ABSTRACT
In the United States, positions on climate change have become strong markers of political identity. Matthew Nisbet, a political communications scholar, places the current public conversation in the United States about climate change in the same rarefied category as debates about gun control and taxes, as one among a handful of issues that most clearly "show two Americas divided along ideological lines". The climate engineering conversation can be seen to be creating some strange bedfellows, with pockets on the left and right finding themselves arguing for similar positions, though often for quite different reasons. One important thing to note is that the climate engineering conversation that is evolving rapidly in the United States is doing so in a context that, despite all that has been noted, is marked to its core by left–right ideological understandings. However, when climate engineering gains more political and public traction and salience in the United States, the terms of the conversation will change.
