Local governments play a key role in addressing the climate crisis. However, despite public support for climate action, the policy response has been uneven. We argue that (1) biased beliefs about voter preferences, (2) the time horizon for credit claiming, and (3) source credibility shape the willingness of politicians to learn and adopt new environmental policies. We test our arguments in a large, scalable field experiment embedded in a webinar on climate solutions for local governments. The webinar host sent different versions of the same invitation to public officials in six Western countries. We find that providing constituency opinion on climate made local officials more likely to follow public preferences. Policy interest was also higher when the invitation emphasized the short-term effects of acting on climate, and when it was sent by a climate scientist. Only United States legislators responded more to an invite from a public official than from a policy expert. The results reveal concrete steps to induce local climate action and contribute to scholarship on policy learning.