ABSTRACT
As climate change continues to warm the Earth, it is increasingly urgent to enact greenhouse gas emissions-reducing policies. Yet the US public still remains sharply divided over the reality of climate change and its solutions. This chapter reviews various interventions for reducing the ideological polarization in climate change attitudes, including interventions targeting emotions, manipulating psychological distance, providing climate science consensus messaging, framing policies, highlighting health, invoking morality, and emphasizing economy and national security. While each type of intervention contains evidence both for and against its efficacy, none proves to be consistently successful in combatting political polarization regarding climate change. The most promising interventions appear to be those that specifically target conservative participants—such as free-market policies or messages from conservative leaders—as well as those that reduce the psychological distance of climate change. The chapter closes by discussing both the stability of politicized climate attitudes and the most compelling interventions.
