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Climate concern, political trust, and the feeling that politicians care about people like oneself showed even larger effects than material life satisfaction. These factors have been established in previous studies, and our results confirm their significance in a large Dutch sample.

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Our outcome measure was willingness to contribute 1% of one's household income to climate action. Material life satisfaction showed a strong effect, while satisfaction with one's social life, physical health, and mental health only showed negligible or no causal effects.

At the same time, satisfaction with one's future perspective was notably lower. While 59% reported being satisfied or very satisfied, 17% reported being not satisfied or not satisfied at all.

Across most life domains, respondents reported relatively high levels of satisfaction. Overall life satisfaction was especially high: 82% reported being satisfied or very satisfied, and only 6% reported being not satisfied or not satisfied at all.

We used directed acyclic graphs to make our causal assumptions explicit and to guide covariate adjustment. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis to assess the potential impact of unobserved income confounding, which shows that the estimated effects remained robust and only mildly attenuated.

Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

🔥 Material life satisfaction increases willingness to engage in costly climate action @maiensachis.bsky.social, @jmbh.bsky.social, & I use causally informed regression models to estimate the effect of life satisfaction on climate action in a large Dutch sample (N = 22,749): osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Reposted by Fabian Dablander

You can get to a high-warming world without high emissions . That's the part of this week's "RCP 8.5 is implausible" discussion that's getting missed. A short thread on why the relief is premature 🧵

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We hope that our findings can contribute to a discussion about how the news media can best inform about the causes and impacts of climate change and the full scope of the societal transformations needed to secure a livable and sustainable future for all. 🔗 Link: osf.io/preprints/so...

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4️⃣ 𝐀𝐝𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 Causes, impacts, & mitigation were much more covered than aspects relating to adaptation. 5️⃣ 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 The overall pattern of reporting is very similar to German newspapers, with The Guardian being most similar to left-leaning outlets.

3️⃣ 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭-𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 Reducing fossil fuels & shifting to renewables were the mitigation strategies that received the most attention. Shifting to a vegan/vegetarian diet or reducing livestock farming was mentioned in only 3% of articles (versus 57.2% for reducing fossil).

2️⃣ 𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐥 𝐟𝐮𝐞𝐥𝐬 Agriculture is responsible for 1/3 of emissions, yet was mentioned ten times less than fossil fuels as a cause (in 5.8% of articles vs 59.7%). Similarly, economic growth, overconsumption, carbon inequality appeared in only 2.4-6.3% of articles.

𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬: 1️⃣ 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 2018 We found a clear upward shift in coverage from late 2018 onward, coinciding with several key events, including heightened climate mobilization, the publication of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C, and The Guardian's climate pledge.

We used IPCC-aligned questions covering causes, impacts, mitigation, and adaptation, and large language models for deductive content analysis. The Guardian provides easy access to all their articles using an open API, so we did not have to build custom scraping tools like in previous work.

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Laurie Ulster @floobish.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

🚨 Climate change coverage in The Guardian In a new preprint, Simon Wimmer, @jmbh.bsky.social, and I analyzed over 18,000 articles about climate change in @theguardian.com (2010-2025) using large language models 🧵 🔗 Link: osf.io/preprints/so...

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Reposted by Fabian Dablander

Octavia E. Butler, 1998:

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Choose your leaders

with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward

is to be controlled

by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool

is to be led

by the opportunists

who control the fool.

To be led by a thief

is to offer up

your most precious treasures

to be stolen.
To be led by a liar

is to ask

to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant

is to sell yourself

and those you love

into slavery.

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Reposted by Fabian Dablander

Kristian Steensen Nielsen @kristiansn89.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

⭐NEW PAPER ⭐ We collaborated with AWorld, the largest app for personal climate action, to examine behavioral patterns, data quality, and the links between users' actions, carbon footprints and psychological factors. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... @fdabl.bsky.social @cameronbrick.bsky.social

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Reposted by Fabian Dablander

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 29/03/2026

What a stunning demonstration of how data centre development is directly and materially boosting fossil fuels. After ferocious lobbying the Carney government caved and killed off environmental rules to allow fossil gas power plants to be built for data centres: thewalrus.ca/after-intens...

After Intense Lobbying, Carney Allows Gas-Powered Data Centres in Alberta
Energy firm pushed federal officials to scale back clean-electricity rules tied to AI sector
by Taylor C. Noakes
Updated 11:46, Mar. 27, 2026 | Published 6:30, Mar. 27, 2026

he Alberta electricity company Capital Power, which is developing a new, large artificial intelligence data centre in the province powered by natural gas, lobbied the federal Mark Carney government dozens of times in 2025 to eliminate clean-energy regulations, DeSmog has learned.

