By Robin Bayes.
Photo Credit: John Englart
On July 4, 2025, American climate policy was upended as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) rolled back or canceled many clean energy tax incentives in the United States. Supporters touted this move while opponents lambasted it, each side claiming the moral high ground. While Republican House Budget Committee members argued that the OBBBA stops climate activism as a weapon to harm working families, the Committee’s Democratic caucus argued that it betrays the middle class by killing clean energy jobs and investments.
When political messaging uses this kind of harm-based moral rhetoric to escalate the climate policy debate, there may be lasting consequences.
Moralizing science and technology is associated with divisive characteristics
In a recent short article published in Public Understanding of Science, I examine how moralization affects the way everyday people approach policy debates about science and technology.
I surveyed a nationally representative sample of Americans about their opinions on three issues: combating climate change, advancing gene editing therapies, and labeling genetically modified food. For each issue, I measured the degree to which survey respondents moralized their position, perceiving that their opinion on the issue reflects their understanding of moral right and wrong. I then compared high and low moralizers on indicators of entrenched division.
Controlling for alternative explanations like being more educated or holding more extreme positions, I find that people who moralize their stance on an issue believe more strongly that there is an objectively correct position to take, and that they would never change their opinion even if the situation called for it.
I also find that stronger moralizers feel more negative emotions toward those on the opposite side of the issue and might even dehumanize or avoid social contact with them.
Together, these findings suggest that moralization may encourage people to dig in their heels in important policy debates, disregarding evidence that challenges their position and enflaming hostility toward those who disagree.
Industrial climate policy failed to skirt political division
The moralized rhetoric surrounding the OBBBA’s rollback of clean energy tax incentives is therefore bad news for climate activists. Many had hoped these incentives would fly under the radar, avoiding the politically polarized debate over climate change.
There was reason to believe it might work. Tax incentives are industrial policy tools that guide private investment toward particular industries that serve policy goals, such as combatting climate change. They can be especially useful for skirting controversy on divisive issues because they can “submerge” government intervention from public view. (They can also be passed through a budget process that avoids the Senate filibuster, which otherwise stymies much of the activity in a polarized Congress).
As a result, industrial climate policy in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) successfully launched federal climate action in the United States, where more traditional regulatory approaches, and even market-based solutions like cap-and-trade, had failed in the past. The IRA’s tax incentives served the nation’s climate goals by encouraging clean energy adoption, without fully confronting the political division around climate change.
This advantage, however, has been short-lived. Even as the OBBBA rolls back specific IRA tax incentives, my study suggests that the moralized rhetoric around the action may be even more problematic. Political messaging that encourages people to think about even the driest, most “submerged” policy through a moral lens can enflame division.
Therefore, when people come to perceive their position on industrial climate policy as a matter of moral right and wrong, we may lose yet another avenue for climate action to polarization and further reduce the chances for definitive climate policy in the United States at the federal level.
Read the original research: A matter of right or wrong: Divisive attributes of moralized science and technology attitudes.
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Links to other published work: