Climate worry is moving right
May 2025
Simon Glynn and Claire Whitehead (2025), Climate worry is moving right, Zero Ideas, https://doi.org/10.70272/qzus
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As the world moves to the right, concern about climate change is moving with it. Already there are more climate-worried people on the right than on the left.
It is easy to see climate change as a progressive issue. The cause is typically driven by the political left and embedded in broader progressive issues of social justice. But this perspective is numerically wrong and practically limiting.
Climate policy and the climate movement are out of sync with today’s world. They need a reset. The climate-worried on the right and left have different priorities and expectations. The answer to polarization is not unity; it is pluralism.
To appeal to the climate-worried right, we need to offer a pure-play climate agenda, the opportunity for national advantage, and the recognition of choice.
The following is a condensed version of the research report. Download the pdf for the full report.
More climate worried on the right than on the left
The issue of climate change has become so politically polarized, and so melded with social justice, that it gets taken for granted as a left-wing cause. But analysis of two waves of quantitative, multinational research by Zero Ideas shows two findings that change that picture substantially:
Even on the far right, most people worry about climate change
Climate skepticism is stronger on the right than the left (at least in the Global North). But it is a minority position across the political spectrum. In the US—the country with the most politically polarized views on climate—among those who see themselves on the political left, 92% are climate-worried. Among those on the right it’s still 61%—and even on the far right it’s 56%.
Other countries we have tested show an even stronger majority for climate worry on the right: 66% in Germany, and 72% in the UK and Poland.
We use a simple left-right scale for easy comparison between countries, but we get a similar picture if we look at political parties. In the US, 89% of people who align with the Democrats are worried about climate change, but so are 73% of independents, and 55% of those who align with the Republicans. Germany has seen a big swing to the right in its 2025 election, but 84% of people who align with the Christian Democrats are worried about climate change, as are 54% of people who align with the AfD.
There are more climate-worried people on the right than on the left
The significance of this climate worry on the right becomes clear when we see the size of the right compared with the left. Although the proportion of people worried about climate change is smaller on the right, the size of the right means that there are more climate-worried people on the right than on the left.
The chart shows the effect graphically for the USA. The point holds whether you consider only the far left and right (in red) or also include the centre left and right (in dark pink). There are more climate-worried people on the right than left in the USA, UK and Poland, and slightly fewer in Germany.
In Germany we do see the same effect happening at a party level. There are more climate-worried people aligned with the AfD (13% of people overall) than with the Greens (9%).
If the idea that there are more climate-worried on the right than the left is surprising, one reason why is that it is new—at least for these countries. When we ran the same questions in a survey back in 2023, there were more climate-worried people on the left than the right. The past two years have seen a significant shift of climate-worried people to the right.
Now we have large numbers of people on the right who are worried about climate change, what is their experience? What ideas do they relate to? What policies can they support? Whether from governments, business or the climate movement, the answers are distinctly unwelcoming.
Climate policy skews left
The framing of climate change as a left-leaning, progressive cause is pervasive.
This framing is baked into our treaties on climate change. The principle that countries should contribute based on equity and according to their ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ was established at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and written into Article 2 of the Paris Agreement in 2015. That agreement also links climate action to sustainable development, eradication of poverty, a just transition of the workforce, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, gender equality, empowerment of women, intergenerational equity and more. The COP process charged with executing this agreement is dominated by negotiations about the transfer of wealth from developed to developing countries and demands for climate justice.
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals position climate change, together with some other environmental goals that are essential for sustainability, alongside a set of progressive societal goals regarding human welfare. The construct of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing does the same thing, creating composite metrics within which climate targets are interchangeable with diversity, equity and inclusion.
A deliberate agenda
This progressive framing of climate change has been deliberate. For decades, again going back to Rio in 1992, politicians and activists with progressive agendas have seen the urgency, necessity and transformative potential of climate action as an opportunity to further their cause. Bernie Sanders, in promoting his Green New Deal as part of his campaign for the US presidency in 2020, described climate change as ‘our single greatest opportunity to build a more just and equitable future.’ In 2022 in Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book, Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty said that ‘it’s time for us to acknowledge that there can be no deep carbonization without profound re-distribution of income and wealth.’
Some of this harnessing of climate change to the progressive agenda may be self-serving, but much is driven by conviction and desire for a better world. What its proponents miss is that it represents one worldview. And as we have seen, that worldview is now a minority one in many countries.
