How Americans Perceive the Potential of CO2 Capture and Recycling Technologies

As climate change increasingly causes harm worldwide, addressing it will require a diverse range of efforts to mitigate its worst impacts. Understanding public perception of new mitigation technologies is critical to their potential to be pursued, prioritized, or abandoned. A new study published in Sustainable Production and Consumption explores Americans’ support for carbon capture and utilization (CCU)—an emerging technology that recycles CO2 from industrial sources to produce new products—and how Americans’ beliefs about its benefits, risks, and acceptability are influenced in part by their diverse backgrounds.

CCU has the potential to build a “circular carbon economy” by reproducing carbon-based products, without adding to the net CO2 in the atmosphere. CCU’s potential to spur economic growth and job opportunities through new commercial industries is also considered an attractive benefit of its use.

“While opinions may evolve as this emerging technology becomes more familiar and more products come on the market, this study offers the first look at how Americans may react to efforts to expand CCU initiatives in the U.S.,” says study co-author Kim Wolske, an EPIC scholar and a research associate professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. “Although there are still major factors that will determine the viability of CCU to mitigate climate change at scale, including cost-effectiveness and technical constraints, public perception and support will play a key role in the development, deployment, and success of CCU products.”

With the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the world, and more polarized views on climate change and its solutions, the U.S. presents a unique context for studying the public perceptions of CCU. The paper, led by Kaitlin Raimi at the University of Michigan, assesses Americans’ opinion on CCU technology in general, local CCU facility development, and CCU products. It is also the first to explore how perceptions vary with gender, race/ethnicity, environmentalist identity, and aversion to tampering with nature.

The authors find that the U.S. public had moderately positive views of CCU overall, with important nuances. First, participants were less positive about CCU facilities in their home communities than they were about the idea of CCU in general or about products made with CCU. The results suggest that differences in support for local facilities are not driven by fears that such facilities will damage the local community, as might be expected if environmental justice concerns were top of mind, but rather participants seem to believe that their local community would not benefit from the addition of CCU facilities. Lack of support for CCU facilities could translate to local resistance that limits the scalability – and thus climate mitigation potential – of different CCU pathways.

Second, participants were particularly optimistic about the benefits of CCU for the economy, even more so than health or climate change. Positive perceptions of the economic benefits of CCU suggests that it might earn support among segments of the U.S. public who are skeptical about climate change and efforts to mitigate it.

Third, the study finds that individual differences in demographics and psychological traits matter for perceptions. The authors found that men supported CCU more than women, including seeing more benefits of CCU to the economy and health outcomes, as well as developing local CCU facilities. Additionally, while White participants had more positive views about CCU the more they identified as environmentalists, the same was not always true for Hispanic or Black respondents.

“As the merits of CCU in mitigating climate change continue to be debated by scientific experts, our research demonstrates that public acceptance or rejection of this technology may add an additional layer of complication to CCU’s development and deployment,” says Raimi. “Our work also suggests that segments of the U.S., including racial and ethnic minorities, may perceive environmental tradeoffs in which CCU’s climate benefits may come at the costs of other environmental outcomes. It is therefore crucial to include diverse stakeholder communities in any decision-making about CCU, whether about siting new industrial facilities or offering new CCU products in the market.”

Read the full study here.