The Politics of Climate Possibility

By Madalina Vlasceanu, Danielle Goldwert, and Anandita Sabherwal

Clean Energy Bus in NYC.

Source: PierreOlivierClementMantion/iStock

A growing number of New Yorkers are rallying behind the political promise that government should visibly improve people’s lives again. Mayor Mamdani has built momentum around policies like faster and fare-free buses, universal child care, public grocery stores, affordable housing construction, and major clean infrastructure investment. What makes this strategy politically significant is the underlying psychological promise that collective problems are still solvable if we try. This belief might be the key driver of climate action today.

In our research article published today in Communications Earth and Environment involving more than 32,000 Americans, we found that people were substantially more likely to engage politically, advocate publicly, donate money, and change their lifestyles when they believed their actions, collective efforts, and governments could meaningfully reduce climate threats. Most importantly, beliefs about governmental effectiveness emerged as one of the strongest predictors of climate engagement overall. People acted when they believed institutions were capable of solving problems.

Examples of Visible Climate Action Despite Political Opposition

Despite fierce political conflict and significant rollbacks by the current administration, including efforts to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, Americans are still witnessing visible evidence that large-scale climate action can happen as a direct result of advocacy. For instance, clean energy deployment continues to accelerate across Republican and Democratic states alike. Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, companies have announced hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and manufacturing investments across dozens of states. Wind and solar power are expanding at a record-breaking pace, and battery factories and electric vehicle manufacturing plants are being built across the country. When people see governments building infrastructure, deploying technology, and producing visible improvements to their lives, they can be galvanized into collective action to maintain momentum.

But that effect depends on people explicitly connecting those improvements to the policies, political actors, and advocates responsible for them. Recent research on clean energy investments under the Biden administration suggests that even large-scale climate spending failed to generate attribution of political credit or to catalyze additional action because voters did not connect the visible local developments to governmental action.

The same dynamic helps explain why natural disasters do not consistently increase support for climate action unless the connection between the event and climate change is made explicit in media and political discourse. In complex information environments, visible outcomes alone are often insufficient. People must also understand what caused them and who/what is responsible.

Differences in Efficacy Beliefs Across Political Lines

Our research also found that Republicans reported lower efficacy beliefs overall, particularly lower confidence that governments can effectively address climate change. Yet efficacy beliefs were also more strongly associated with climate engagement among Republicans than Democrats. In other words, when conservatives did believe action could work, they were substantially more engaged, suggesting a cross-partisan pathway to mobilization.

These findings point to a broader transformation already underway in climate politics. Over the past two decades, the fossil fuel industry and its political allies have moved from denying climate change to denying human responsibility, to arguing that scientists are not yet in agreement about the facts, or that mitigation would be economically ruinous. Increasingly, the message today is that meaningful action is futile and that governments are incompetent. Fatalism is psychologically powerful because it accepts the threat while undermining belief in agency, leading to helplessness. Once people conclude that no response will meaningfully alter outcomes, disengagement or denial become rational responses to reduce the psychological discomfort.

That is why visible evidence of successful governmental action matters. Clean energy deployment, faster buses, and universal child care demonstrate that democratic societies remain capable of solving complex problems. The fight over climate change is therefore increasingly a fight over the perception of efficacy, over whether citizens believe their efforts can improve the future.