Archive for the ‘behavior’ Category
« Older Entries |How much is a ton of CO2?
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
One of the challenges of climate literacy is helping folks visualize fossil fuel emissions and their impacts.
Last year, Bowdoin College completed its emissions inventory and climate action plan. We discovered that the campus emits a total of 24,000 tons of CO2 equivalents each year. So how much is that really?
One student decided to help illustrate this by creating an art installation, cordoning off a 27-ft x 27-ft x 27-ft cube in the student center with red ribbon.
Now imagine 24,000 of these cubes emanating from a college campus each year. That helps show the magnitude of the challenge.
_____
Photo courtesy of Bowdoin College
Posted in behavior, campus sustainability, climate change science, communication and framing, energy, higher education | 1 Comment »
The hidden global CO2 emissions of consumerism
Monday, March 8th, 2010
It’s been easy for citizens of the developed, industrialized world to criticize China and India over their rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions. This was one of the major reasons why the Kyoto Protocol was never ratified in the United States.
As many have pointed out, however, there are several flaws with this argument:
- The per-capita carbon emissions in China and India remain much lower (1/4 and 1/16, respectively) compared to the U.S..
- Perhaps more importantly, some of the carbon emission in these countries is caused by the production of export goods to fuel consumer demand in wealthy nations. Thus, we are responsible for “shadow carbon emissions” that get attributed to developing nations.
Until today, there haven’t been very good estimates of these kinds of shadow emissions.
In the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Steven Davies and Ken Caldeira examine how much CO2 is embodied in the import and export of goods.1
Their results are interesting (excerpts below—If you can get a copy of the article, check out figures 1 and 2; they are terrific visuals for this information. Alas, copyrights don’t allow me to post them):
- Approximately 6.2 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2, 23% of all CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, were emitted during the production of goods that were ultimately consumed in a different country.
- Emissions imported to the United States exceed those of any other country or region, primarily embodied in machinery (91 Mt), electronics (77 Mt), motor vehicles and parts (75 Mt), chemical, rubber, and plastic products (52 Mt), unclassified manufactured products (52 Mt), wearing apparel (42 Mt), and intermediate goods (654 Mt).
- These imports are offset by considerable US exports of transport services (49 Mt CO2), machinery (42 Mt), electronics (26 Mt), chemical, rubber, and plastics products (25 Mt), motor vehicles (22 Mt), and intermediate goods (263 Mt).
- [G]oods imported to Western Europe and Japan embody much more CO2 per US$ than do their exports, reflecting the import of energy-intensive products from elsewhere.
- The carbon intensity of imports to China, Russia, India, and the Middle East is consistently far less than that of their exports.
- China is by far the largest net exporter of emissions, followed by Russia, the Middle East, South Africa, Ukraine, and India and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and areas of South America.
- The primary net importers of emissions are the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy. Although the overall mass of emissions is much less, the other countries of Western Europe are all net importers, as are New Zealand, Mexico, Singapore, and many areas of Africa and South America. Similarly, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, and Egypt are among the countries whose net exports of emissions are small.
- On a per-capita basis, net imports of emissions to the United States, Japan, and countries in Western Europe are disproportionately large, with each individual consumer associated with 2.4–10.3 tons of CO2 emitted elsewhere.
Their conclusion:
Consumption-based accounting reveals that substantial CO2 emissions are traded internationally and therefore not included in traditional production-based national emissions inventories. The net effect of trade is the export of emissions from China and other emerging markets to consumers in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. In the large economies of Western Europe, net imported emissions are 20–50% of consumption emissions; the net imported emissions fall to 17.8% and 10.8% in Japan and the United States, respectively. In contrast, net exports represent 22.5% of emissions produced in China. Thus, to the extent that constraints on emissions in developing countries are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.
1Steven J. Davis and Ken Caldeira (2010). Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions PNAS : 10.1073/pnas.0906974107
_____
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deks/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
Tags: China, India
Posted in behavior, climate change science, climate economics, energy, nature and culture, technology, transportation | 1 Comment »
Climate communication: Is fear + collective action a winning strategy?
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
In a previous post from my series on why people don’t engage climate change, I described my interpretations of work by Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling1, which suggested that the use of fear can be a poor way to motivate behavioral changes to deal with climate warming:
Challenge 6: Fear can change perception but not willingness to take action and can lead to counterintuitive behaviors (like the “SUV effect”)
2006 was a watershed year in public opinion on climate change. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Time Magazine’s famous polar bear cover had the world scared to death about climate change. They grabbed people’s attention and raised awareness, but they didn’t do much to galvanize widespread action against climate warming. As we’ll see in the next post, 82% of Americans have not engaged the issue of climate change personally.
Even worse, if people become fearful of climate change, it could encourage counterintuitive behaviors. For example, people might think, if it really does get stormier or icier in my area, I will need the SUV because it has 4-wheel drive. The irony is not lost, given that large vehicles and their greenhouse gas emissions are part of the reason why we have climate warming in the first place.
