Politically conservative people tend to be less concerned about climate change, and that gap grows in wealthier countries, according to a new study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Researchers who analyzed data from nearly 285,000 people across 54 countries over 30 years found a consistent pattern: “The more respondents identified as politically conservative, the less they saw climate change as a serious problem and the less they perceived climate change as a threat to the environment and their country.”

That link is not new, but the study adds a twist: for respondents identified as conservatives, greater affluence made them even less concerned about climate change. “It turned out that the degree of political polarization was greater among wealthier nations,” the authors note.

Across all the data, “there was no example of conservative ideology being associated with more concern about climate change.”

The study used per capita emissions, average education, and GDP per capita as “three variables that theoretically might be presumed to shape degrees of political polarization in climate change concern.” The measures of per capita carbon emissions were weighted toward production rather than consumption, to capture how strongly a country’s economy was tied to fossil fuels.

Higher per capita carbon emissions are “a useful proxy” for the vested interests in resisting decarbonization, write the authors. The more a country stands to lose from changing the status quo, the more vested interests spend on misinformation campaigns that “coach” conservatives to deny or downplay climate change “and the greater the political opportunity for conservative politicians to capitalize on resistance to change.”

The use of education as a variable was rooted in theories of “identity-protective cognition,” where people process information in ways that allow their conclusions to “align with their ideological or political group memberships.” Higher levels of education “can potentially exacerbate this process,” as people acquire skills and tools “to find ideologically convenient information and to critique inconvenient information.”

“Another possibility is that educated people are simply more aware of the ideological position of their favoured political party, leading to greater political polarization,” write the researchers.

Finally, the focus on GDP per capita acknowledged a thesis fundamental to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: that people will seek to secure material needs like security and safety before concerning themselves with “values-driven considerations, like free speech, quality of life, and self-expression.”

While “post-materialism” driven by increased wealth is typically seen as a driver of progressive causes, the researchers said that doesn’t seem to be the case with climate change.

“In the climate change space, post-materialism implies a more problematic tendency to draw climate science into the suite of values-driven attitudes that describe and prescribe differences between the left and right side of politics.”

Attitudes to the role of government versus degrees of personal freedom are one example. Rather than viewing climate change as an existential threat, affluence encourages conservative individuals to double down on their climate doubt by viewing the issue “through the prism of their values,” political and personal.

The growing political polarization in climate change concern has implications for public discourse and policy, write the authors. Policies and communication practices must “anticipate and account for the fact that one side of the political divide is less convinced of the urgency for action than the other.”

Communication strategies that use “conservative language and values” might be one effective response, along with “political hacks that encourage conservatives to vote in pro-climate ways without violating their political loyalties.”