Race, ethnicity, and support for climate policy

Abstract

Addressing the increasing temperatures of the globe requires society-wide adaptation and mitigation efforts. One central challenge to these efforts is the resistance of groups to support broad policy efforts to reduce global temperatures, with particular resistance in the United States. While scholars have established the role of partisanship, ideology, demographic, and socio-economic factors in shaping support for or opposition to climate policy, we do not yet understand the role that racial and ethnic identity might play in these views. In this paper, we use pooled data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Data (Ntotal=241,800) to examine differences in attitudes about climate policy between Asian, Black, Latino, and white Americans. Comparing across groups, we demonstrate that the many core findings of scholarship on support for climate policy apply nearly exclusively to white Americans, with varying correlational effects for Asian, Black, and Hispanic Americans. Our efforts provide a much-needed examination of how racial identity shapes views on climate change and show that central, replicated results in scholarship on climate change apply largely to the views and behaviors of white Americans.

Mapping Solar Mindsets: Socioeconomic Predictors of Rooftop Solar Reception

“…These findings are in line with some previous scholarship (e.g. Benegal et al 2022;Ballew et al 2021) that Black Americans may be more supportive of climate policy than White Americans, not less, due to their disproportionate exposure to the consequences of climate change. Indeed, once you take into account partisanship (more Democratic=more pro solar) and education (more educated=more skeptical of rooftop solar), and the fact that Black Americans are more Democratic and hold a lower average level of education than the population as a whole, that evidence is even stronger.…”

A critical feminist system justification analysis of climate obstructionism on the part of conservative white men

“…To this end, environmental psychology would benefit enormously from incorporating the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and critical theorists, as we have sought to do here. Our approach is also aligned with recent calls to link critical-feminist theory and empirical social science (Kaul & Buchanan, 2023) and to address the ways in which racial identity affects climate attitudes and refrain from making population-level generalizations from findings that apply only to white Americans (Benegal et al, 2022).…”

“…However, for the most part, social scientific research brushes past the 6.2 gigatonne 1 elephant in the room. Although people who are wealthy, white, and male generate higher per capita emissions (Carlsson et al., 2021; Goldstein et al., 2022; Oswald et al., 2020), conservative white men are more likely than any other demographic to downplay concerns about anthropogenic climate change (McCright & Dunlap, 2011; see also Benegal et al., 2022; Feygina et al., 2010; Jylhä et al., 2016; Krange et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2014). Given their outsize impact on the climate—and their disproportionate degree of social, economic, and political capital—addressing and overcoming climate skepticism among conservative white men is crucial to obtaining a more sustainable future (Jacquet et al., 2014).…”

Varieties of Environmentalisms and Latino Views of Climate Action

“…More recent studies (Benegal, Azevedo, and Holman 2022; Leiserowitz and Akerlof 2010) provide a far more nuanced and complex cross-race portrait for pro-environmental positions. The high-profile issue of climate has received far greater attention across the media environment, and the connection of global climate change with issues such as water quality, heat in workplace environments, and desertification in farm regions collectively have brought the broader environmental fight to the proximate concerns of Latino workers and families (Mendez and Sadhwani 2022; Park et al 2020).…”