The role of framing in public support for direct air capture: A moral hazard survey experiment in the United States

Limiting global warming will likely require removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keeping it out of the atmosphere by sequestering it. Public support is crucial for a rapid upscaling of carbon removal and sequestration. One central concern is that public support for these negative emissions technologies (NETs) could be hampered by a moral hazard: that NETs could undermine mitigation efforts and should thus be avoided. Building on previous research, we investigate four novel ways of framing the use of a form of carbon removal from the atmosphere that is currently of broad interest, direct air capture (DAC). We frame DAC use in terms of either necessity (DAC for limiting climate change being either essential or dependent on future mitigation) or temporality (DAC of either past or future emissions from the atmosphere). In a survey experiment with a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 2891) we examined how these frames affect public support and risk perceptions in the U.S. for DAC, and the roles of prior awareness of DAC, climate change worry, and their interactions with the different frames. Frames differentially influenced support depending on prior awareness and climate change worry, higher levels of which were associated with more support for DAC (but also greater anticipated moral hazard) independent of the frames. Overall, framing only weakly affected public support, which was on average modest. These insights extend previous findings regarding the limited usefulness of moral hazard frames, but highlight the potential value of tailoring DAC messaging to different target audiences. •We examine two novel facets of moral hazard for the support of direct air capture.•Limited evidence that necessity or temporality of DAC affects support.•Climate change worry moderates the effects of necessity framing on DAC support.•Climate change worry is associated with greater DAC support.•Overall, moral hazard does not pose a grave risk to direct air capture upscaling.