What's in it for us? Moral foundations, co-benefit narratives and preferences for renewable energy investments

Abstract

Scaling of renewable energy (RE) delivers global mitigation and local co-benefits, such as enhanced energy security. Narratives and policies in the energy transition differ in their advocacy of international cooperation or competition, reflecting different priorities in securing co-benefits for one's own country or others. We conduct a pre-registered information provision experiment with 4,000+ representative respondents in Germany and Spain analyzing two novel determinants of locational mitigation preferences: moral universalism-altruism towards strangers versus in-group members- and economic narratives about the energy transition. In our 2x2 design, treatments manipulate the location-home versus developing country-of required investments in renewables and resulting cobenefits. We identify a universalism gap, underpinning the moral universalism literature: universalist individuals show stronger support for foreign RE projects than communitarians. While co-benefit narratives shift average policy preferences, they do not close this moral divide in preferences, even under narratives targeting communitarian audiences. Despite notable differences between Germany and Spain with respect to their technical and institutional environment to scale RE, the effects of the narratives and the association between moral universalism and policy preferences are consistent across both countries. Overall, our results indicate that moral foundations strongly shape locational mitigation preferences, and that communicating positive spillovers to the home country from RE investments abroad is an effective narrative to build support for climate transfers.