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🧠Happy to share that our perspective paper on GenAI for climate policy has been published at npj Climate Action! 🤖We discuss LLM as a public-acceptance emulator in climate policy pipelines 🔗Link in: www.nature.com/articles/s44... 👥Thank you Ajay and @viktoriaspaiser.bsky.social for leading this!

The climate crisis demands urgent action, yet technically sound policies repeatedly fail upon contact with social reality1. France’s 2018 carbon tax increase sparked the Yellow Vest protests and was swiftly abandoned2. Wind farms face fierce local opposition despite clear climate benefits and local energy price reductions3. In Canada, polarization around carbon pricing led Mark Carney, ahead of the 2025 election, to drop the Liberal Party’s commitment to the tax, calling it “divisive” (CBC News, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-drops-carbon-tax-1.7484290). Urban congestion pricing schemes stall over fairness concerns4. Across these cases, a common thread emerges: policies optimized for emissions reduction falter when they overlook how communities assess risk, fairness, and identity implications (i.e., whether a policy affirms or threatens their cultural values and social status). This can be exacerbated by opposition groups that will exploit these reservations to generate public backlash to these measures5. Public acceptance is thus critical for climate policies to succeed1,6,7. Researchers across disciplines (e.g., social6, psychology8, economics9, politics10) have tried to understand the determinants of climate policy acceptance among the public. Bergquist et al.1 found perceived fairness and effectiveness among the public as the chief determinants (based on 89 data sets from 33 countries). Others have attributed social, psychological, and political...

1. Here’s a thread on #NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) and the challenges of change in cities: First off, although it might feel that way, NIMBY isn’t unique to your city, and it’s (probably) not worse in your city than anywhere else. It’s also not surprising, since it’s largely about human nature.