About this project

Funding

Research on mapping the social landscape for net zero and new climate technologies was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment Progam. They are funding a lot of great social science research on the energy transition — check the link above to sign up for their mailing list!

Grant description

This grant used a mixed-methods approach in five different regions of the United States — Alaska (railbelt), northeastern California (Sierra region), central Oklahoma, northern West Virginia, and coastal Maine. We conducted focus groups with the public, semi-structured interviews with community leaders and local experts, and a national survey to better understand perspectives on net-zero policy, clean energy technologies, carbon removal, and solar geoengineering.

Team

The Principal Investigator on this grant is Dr. Holly Buck, Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo’s Department of Environment and Sustainability.

Research team members include research social scientist Dr. Travis Young, who was a postdoctoral associate at UB; Dr. Benjamin Sovacool from Boston University, PI on the GENIE project (GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions Pathways in Europe); and Dr. Daniel Sanchez at UC Berkeley.

We are grateful to Vanessa Suarez for research assistance, as well as Molly Majewski at UB, and our survey collaborators at UB.