These regulations were subsequently dropped from a fossil fuel accord that the prime minister signed with the Government of Alberta this past November, allowing new, large data centres fuelled by gas turbines to proceed.

“We’ve got a new paradigm that allows us to look at growth capital” for Canadian gas-powered AI projects, Capital Power chief executive officer Avik Dey said in reaction to the Carney government announcing it would suspend the regulations.

The term “data centre” appears at least twenty-five times in notes from Capital Power’s interactions with the federal government, while the term “emissions” appears seventeen times, and “clean-energy regulations” and “net zero” appear each at least fourteen times.

The AI boom is itself driving a massive development of gas-power generation: over 1,000 gigawatts worldwide, a quarter of which is in the United States. Though AI data centres can be powered by any form of electricity, the gas industry has marketed gas power as cheap, efficient, and reliable.

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Reposted by Fabian Dablander

Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

1/ Yesterday @wmo-global.bsky.social made Earth's Energy Imbalance a headline #climate indicator for the first time. I think this could be a significant reframing of climate discourse, and it's worth paying close attention to why. 🧵

A staircase diagram with six levels rising from bottom-left to top-right. Each level on the left represents a stage in the causal chain of climate change, connected by a dashed arrow to a corresponding intervention on the right. From bottom to top: Root Drivers (economic system, fossil finance, colonial and historical structures, geopolitics) connects to Transformative System Change (economic restructuring, post-colonial redress, geopolitical shifts); Human Activities (consumption and production patterns) connects to Socio-technical and Behavioural Change (electrification, behaviour change, market incentives); Energy and Land Systems connects to Infrastructure Transition (renewables, grids, land-use redesign); Emissions connects to End-of-pipe Controls (CCS); Atmospheric GHG Concentrations connects to Carbon Dioxide Removal (including NETs); Earth's Energy Imbalance connects to Geoengineering (SRM). A diagonal arrow runs across the full diagram from Structural/Preventative at the bottom-left to Reactive/Compensatory at the top-right.

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Reposted by Fabian Dablander

Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 19/03/2026

Even in a world of extremes, some events still stand out to me. This is one. All-time monthly records are being shattered. The size of this ridge across the western U.S. is truly striking for March, and we see a very clear climate change connection. Explore: csi.climatecentral.org/climate-shif...

Screenshot showing the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central for March 19, 2026. There is a change in likelihood of CSI 5 across nearly the entire Western USA.

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SEVEN advises the government on how to achieve policy goals for insulation and electricity consumption - SEVEN

This was a very rewarding and insightful collaboration, and you can read a short summary of this work — commissioned by the Dutch Ministry for Climate Policy and Green Growth — and the full report here: seven.uva.nl/en/content/n...

seven.uva.nl

The Dutch Ministry of Climate Policy and Green Growth will incorporate the policy recommendation by the University of Amsterdam’s Climate Institute SEVEN.

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Across 3 sessions, we brought together stakeholders from policy, science, civil society, and practice to jointly map the structures underlying the two behaviours. We identified feedback loops that could accelerate or hinder progress, and distilled a set of policy recommendations with high leverage.

This has implications for policy: the most impactful interventions are unlikely to be isolated campaigns or one-off incentives, but efforts to change the structures that shape behaviour.

This is where a systems perspective is especially useful. Instead of locating behaviour change primarily at the level of the individual, it asks how personal, social, and structural factors interact to make certain behaviours easier or harder.

These factors do not operate in isolation. They interact in ways that can either support change or generate friction that reinforces the status quo.

Take home insulation, for example. Whether people insulate depends not only on motivation or costs, but also on the availability of skilled installers, the stability of government policy, the availability of trusted advice, and the experiences and expectations of others around them.

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Behaviour change is often framed narrowly as a matter of individual choice: give people better information, the right incentive, or a small push, and change will follow. But many climate-relevant behaviours do not work like that. They are shaped by the broader systems in which people are embedded.

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We recently published a report from a project at SEVEN, in which we used group model building to map the systems shaping home insulation and shifting electricity use away from peak hours in the Netherlands: seven.uva.nl/en/content/n... It also highlights something broader about behaviour change 🧵

Simplified Causal Loop Diagram for Insulating to the Standard

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This has implications for policy: the most impactful interventions are unlikely to be isolated campaigns or one-off incentives, but efforts to change the structures that shape behaviour.

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These factors do not operate in isolation. They interact in ways that can either support change or generate friction that reinforces the status quo.

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Behaviour change is often framed narrowly as a matter of individual choice: give people better information, the right incentive, or a small push, and change will follow. But most climate-relevant behaviours do not work like that. They are shaped by the broader systems in which people are embedded.