Seeing the climate from above: U.S. policy options and economic elite attitudes

Abstract Climate policy faces strong political resistance for numerous reasons unrelated to the substantive merits of policy proposals. Not only does partisan polarization exacerbate the difficulties already inherent in climate policy formation, but public preferences are commonly superseded in the policymaking process by those of economic elites. In this paper I therefore examine the climate-related opinions of wealthy Americans—an undersampled but important segment of the population, given their outsized influence on policymakers—to assess the political viability of different climate policy options. My approach is quantitative, conducting a survey experiment with respondents exclusively from the top ten percent of U.S. incomes, designed to gauge economic elites’ openness to climate policy interventions in a geoengineering context as compared with a traditional regulatory context. The results find high salience for climate issues among elites, but also reveal that the influence of partisan polarization supersedes the attempt to reframe policy options within the climate domain, and contributes to strong levels of political resistance even in the context of economic elite preferences. These findings illuminate the relative weight of partisan versus economic influence, open avenues for interdisciplinary dialogue, and pose new challenges for climate policy advocates.