Time for a reset
There is nothing inherent to climate change that makes it a progressive issue. Indeed in the UK, the first political leader to take it seriously was Margaret Thatcher. The politicization has grown out of ideologically driven perspectives about how we should respond.
To win support for climate action from the climate-worried on the right as well as the left, we need to challenge these perspectives. Which ones are fundamental to the objective urgency of climate change itself, and which are a political choice among available options? There is nothing wrong with campaigning for a political choice. What is wrong—because it is unproductive and alienating—is to insist that your choice is the only way to think about climate change.
If it was ever plausible that the political solution to climate change is first to convert the world to progressive ideology, it must be clear today that this is not what is about to happen. A common response is to lament the current shift to the right and to a multipolar world of competing interests, and double down on the same ideological approach, hoping to ride out the cycle. But this response ignores both the geopolitical realities and the opportunity that is provided by the climate worry and appetite for action on the expanding political right. Now is the time to engage that worry and potential support.
Unfamiliar priorities and values
If we want to appeal to the climate-worried on the political right, we need to understand who they are and what they value. Their can-do optimism and trust stand out from both the climate-worried on the left and the non-climate-worried on the right.
Humanity as a force for good
The climate-worried left tend to see humans as a destructive force on our planet. In this view we are exceeding the limits of our planet and need to change our way of living so that the planet can regenerate. The net position of the climate-worried right is more balanced, and can even lean towards the view that humans are a force for good. In this more optimistic view we need to build on our story of progress, advancing responsibly, with a love and respect for nature.
Incremental change
The climate-worried left tends to believe that we need to make big, disruptive changes to our society in order to stop climate change. This is particularly true of the climate-worried far left, who have a strong voice in the climate movement. The climate-worried right think that we need only gradual, step-by-step changes.
Broad trust
At least in the USA, which is the only country in which we asked this question, the climate-worried right trust a wide range of authorities for guidance on which technologies are safe and ready for use in tackling climate change. This is in contrast to the climate-worried left, where people’s trust focused on scientists at major research universities, and the non-climate worried right, who mostly trust no-one at all.
A plea for pluralism
It is clear from these differences that the widely shared worry about climate change transcends some quite different worldviews. This is why the answer to polarization is not unity; it is pluralism.
Pluralism is a realistic goal. The climate-worried right are not the conservative right. In fact, they are even more optimistic about change, and ready to accept change, than the left. But they do believe in freedom of choice. They don’t want to be told what they have to do. While they trust the government as an authority on climate technologies, they resist what they see as government overreach. On this issue, their stance is much closer to the conservative right than to the left.
As we have previously argued, they tend to see responsibility as a moral choice (‘I am a responsible person’) rather than an imposed burden (‘I have been given responsibility through the position I have been put in’). With this lens it is easy to see why much of today’s climate narrative is not accepted on the right, even by people who worry about climate change.
A recent survey by More in Common of ‘progressive activists’ in the United Kingdom found that most of them would not be prepared to campaign alongside anyone who had voted for one of the country’s rightwing political parties. The researchers concluded from their study that progressive activists’ ‘political outlook and approach to bringing about change makes them outliers from much of the wider public and those they are trying to win over.’
To be effective against climate change in the world we live in today, we need to to be more genuinely inclusive and open to a plurality of people, policies and ideas.
What we can offer the climate-worried right
Within this pluralistic view, what tangibly can we offer the climate-worried right? What will engage their forward-looking appetite for change, and crystallize their climate worry into support for—or at least consent to—climate action?
Answering this question matters, because although the climate-worried right are numerous, they are not (yet) putting their worry into action. Among the climate-worried left, across the four countries we surveyed, 40% of people rank climate change or the environment as one of their top three voting issues. Among the climate-worried right that number is 23%.
Our previous analyses suggest the answer may not primarily be about the prioritization of specific policies. Some of the policy territories that might be favoured by the climate-worried right—such as a demand-side focus on promoting clean energy technologies as opposed to a supply-side focus on ending fossil fuels—turn out to be favoured by the climate-worried left also. But the context for these policies matters. To appeal to the climate-worried right, our findings suggest we should offer three propositions that are missing in the progressive approach:
- A pure-play climate agenda, separating climate action from social issues with which it is often bundled, but on which left and right can’t agree;
- Opportunity for national advantage, recognizing the specifics of different countries and showing the way for my country to thrive in the post-fossil-fuel world;
- Recognition of choice, replacing a presumption about what must be done with respect for the legitimacy of different groups’ priorities and trade-offs.
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