Public opinion foundations of the clean energy transition

Popular debates about political barriers to the clean energy transition increasingly acknowledge the mass public’s role, but often summarize its importance with amorphous concepts like ‘political’ or ‘public will.’ This essay clarifies how the public’s beliefs, preferences, and behaviors affect the clean energy transition through three channels: policymaker incentives, electoral selection, and technology adoption and siting. In turn, we consider how energy and climate policy design can influence the mass public’s preferences, emphasizing cost and benefit visibility, public perceptions of distributional effects, and cross-domain policy linkages. Drawing from our framework, we outline priorities for public opinion research on the clean energy transition.