Summary

Short videos featuring stories of people impacted by extreme weather, such as hurricanes and wildfires, can be particularly persuasive in convincing people who recently experienced a climate-fueled extreme weather event that polluters should pay for climate-fueled natural disasters.

Study Design

This test was run in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Debbie in September 2024. Participants were sourced from counties in South Carolina under a mandatory evacuation order from Hurricane Debbie as well as a sample of people from unaffected counties in Texas with similar vulnerability to hurricanes and a similar score on the item “Corporations should do more to address global warming” from the Yale Climate Opinion Maps.

Participants received two types of video ads: Half received video stories of real survivors of hurricanes (Impact), and half received Impact videos as well as a video demanding polluters be held responsible (Impact + Vilification). Control group participants received no videos.  

Participants were then asked to rate their agreement to the following statements:

1. Oil and gas companies profit substantially while knowingly harming people.
2. Communities are paying for the losses and financial costs from oil and gas companies’ actions.
3. Oil and gas companies should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change, including their impacts on extreme weather events.

Key Findings

• People in counties under a mandatory evacuation order from Hurricane Debbie had significantly higher agreement to all outcomes – that oil and gas companies profit while knowingly harming people, that communities are paying for the costs for oil and gas companies’ actions, and that they should be held legally accountable for their contributions to extreme weather.
• People in the affected area (South Carolina) who received only the Impact videos had a higher level of agreement with the perception that communities are paying for the costs from oil and gas companies’ actions, compared to people in the unaffected area (Texas). (This result was not found in the case of the Impact plus Vilification group.) This indicates that villainizing fossil fuel companies explicitly does not necessarily strengthen the message that they should be held accountable, but instead that authentic, first-hand stories of the impacts of extreme weather are the strongest messages. It is also possible that more exposure to vilification messaging is needed. Future research should explore whether increased frequency of vilification messaging improves persuasion.