‘Climate change? It’s really not for us’

Strongly conservative people are less likely to support action on climate change, new research has found.

Strongly conservative people are less likely to support action on climate change because they believe the impacts will hit people who are not like them, new research has found.

Australian and New Zealand researchers used a long-running survey of 30,000 people to establish that climate change action is the preserve of liberals who favoured greater social equality.

The research by Canberra University and Victoria University of Wellington is published today in scientific journal PLOS One. It finds people who believe in “social dominance structures” and “right-wing authoritarianism” have lower concern for the environment and are less likely to act on climate change.

Both “social dominants” and “authoritarians” show a preference for people similar to themselves, and hostility towards those who are different.

Co-author Marc Wilson said participants had been assessed each year for the past 10 years.

About 5 per cent of respondents were classified as social dominant and 15-20 per cent right-wing authoritarian.

People who endorse social dominance want society to be structured hierarchically, with groups at the top dominating over “lower-status” groups.

Right-wing authoritarians prefer to conform to group norms and the orders of authority figures, while punishing those who do not conform.

“The refusal to make personal sacrifices for the environment might lead individuals towards preferring an unequal society,” the study found. “Inaction on climate change means accepting its consequences and allowing these to fall to low-status groups.

“While climate change is arguably the biggest environmental problem of our time, people tend to view themselves and those close to them as less vulnerable to its effects.”

Researchers said there was some truth to these perceptions.

“Although humans are causing the rapid heating of the planet, the key contributors to climate change and those most vulnerable to its effects are not necessarily the same people,” they said.

The research found “individuals who tolerate the environmental inequality brought on by the current environmental crisis, by way of forgoing making personal sacrifices to mitigate the problem, are more likely to extend these attitudes to general tolerance for social inequality”.

It concluded that traits of social dominance and right-wing authoritarianism predict less willingness to make sacrifices for the environment over time.

Pro-environmentalism, on the other hand, was associated with a rejection of the desire to dominate in the future.