Climate Tech Forward
Popular support for the science and technologies that can help stop climate change
June 2025
Simon Glynn and Claire Whitehead (2025), Climate Tech Forward: Popular support for the science and technologies that can help stop climate change, Zero Ideas, https://doi.org/10.70272/xsoh
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The success of any climate policy depends not only on how effective the solution is, but on the political will to make it happen. These two considerations have their own feedback loop. Detractors use doubts about performance, scale, and cost, to suppress political will. And without that will, solutions may fail to attract the investment needed to drive up performance and scale, and drive down cost.
Various technologies that can help stop climate change appear to be caught in this vicious cycle. But what if the political will is misreading the electorate? What if the people want these technologies? What if this is in fact the only way they will sign up to tackling climate change and species loss?
To find the answer, we partnered with Potential Energy Coalition and WePlanet. We worked with the research agency Savanta to ask 10,500 people in Germany, Nigeria, Poland, the UK and USA whether they support different technologies with a role to play in stopping climate change. We asked why they support them when they do, and why they don’t when they don’t.
We found that people’s confidence in science is strong. They are choosing to depend on science and technology to solve the dual challenges of climate change and species extinction, both of which cause widespread worry.
People are generally not prepared to compromise their prosperity. They have little appetite for reducing the size of our economy; their clear preference is to move forward with technology, innovating to grow our economy and still stay within the limits of our planet. The tech-forward approach is not their Plan B. It is Plan A.
People’s support for the specific climate-related technologies we tested is strong but not universal. There is broad support for nuclear energy, especially on the political right. There is broad support for climate engineering—carbon dioxide removal in particular—especially on the political left. There is little support for food biotech, and a visceral rejection of cultivated meat.
Where support is withheld, the opposition comes from a fear of the technology going wrong, or from a sense of doing wrong in our relationship with nature. Where support is given, it comes not from a grudging acceptance of a least worst option, but from a positive aspiration for progress.
The concerns about going wrong and doing wrong may have been stoked by environmental organizations that favour different and generally more disruptive transition paths. The stances these non-profits have taken do not fit well with what the public wants and will accept.
In fact, some environmental organizations taking those stances appear not to be speaking for their own members and supporters. In general we find that their members and supporters want to see a tech-led transition, and are more supportive of climate technologies than the population at large.
Follow the science – and the social science
With familiarity low and many people still uncommitted, everything is still to play for.
This complex picture demands radical realism in order to deliver climate action by consent. We must be radical because the challenge demands it, and realistic because we depend on political will. If we simply ‘follow the science’ and go all out for food biotech, we risk alienating many rejectors, particularly on the political right, where support is vital. If instead we ‘follow the social science’, by going for what people are prepared to support, we may miss out on technologies that can feed the world while restoring nature, and expose ourselves to the avoidable risks of solar radiation management.
We need to take a pluralist approach to climate technologies, learning as we go, and find where the science and social science can come together.
Please download the report, and let us know your reactions.