Tackling climate change can be particularly challenging these days. Countries, states and municipalities around the world are falling short of greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and in the United States, President Donald Trump has rolled back key elements of his predecessor's climate agenda.
Given the trajectory, climate policymakers may be tempted to turn to more aggressive measures to encourage people to act, such as mandates, bans or restrictions. People would then have to save the planet.
But study published last week in the journal Nature Sustainability. suggests that this approach may carry real risks. It has been found that climate policies aimed at forcing lifestyle changes, such as driving bans in urban centers, can backfire, weakening people's existing pro-environmental values and causing a political backlash, even among those who already care about climate change. The results suggest that how climate policy is designed may matter as much as how aggressive it is.
“Mandates can sometimes get you past a challenge and a tipping point, but they come with costs,” said Sam Bowles, an author of the paper and an economist at the nonprofit Santa Fe Institute. “There may be negative consequences that people don’t expect.”
The researchers surveyed more than 3,000 Germans and found that even people who care about climate change reacted particularly negatively to mandates or bans that included things like limiting the thermostat temperature or eating meat, which they saw as restrictions on their freedoms. The paper also compares this to people's reactions to COVID-related requirements, such as vaccine and mask requirements. While the researchers found a backlash effect, or “control cost,” in both cases it was 52 percent higher for climate policy than for COVID policy.
“I didn’t expect people’s resistance [a] lifestyles driven by climate change would be so extreme,” said Katrin Schmelz, another study author who also works at the Santa Fe Institute. She said people's trust in their leaders can mitigate adverse impacts, and compared with the United States, Germans have fairly high trust in government. This, she said, means she “expects mandates to be less accepted and to generate more resistance here.”
Ben Ho, a behavioral economist at Vassar College, was not involved in the study and was not surprised by the results. “Essentially, it's about how society values individual values of freedom and self-expression versus societal values like safety,” he said, pointing to a significant body of similar research on the potential backlash to climate policy. “What's new about their work is that they show that these side effects are still relevant today, and what's particularly interesting is linking their data to how people felt about COVID.”
The political consequences of climate-related mandates can be dramatic. In Germany, a 2023 law passed by the country's then-center-left government aimed to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels by effectively banning new gas heating systems and promoting heat pumps. Although the policy allowed benefits and subsidies, opponents quickly framed it as a ban, calling it Heitzhammeror “heating hammer”.
The measure became a powerful symbol of government abuses. taken up by far-right parties and contributing to a broader public reaction against the ruling coalition. “The last German government fell essentially because it was thought to have introduced a gas ban,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. The current government is attempt to repeal legislation.
The German experience highlights the risks identified in the study. Policies that are perceived as restricting personal choice can generate resistance that extends beyond the measure itself, weakening public support for climate action more broadly. Until now, U.S. policy has largely avoided such resistance. This is largely because American climate policy has historically been much less aggressive, with even progressives rarely resorting to outright bans. However, there are both precedents for potential backlash and hints of potential future struggles.
For example, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 paved the way for the phasing out of incandescent light bulbs. This led to Light bulb Freedom of choice And Best uses of light bulbs two 2011 bills that were unsuccessfully pushed by the then-Tea Party movement. Today, methanealso known as natural gas, is at the center of similar cultural battles How cities are trying to ban new connections and take other steps to limit its use.
Opponents of climate action appear to have realized that bans could also trigger a backlash. President Trump regularly refers to fuel efficiency as a “mandate” for electric vehicles. The gas industry has also framed gas equipment efficiency standards as bans and used the backlash effect to help successfully delay other outright bans on gas in new construction. for example in New York State.
On the face of it, studies like these might put lawmakers in a quandary: If policies aren't aggressive enough, they won't do much to combat climate change. But if it is too aggressive, people may rebel against it, or even against the entire political movement behind it, as in Germany, and progress may stagnate.
“This doesn’t mean we should abandon climate policy,” Ho said. “It just means we need to be more thoughtful in how we design policy, and that trust may be a key component.”
Schmelz and Bowles reach a similar conclusion and say that any policy must at least take into account the plasticity of citizens' beliefs and values. “Ethical obligations and social norms are very fragile and easy to break,” Bowles said. Schmelz added that people in power “can frustrate and reduce the willingness to cooperate by crafting bad policies.”
One way policy can avoid a backlash is to focus less on prohibiting specific actions and instead making other options more common and attractive (for example, by adding tax breaks or rebates). “Offering alternatives helps promote environmental values,” Schmelz said. Another option would be to try to do climate-damaging activities are more expensive, rather than limiting them. As Bowles puts it, “People don't feel like they're being manipulated by a higher price.”
The closer politics gets to people's personal lives, they say, the more important it is to be aware of potential pitfalls. The authors also emphasize that they are not arguing that mandates or bans never work—for example, seat belt laws and smoking restrictions have become commonplace. But they were adopted in a different era, and there was no public disagreement about their benefits for personal health.
“There was always someone in this man's family who said, 'No, look, honey, I really wish you would wear a seat belt,'” Bowles said. “With the environment, we don’t have that, so it’s much harder to change the rhetoric.”
But ultimately, Bowles said the broader message he wants to convey is that people tend to be generous and want their actions to be consistent with their values. This new research highlights the need for policies that help them embrace this tendency, rather than temper it, which is what mandates or bans can do.
“People have a lot of good values,” he said. “When we look at our citizens and make policy, don’t think of them as assholes.”
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