Nation states need to address global climate change with ever increasing levels of stringency, as scientific evidence available suggests that efforts implemented so far will massively overshot the 2° Paris Agreement scenario. A central component of the international agreement is the role of a progression of commitments and thus a strengthening of domestic policies to reach the proposed targets.

More stringent climate change policies (e.g. an increase of a carbon tax) will come at a cost. A cost with respect to economic growth or international competitiveness for firms and at a cost for individuals resulting from higher expenditures for heating, mobility or housing. The yellow vest protest in France prominently figure as an example on how more stringent policies and their distributive consequences may lead to increased politicization of the climate issue and even outright protest. I use the recent complete revision of the Swiss CO2 law (the main climate policy instrument in Switzerland) as an example of a change towards a more ambitious climate policy and experimentally test whether and which distributional implications of the policy change matter in people's consideration of supporting or opposing the revision. Moreover, people were asked about their preferences in compensating losers of the reform. Preliminary results suggest that people generally react very negatively to information on distributional implications and that preferences regarding compensation vary widely and line up well with partisanship.