Why Not Change?
Sharon November 2nd, 2009
Interesting paper from the World Bank about why people aren’t making more life changes in relationship to climate change.
The author writes:
“Myriad private acts of consumption are at the root of the climate change challenge. As consumers, individuals hold a reservoir of mitigation capacity. Roughly 40% of OECD emissions result from decisions by individuals - travel, heating and food purchases.”
That 40% number is actually low - it assumes that we wish to continue on more or less as we have been. Consumer spending drives 70% of the economy and accounts, depending on how you calculate the number, for considerably over half of all emissions, if you draw the circle properly - radically reducing consumption would have ripple effects - businesses would close, for example, and thus not run their computers and lights all night long.
The paper goes on to analyze the reasons that people don’t make changes in economics-psychology language, but offers some interesting observations, including a sense of the deep scientific illiteracy that we face. One in four Americans, for example, can’t identify a single fossil fuel.
This is, of course, pitiable and pathetic, but I don’t think it is the deepest reason, nor do I think that the World Bank gets it quite right. My own suspicion is that the problem is not that ordinary people are too dumb , but too smart.
The two “sides” of the climate change story both tell essentially the same narrative. On one side there is something bad, that will change your world forever, take away your security and do you great harm. On the other, there is the world as we know it, with only a little variation. Unsurprisingly, most people prefer the more familiar choice.
If you believe the climate skeptics, behind door number 1 is the world as we know it, maybe a little bit warmer and dryer, but whatever, and behind door number 2 a nightmare of rising costs and poverty, one world government and all sorts of other baddies. If you believe the climate activists, behind door number 1 is the world as we know it, only with renewable energies and maybe a tiny bit higher taxes. Behind door number 2 is ecological disaster - rising seas, hunger, disease, etc…
Who wouldn’t prefer to offer people a familiar choice - that’s a no-brainer. The problem is that the conflict between the two stories being told makes people uneasy - most of them instinctively grasp that it will be hard to fix the economy and get us all buying again and also cut our energy by those big numbers people ask about. Where will the money come from? And they also instinctively recognize that the climate is changing around them - that you can see and feel it, and that we all know that the climate has changed before. Being told that this is no big deal doesn’t quite work - even for people who aren’t sure they believe global warming is anthropogenic.
That is, most people instinctively distrust those who tell us that things will be easy and quick and painless, at the same time that we desperately want to grasp onto an easy and quick and painless solution. And both sides of the discussion have largely failed to tell the truth - that the only choices out there for us are not “easy and familiar vs. terrible and unfamiliar” but two versions of unfamiliar - one in which we change ourselves in response to a changing world, simultaneously softening the degree of physical change and expanding the degree of personal change, and the other in which we cling desperately to the shattered remains of the familiar in a world that is utterly transformed around us.
If we ever want people to fully grasp the connection between their way of life and the future, we have to tell the truth about it. It won’t be easy or pleasant, but it is only then that we can begin to change.
Sharon