PBS NewsHour - Nsikan Akpan
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| Local school children join Greta Thunberg's initiative on climate strike
during the COP24 UN Climate Change Conference 2018 in Katowice, Poland
December 14, 2018. Photo by Agencja Gazeta/Grzegorz Celejewski via
REUTERS
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Action on climate change has been stymied by politics, lobbying by
energy companies and the natural pace of scientific research — but one
of the most significant barriers is our own minds.
Think about how every town seems to have a traffic intersection
that’s needlessly dangerous. No matter how many times you think to
yourself, “They should really put in a stoplight here,” you don’t call
the proper authorities. (You’re already late for work, and it feels like
someone else’s problem to solve.)
Our mental responses to global warming and climate change follow a
similar script. What needs to be done is clear enough — stop greenhouse
gases from occupying the atmosphere — and yet progress moves at a
snail’s pace. Three decades passed between the first report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the international
community’s pledge for action through the Paris climate accords.
Part of the reason it takes us so long to act is because the human brain has spent nearly 200,000 years focused on the present.
It took another two years for these governments to decide — at the COP24 conference in Poland — on
how to keep each other accountable. And keep in mind, the Paris agreement
still carries no legal powers of enforcement.
Part of the reason it takes us so long to act is because the human
brain has spent nearly 200,000 years focused on the present. “Find food.
Make shelter. Mate!” We only began to contemplate time, and by
extension the future, within the last few hundred years.
Making the future tangible is only one of the psychological barriers that have made climate change into an elusive problem that
now must be tackled in the next 12 years to limit devastation.
Our minds — regardless of one’s political or socioeconomic status —
are constantly looking for ways to tell ourselves that business as usual
is OK. News of disappearing glaciers fails to inspire serious change
because of this cognitive shield — indeed certain efforts to educate
only harden partisanship on the issue.
But it’s still possible to train your brain to get over these hurdles. Here’s how.
Apathy and discounting (why news stories about polar bears don’t inspire action)
Overcoming these hurdles relies on the careful intersection of three
key dimensions — almost like trying a Rubik’s Cube, said Robert Gifford,
an environmental psychologist at the University of Victoria in British
Columbia.
The first dimension centers on finding the best way to change a person’s behaviors toward the environment.
To do that, you need to tap into another dimension: a person’s demographics — how much money they make or where they live.
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| A polar bear outside Churchill, Manitoba, which is located on the
animals’ annual migration route. Photo by Tim Auer/Polar Bears
International |
Finally, there are what Gifford calls “
dragons of inaction” — the specific cognitive barriers that dominate someone’s view of climate change.
“The perception of not having control over the situation is certainly one of the biggest” barriers, Gifford said.
Whenever the NewsHour covers climate change, the most common
responses we get from those who don’t believe that humans influence
climate change point to the ice ages. They cite how the Earth has
experienced natural cycles, between extreme cold and heat, for
millennia.
These beliefs are known as nature-benign worldviews, because they
suggest the planet is impervious to carbon pollution or any activity
performed by Earth’s creatures — even it is done by billions of them,
repeatedly in developed countries, for more than a century.
No one wants to believe their daily
activities are responsible for a global disaster that has already turned
millions of people into climate refugees and killed scores of others.
Research shows some deniers may espouse these opinions
because they have a personal stake — whether it’s stock investments in fossil fuel companies or they simply enjoy a drive in their gas-powered car.
“But these people are honestly ignoring the fact that
the temperature is rising at a rate beyond anything that anybody’s seen for thousands of years,” Gifford said. “
It’s pretty clear that it’s not a natural cycle.”
Cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort created by holding more
than one conflicting belief at once, plays a part in these dismissals
too, Gifford said.
No one wants to believe their daily activities — from switching on a
light to checking your phone to washing your hair to going to work — are
responsible for a global disaster that has already turned
millions of people into climate refugees and killed scores of others.
So people change their minds about the issue rather than changing
their habits because it’s an easier way to cope, Gifford said.
Gifford’s lab has found this cognitive tension runs alongside another
barrier known as discounting, wherein people undervalue climate change
because its hazards don’t feel immediate or nearby. When they surveyed
3,200 people across 18 nations, they found a majority — those from 15
countries —
believed incorrectly that climate change wasn’t a local problem.
Spatial discounting helps explain why people maintain the status quo — or become
more polarized
— even if their news feeds are swamped by viral stories of giant
icebergs breaking off Antarctica, or polar bears swimming until they
drown.
If the message lacks personal or local relevance,
research shows that people will be less engaged.
Ignorance (why people don’t know how to live environmentally)
Another of these “dragons of inaction” is ignorance — not in a
negative sense, but rather a lack of information. People often recognize
that climate change is bad but
don’t know quite what to do about it in their own lives.
Washing clothes in cold water can save up to 15 pounds of carbon emissions per load.
