Living Like There Really is a Climate Crisis?

How can we use behavior science to persuade people to solve the Climate Crisis? I recently attended a UCSB Psychology talk on this subject. To me, facts and evidence should be enough. It takes a lot more than that for most people.

It turns out that people who are most environmentally aware are often worse than average in their environmental impacts. One reason: They tend to be more educated than average, hence have higher incomes, which often leads to more consumption.

There is also the question of “elasticity.” Some behaviors are hard to change. People drive based on perceived options available. Raising the price or shaming has little effect. The speaker lives in the Netherlands and his family is car-free. But if they lived in the U.S., he said they would probably own two cars. Civilized countries provide good public transit and life is designed around it.

It is not just about individual behavior. It is about voting for massive public investment in urgently needed energy and transportation infrastructure.

The speaker quoted Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.” Scientists have been warning about the Climate Crisis for decades.

Just as environmentally aware individuals don’t do much better than average, the same is true for countries. Europeans already have half of the environmental footprint as Americans. But there has been surprisingly little new action in Europe.

There is a fundamental disconnect between what people “believe” and how they actually live and act.

Skeptic podcaster Michael Shermer recently interviewed The New York Times best-selling author David Lipsky about his book The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial. Roger Revelle was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and warned of the Climate Crisis in Time Magazine in 1956. This was a common topic in the mainstream media in the 1950s-’70s.

The JASON advisory group on science and technology grew out of Sputnik. They published a 1979 report warning that action was needed to head off serious climate problems due to burning fossil fuel.

President Jimmy Carter promoted sustainable energy but actually did little. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen delivered an address to the Senate warning that action was needed to halt global warming. President Ronald Reagan acted by cutting Hansen’s funding.

That same year, the UN set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The fossil fuel industry did not oppose it. Why? Lipsky said they loved the fact that it meant a delay of 20 years while the IPCC “studied the problem!”

George Bush Sr. actually did want to take action. His secretary of state and secretary of energy agreed. But his Chief of Staff John Sununu killed it on political grounds. Neither party took meaningful action. With the notable exception of Joe Biden, who got major climate/sustainable energy funding into the Inflation Recovery Act. But it is still far from what is needed.

Lipsky drew a contrast with COVID: In a matter of weeks, our entire way of life changed. The Climate Crisis threatens far more devastation than COVID. Yet our lives continue unchanged. It becomes self-fulfilling. People think that if it were really serious, we would make COVID-level changes. Since that is not happening, it must not be that serious. Hence, no major action occurs.

Lipsky talked about a dialogue where a Walmart representative said that we are making things worse for our grandchildren. A Nature Conservancy representative replied that watching our behavior for decades, he can see that we don’t really care about our grandchildren.

When the U.S. entered World War II, no one asked how we were going to pay for it or why we had to give up normal life for the war effort. We need that level of mobilization to develop and deploy sustainable energy, sustainable transportation, direct carbon capture, and heroic measures to keep glaciers from sliding into the ocean. This is an emergency. It is as if the Titanic is heading for the iceberg and we are not even rearranging the deck chairs.

We can’t act after the ship is sinking. Do people understand that we urgently have to act now?