Australian voters’ attitudes to climate action and their social-political determinants

Views on future energy sources: Renewable energy future broadly accepted Renewable energy is seen as the future for Australia’s energy system by a large majority; over 85% see renewable energy contributing at minimum half of Australia’s future electricity. Thirty percent think that the electricity grid should be supplied mostly by renewables. A sizeable minority (10%) sees nuclear power play an important role in the future. We used parametric (ANOVA) and non-parametric (Pearson’s chi-squared test of independence) analyses to examine for associations between energy preferences and demographic variables. We found a strong signal of influence from political party preference, age, gender, and education. Women (p < 0.001), younger people (p <0.001), people living in cities (p = 0.006), and people with higher educational attainment (p < 0.001) show the strongest positive association with support for renewable energy. Meanwhile, men, (p < 0.001) people from NSW and QLD (p = 0.017), and LNP and Liberal voters (p < 0.001) show the strongest positive association with support for fossil fuels. With regard to nuclear energy, men (p < 0.001), Liberal voters (p < 0.001), and less educated people (p = 0.022 compared to mostly renewables and some fossil fuels & p < 0.001 compared to all renewables) show the strongest positive association with support. Demographics: Generational differences are pronounced but change is slow Age was not found to be a significant variable in the multivariate analyses. But, due to its sig-

nificance in univariate analyses and the fact that ageing is a guaranteed change over time among the population (compared to, for example, distribution of political party preference) we did further analysis on the potential for age-related opinion trends to change aggregate public opinion over time. In an analysis of the possible effect of demographic change over time, we focus on the share of respondents who indicate they believe it is ‘extremely important’ to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (50% in our sample, or 52% after weighting our survey data by age to reflect the age distribution in the Australian population). We considered both what may happen if today’s young people (18–28 year olds) will be representative of future young people with regard to attitudes about climate change (scenario 1), and what may happen if future young people will hold views even stronger than today’s young people (scenario 2). We assumed there is no change in views of the current adult population, that is, the proportion of people who consider it ‘extremely important’ to reduce GHG emissions will remain con- stant for the cohorts surveyed as they age (e.g. 65.2% of 18–22 year olds in 2019 will become 65.2% of 23–27 year olds in 2024). Breaking our sample into 5-year age brackets (18–22; 23–27 etc.) we identified the propor- tion of each 5-year age group that considers GHG emissions reduction to be extremely impor- tant. We then applied these opinion data to the ABS population projections at five yearly

intervals starting in 2024 through to 2064. For scenario 1, we assumed all future young people will hold views in line with 2019’s young people. For scenario 2, we assumed future young peo- ple will hold views proportionately stronger than 2019’s young people. To apply a reasonable proportion for our projections in scenario 2, we conducted linear regression on the percent of each age bracket answering ‘extremely important’ to Q1, predicted by age (% of age bracket = 73.5293–0.4829x, where x = the youngest age in the age bracket (i.e. 18 for 18–22), p < 0.001, DF = 14, R2 = 0.5869, Fig 8). We used the slope coefficient from our linear model to project that the percent of future young people holding opinion aligned with ‘extremely important’ on Q1 would increase by 2.4% for each new group of young people (18–22 year olds) entering the Australian voting population at 5-yearly intervals (0.4829(5) = 2.4145). A complication for this analysis was that the proportion of respondents in the 93+ age group (9 respondents) who selected ‘extremely important’ was zero. We re-ran the linear PLOS ONE Australian voters’ attitudes to climate action and their social-political determinants PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248268 March 24, 2021 11 / 18