attachment. Such findings stand up in models that include a wide range of covariates.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn this context, we have investigated the effects of framing foreign aid appeals in terms of historic carbon emissions, varying the nature of responsibility as either disproportionately on the shoulder of the United States or shared by \u0026ldquo;everyone.\u0026rdquo; We find moderate positive effects overall for the Climate Justice frame relative to both the control condition and the Solidarity frame. These appear to be driven almost entirely by Democrats. Although that frame does lead Democrats to feel a \u003cem\u003edecreased\u003c/em\u003e sense of shared perspective with people from the Global South relative to those in the control and solidarity conditions, the frame may be contributing to a sense of differential responsibility that leads to generosity.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePerhaps not surprisingly, given the strong associations between party and other individual-level characteristics with virtually all climate-related attitudes, the magnitude of the estimated framing effects is not very large. For example the estimated difference between Republicans and Democrats is thirteen times as large as the estimated effect of the climate justice treatment relative to our control condition of Appeal Only. And yet, the climate justice framing effect is still about as large as the estimated average difference between those reporting having experienced 1 or 2 days of extreme heat in the past 12 months compared with those who experienced zero days of such\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eheat.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOur study contributes to the body of evidence that concludes that communicating the historic responsibility of the largest carbon emitters is a useful motivation for some to feel a greater sense of generosity towards the common good. We contribute to the external validity of such findings, but also highlight that this framing does not seem to move the crucial Republican subset of the population. As voters, such citizens tend to support political leaders who either deny climate change altogether or object to climate-related foreign aid. Thus, while such messages may \u0026ldquo;do no harm,\u0026rdquo; they also may not be nearly enough to do much good in a polarized political environment.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eNonetheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that Republicans are a monolithic group when it comes to climate attitudes. We find a great deal of variation among Republican party-identifiers and -leaners in responses to questions about worries about global warming and support for climate aid, with younger citizens being much more likely to express pro-climate concerns. Future research should consider the effects of messaging not just across parties, but especially among Republicans based on likely variation in receptivity to motivational appeals.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSupplementary information.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003eWe include an appendix (below) intended for more detailed consideration of our results.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAcknowledgements. \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp; \u0026nbsp;\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e(To be added)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n \u003cli\u003eFunding: This study was funded by the Global Diversity Lab at the Massachusetts\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInstitute of Technology.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n \u003cli\u003eConflict of interest/Competing interests: No conflict of interests.\u003c/li\u003e\n \u003cli\u003eEthics approval and consent to participate: On March 27, 2023, the protocol E-4863,\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmerican Attitudes Towards Climate-Related Foreign Aid, was determined by the MIT Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) to be exempt from full human subjects review because the study involved only a benign behavioral intervention, and involved a low-risk survey.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n \u003cli\u003eConsent for publication: Yes\u003c/li\u003e\n \u003cli\u003eData and code availability: All data and code will be made available at the Harvard\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDataverse.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Footnotes","content":"\u003col\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e As we detail in the appendix, our sample is disproportionately Democratic, but our Republican sample is large enough with which to conduct meaningful analyses of heterogeneous effect sizes.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e For example, in our pre-registered analysis plan, we predicted that the \u003cem\u003eclimate justice\u003c/em\u003e frame would have a greater positive impact on Democrats; and the \u003cem\u003esolidarity\u003c/em\u003e frame would have a greater positive impact on Republicans. Note that in our pre-analysis plan, we indicated that we would analyze the data for this study for Whites only, but that sub-setting was intended only for a separate study focused on race attitudes. In this article, we report findings for the full sample, but for the sake of transparency, we report White only estimates of our main findings in the appendix.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Ethics approval details anonymized for peer review.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Although the survey contained two experimental interventions in the form of randomized presentation of images and text, we consider only the second experiment here. The first experiment investigated the role of race and nationality in support for climate aid for poor communities by randomizing the identity (Black or White) and location (United States or Brazil) of a family displaced by climate-related flooding.\u003c/span\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Par17\" class=\"Para\"\u003eWe include controls in our analyses for treatment assignment in the first study.\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e \u003cspan\u003e Other options included, \u0026ldquo;Between \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e0.5bn and \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e1.5bn(the recent proposal);\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Between \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e2bn and \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e5bn;\u0026rdquo;\u003c/span\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Par30\" class=\"Para\"\u003e\u0026ldquo;Between \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e6bn and \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e10bn;\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;Between \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e11bn and \u003cspan\u003e$\u003c/span\u003e15bn (the original proposal).\u0026rdquo;\u003c/div\u003e \u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e We present full regression estimates in Appendix Table A.2\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":true,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":true,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"climatic-change","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"clim","sideBox":"Learn more about [Climatic Change](https://www.springer.com/journal/10584)","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"https://www.editorialmanager.com/clim/default.aspx","title":"Climatic Change","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"em","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false},"keywords":"climate change responsibility, foreign aid, public opinion, United States, climate attitudes","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-4281604/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4281604/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eOver the past several years, international climate negotiations have concluded that the wealthiest countries should make significant financial contributions towards solutions to the climate crisis owing to their disproportionate responsibility for global warming. However, in democratic countries such as the United States, public opinion is divided about whether to use taxpayer money in this manner. We conducted a pre-registered survey from a national online pool (N\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5,065) with a built-in experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of different motivational frames associated with historic carbon emissions for increasing support for climate aid. We find that specific attribution claims that reflect a \u003cem\u003eclimate justice\u003c/em\u003e perspective do boost support for more generous climate aid, but their effects are mostly limited to Democrats. We also find that global solidarity frames had no effect on support for climate aid. Such results have important implications for climate advocacy and our understanding of climate-related attitudes.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Responsibility for Historic Carbon Emissions and Public Support for Climate Aid","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2024-06-05 08:17:42","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-4281604/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"","date":"2024-05-28T20:01:14+00:00","index":0,"fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"","date":"2024-05-24T00:39:37+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2024-04-22T14:01:47+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"submitted","content":"Climatic Change","date":"2024-04-18T09:42:24+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"climatic-change","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"clim","sideBox":"Learn more about [Climatic Change](https://www.springer.com/journal/10584)","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"https://www.editorialmanager.com/clim/default.aspx","title":"Climatic Change","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"em","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"fda1d25e-320f-4f6a-a1fe-dd3425e560e7","owner":[],"postedDate":"June 5th, 2024","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"published-in-journal","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2024-12-16T16:04:43+00:00","versionOfRecord":{"articleIdentity":"rs-4281604","link":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-024-03826-y","journal":{"identity":"climatic-change","isVorOnly":false,"title":"Climatic Change"},"publishedOn":"2024-12-11 15:57:31","publishedOnDateReadable":"December 11th, 2024"},"versionCreatedAt":"2024-06-05 08:17:42","video":"","vorDoi":"10.1007/s10584-024-03826-y","vorDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-024-03826-y","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-4281604","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-4281604","identity":"rs-4281604","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"8U1c8b4HqxoKbykW_rLl7","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}