For instance, even if many people know that
the average American emits about 17 tons of carbon every year, they don’t realize half of those emissions could be eliminated with simple fixes.
“The average house has air leakage equivalent to a small window being
open all year round,” said Richard Heede, co-founder and co-director of
the Climate Accountability Institute. “If people can caulk these leaky
areas, it would help reduce cold infiltration and lower heating bills.”
Heating and cooling account for
53 percent of household emissions, which can be cut by switching to energy-efficient appliances or brushing your teeth with cold instead of hot water.
“Lower the water heater temperature from the normal preset of 140
degrees Fahrenheit to 120,” Heede said. “That’s easy enough, and it
prevents scalding by friends and visitors.”
Washing clothes in cold water
can save up to 15 pounds of carbon emissions per load, depending on your washing machine and your energy supplier.
You can check your home’s carbon footprint and ways to shrink it with
this tool or
this one.
Awareness (why so few are driving electric cars)
Experts view the abandonment of gas-burning vehicles as essential to meeting climate goals. In 2014,
nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions were created by transportation, a sector that accounts
for 70 percent of U.S. petroleum consumption,
most of which — 99 percent — is used by cars, trucks and airplanes. In
the U.S., transportation is the biggest source of greenhouse gas
emissions.
How you can make a
difference with climate change
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A battery charger sign for electric cars is painted on the ground of a
parking ground near the soccer stadium in Wolfsburg, Germany, April 6,
2016. Photo by REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
Here are some steps — both tangible and psychological — you can take on your own:
- Caulk air leaks around doors and windows in your house
- Swap out older appliances and light bulbs for more energy-efficient models
- Brush your teeth (and wash your clothes) with cold water
- Lower your water heater to 120 degrees Fahrenheit
- Trade your conventional vehicle for a plug-in hybrid
- If you want to encourage others to make changes, talk about local or personal ways it affects you and your community
- Start thinking about your green identity, the parts of your lifestyle dedicated to climate change and its effects
- Vote with your wallet
- You can be a hero (just keep telling yourself that
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Yet even though every major automaker produces electric or hybrid
models, most lack mainstream brand recognition. Car dealerships — even
in California, which leads the nation in electric cars —
express an annoyance toward selling green vehicles.
Go ahead, name an electric car brand. Let me guess: You said Tesla.
Consumers in Canada and the U.S. are “aware that electric vehicles
exist as a thing, but don’t understand anything beyond that,” said Jonn
Axsen, who directs the
Sustainable Transportation Action Research Team at Simon Fraser University. “We find this repeatedly in our in our survey work.”
When his lab examined a survey of 1,700 new car buyers in Canada, they learned only
18 percent knew of a nearby electric car charging station. A second study found a
mere 22 percent reported being familiar with how plug-in cars work. Buyers said these things dissuaded them from purchasing electric vehicles.
But in what might be the biggest misconception about the transition
to electric vehicles, many respondents assumed that they need abundant
access to charging stations before they can invest in an electric car to
help the climate, Axsen said.
That’s because most folks are confused about the difference between
plug-in hybrid vehicles,
which can be plugged in or use gasoline, and pure electric vehicles,
Axsen said. “While niche groups of enthusiasts want to go pure electric,
that’s proven to be a small share of the market.”
Once a town or community
becomes aware of plug-in hybrids and how they operate,
Axsen’s group found, there is far more — about 75 percent — expressed
demand for that type of vehicle. Consumers can charge them at home for
daily city commutes, but still go on unplanned road trips with the
gasoline engine.
Contrary to concerns about how far you can drive, “your range is even
longer than a conventional vehicle because you have both the battery
and the inefficient gasoline engine to work with,” Axsen said.
On the long road to decarbonizing vehicles, the IPCC views hybrid
vehicles as “instrumental,” given that transportation emission must drop
by 15 to 30 percent in the coming decades to stop the calamity of 1.5
degrees Celsius of warming.
Delusions and procrastination (why politicians are taking so long to act)
Washington, D.C., the city proper, is the definition of a liberal
stronghold. The District has elected a Democrat in every mayoral race
since 1961 and has never voted in favor of a Republican president in its
history. The nation’s capital is also a car city, with more than
310,000 registered vehicles. That’s about 5,000 vehicles per square mile, which rivals megacities like
New York (7,200); it’s three times as congested as
Los Angeles (1,700).
Even after politicians become
convinced that climate change matters, they set ineffective policy goals
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — a basic premise that scholars have
noticed for decades.
Despite its liberal core, only
1 percent of new vehicles on D.C. streets were electric in 2016, a lower percentage than in Detroit and Salt Lake City. Its total fleet of electric vehicles
falls outside the top-10 for U.S. cities.
So how can a government like D.C.’s, which often touts its
leadership on energy efficiency, not take steps to boost the city’s supply of electric vehicles?
