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Two University of Connecticut political scientists, Lyle Scruggs and Salil Benegal, using a wider range of evidence from both the United States and Europe, found He said the decline in climate anxiety at that time was largely due to poor economic conditions, which raised concern about more pressing issues. In times of scarcity, people tend to think less about policies with long-term payoffs.

“The state of the economy affects people’s sensitivity to the present versus the future,” said Professor Scruggs. “Historically, climate change has fallen into the same camp as many other environmental problems, where people’s responses tend to increase and decrease with the economy.”

This research suggests that if a central bank can deliver consistent prosperity, it can change some of the political dynamics on aggressive climate action. Welfare can support branches of government with more explicit responsibility to reduce greenhouse gases, build clean energy capacity, or help communities adapt to more extreme weather conditions.

Not everyone who studies public opinion on climate agrees.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Climate Change Communications Program, attributes the waning of concerns about climate change in the early 2010s not to the weak economy, but to political polarization and the conservative media’s shift towards climate change denial.

“What we saw was a symbiotic relationship between conservative media, conservative elected officials and conservative public,” he said. “He drove that shift. It wasn’t the economy.”

Paper published This summer, Michael T. Kiley, a Fed employee, analyzed how temperature changes affect economic performance. It concluded that climate change may not change the typical rate of growth in the economy over time, but may make severe recessions more common. For example, a major crop failure directly lowers GDP and can simultaneously create economic volatility effects such as bank failures.

And Lael Brainard, who was appointed by the potential Biden to become a Fed governor and the next president, stressed that the unpredictable nature of climate change can invalidate the historical models on which economic policy is based.