One of Axsen’s colleague’s at Simon Fraser University — Mark Jaggard —
says it happens because policymakers are deluding themselves.
Even after politicians become convinced that climate change matters,
they set ineffective policy goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — a
basic premise that Axsen said other scholars have noticed for decades.
“Time after time, [lawmakers] either put in no effective policies or
very few effective policies — where there is no evidence that those
policies will get anywhere near their targets,” Axsen said. “It has been
happening for decades, and it is everywhere.”
He cites the slow national adoption of the zero-emission vehicle
mandate as the starkest example. This policy, which was first
implemented in California in 1990, requires automakers to ensure that a
certain number of electric vehicles are on the road.
“The beauty, at least from a public policy perspective, is that it
puts the onus on automakers,” Axsen said. “When carmakers are required
to make, develop, market and sell electric vehicles, then they will
channel their resources into doing that,” and it has a snowball effect.
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| Zero-emission vehicle programs could nearly eliminate petroleum use in
passenger vehicles by 2050 in the U.S., yet only nine states have
followed California’s lead in 30 years. Photo by REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson |
It usually goes like this: Automakers begin swapping subsidies, which
lower prices for consumers. These backroom deals also reduce the number
of government-funded incentives — tax credits — needed to promote
electric vehicle adoption. Such incentives can become prohibitively
expensive for a city and its citizens as the market grows.
More money going into research and development to bring the cost down
for batteries eventually means “a wider range of makes and models of
electric vehicles and more marketing efforts in order to make people
aware of the different vehicles,” Axsen said.
Research shows that the zero-emission vehicle programs could nearly eliminate petroleum use in passenger vehicles
by 2050 in the U.S., yet only
nine states have followed California’s lead in 30 years. Automakers and their lobbyists argue
that the mandate places too high a burden on vehicle manufacturers. D.C.’s landmark climate bill, which
would transition the city to 100 percent renewable energy, does not include a plan for reaching zero emissions from vehicles.
The political reluctance around the zero-emission vehicle mandate mirrors what happened with solar energy, which
only ballooned in the last decade thanks in part to government support.
Carbon capture and storage technology, which sucks carbon dioxide out of the sky, has also faced a slow rollout.
As of 2018,
there are 18 large-scale carbon capture facilities operating in the world, up from
a tally of 17 the year before.
Akshat Rathi, who has thoroughly
covered this issue for Quartz, reports that the world needs
at least 200 of these facilities by 2025 to hit zero emissions. Meanwhile, there are 500 coal plants currently under construction worldwide, and another 1,000 planned for the near future.
Based on every climate scenario studied by the IPCC, the Earth cannot
stop the coming devastation wrought by global warming without carbon
capture and storage; the
global dearth of carbon capture continues to
threaten the Paris accords emissions targets for 2030.
Internal motivation (why you can still make a difference)
Every expert interviewed for this story said that if people want to
stop this slow, collective demise by a thousand political half-steps,
the best weapon is you.
Consumers have a lot of power to
adjust their spending habits, what they invest then and what their
concerns are. We vote with our dollars.
People tend to mold their behaviors around what they already favor.
If you favor patriotism, you’ll attend parades. If you favor the
outdoors, you’ll go camping or hunting.
So how we internally frame our discussions about climate change is
one of the keys to motivating action, Gifford said. (Alternatively, if
you give people outside incentives to do the right thing
environmentally, the behavior stops pretty much when the incentive
stops.)
“The goal is trying to get people to have a green identity, an
intrinsic motivation instead of an extrinsic motivation,” Gifford said.
One way to shape environmental attitudes is to explain how climate change will directly affect a person’s lifestyle, such as by
threatening national security or
national parks, he said.
“Another messaging strategy that works across the board is not
telling people that they’re going to have to sacrifice,” Gifford said.
“Research shows that pro-environment messages stick best when you tell
people that they can be a hero by helping others.”
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| Public pressure led to a $6 trillion in divestment from fossil fuels. Photo by REUTERS/Simon Dawson |
Heede echoed this sentiment, pointing to massive efforts by investors toward green energy. One student-inspired campaign has
pledged to divest $6 trillion from fossil fuels since 2011, and global investments in clean energy have exceeded
$200 billion for the last eight years.
Heede said this investor pressure has led most oil and gas companies to pledge reductions in carbon emissions —
at least with their field operations. Shell has even developed a global plan for reaching zero emissions,
though it calls on increases in coal, natural gas and oil for decades.
Grassroots efforts
have also spawned political pressure and movements like the Green New Deal in the House of Representatives.
“Increasingly shareholders are more activist with respect to
climate,” Heede said. But you don’t have to be a millionaire to make a
difference. “Consumers have a lot of power to adjust their spending
habits, what they invest then and what their concerns are. We vote with
our dollars.”
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