When I first saw the Time cover, I thought that mainstream media is finally getting climate change and that people would start demanding action. Now I’m not so sure fear is an effective tactic for driving change.
I also noted in that post that when people are fearful but don’t know what to do in the face of complex problems like climate warming, there can be a tendency to do nothing.
New research by Martijn van Zomeren and colleagues in the Journal of Environmental Psychology2 is beginning to challenge these views (emphasis added):
An inconvenient truth, the book and documentary by Nobel-prize laureate and former US Vice-President Al Gore, is a real-life example of the presumed power of psychology to increase pro-environmental behavior by telling individuals what they could do, and by telling them what to fear if they fail to do this. Although many applauded Gore’s efforts to raise environmental awareness and action, there was a danger that the fear invoked by his message could be counter-productive. Raising fear about the consequences of smoking and safe sex, for example, is thought to undermine health behavior if individuals do not have a sufficient sense of efficacy to transform their fear into action. Without such a sense of self-efficacy, fear is thought to lead individuals to protect themselves against their fear (rather than to take action to reduce the cause for fear). A key aim of this paper is to challenge this pessimistic conclusion.
Although we believe concern for the counter-productive effects of fear appeals is warranted, we think that self-protective responses are most likely in the context of individual problems such as individual health behavior. When individuals perceive a problem as an individual problem, their individual action should be best predicted by their self-efficacy beliefs. Unlike smoking and safer sex, however, one can perceive the climate crisis as a collective problem that requires collective action. Collective action is aimed at promoting collective interests, even if it is pursued by individuals. When individuals perceive a problem as collective, their collective action should be best predicted by their group efficacy beliefs – the belief that group goals can be achieved through joint effort.
This team is arguing that fear of climate warming impacts needs to be coupled with a clear message that
- climate warming is a collective-action problem;
- people can work together effectively to deal with climate warming.
In a series of experiments with university students in the Netherlands, the researchers manipulated climate fear (fear vs. no fear) and collective action efficacy (group action can be effective vs. no information about group action) through the use of different sets of readings.
After completing the different sets of readings, the students ranked in the following order (highest to lowest) in terms of their intentions to take actions on climate warming:
- fear + group action can be effective
- no fear + group action can be effective
- fear + no information on group action
- no fear + no information on group action
What’s interesting about this is the apparent importance on providing information on how collective action can be important. Their results suggested that even students who were not given fearful messages about climate warming were still willing to take action on warming if shown how to do so.
This brings us back to one of my points in the earlier post.
Challenge 3: Specific warming impacts and solutions are seldom conveyed clearly
Rather than just telling people that warming will be bad and we should all be afraid, warming advocates should state examples of how the impacts will be experienced by people in a specific region and specific steps that people can take to help adapt to or mitigate them. Empower people to become part of the solutions process rather than letting them sit on the sidelines. Climate warming is not a spectator sport.
To paraphrase FDR: The only thing we have to fear is fear (when used by) itself.
It’s an interesting idea, although I’m not yet convinced for several reasons:
- I’d like to see how well this resonates with working-class America rather than students from a country like the Netherlands where people are much more likely to be socially conditioned to take action on climate warming. Put another way, in certain cultural contexts, fear + solutions may work. In others, fear + anything may turn people off.
- As I mentioned above, research suggests that 82% of Americans have not engaged the issue of climate change personally. Is there really a lack of information on what we can do collectively to deal with climate warming, or is there a lack of interest in taking collective action? I think it’s both. So long as climate warming solutions are framed in terms of national or international policy (cap and trade or C taxes) or matters of renewable energy innovation and investment, people will feel like they have little leverage to engage either of these approaches—either individually or collectively.
- One might argue that collective action can be promulgated as political action at local, state, and federal levels. However, the deep cynicism about the efficacy of federal institutions may dissuade people from investing the effort. And when the world continues to struggle with the recession and unemployment, jobs will usually trump collective action on climate.
- It’s a complex story with multiple layers of cultural and economic confounding factors. Just as scientific evidence seldom speaks for itself, clear pathways for collective action may not translate to greater action either.
1Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (2004) Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and Challenge of Global Climate Change. Environment
2Martijn van Zomeren, Russell Spears, Colin Wayne Leach (2010). Experimental evidence for a dual pathway model analysis of coping with the climate crisis Journal of Environmental Psychology : 10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.02.006
_____
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunadirimmel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, solutions | 2 Comments »
Land consumption and open space loss across U.S. cities
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
The issue of land use change is a complex, with many factors being important historically, such as
- population growth (more land required for more people)
- technology (e.g., automobiles made suburban expansion feasible)
- economics (cheaper land and rents in suburbs compared to cities)
- policy (things like 30-yr mortgages, mortgage insurance, and FHA loans had a large impact on urban sprawl because they often made it cheaper to own rather than rent)
- cultural values (the romanticized notion of a detached home in a safe, pollution-free neighborhood with good schools)
In this week’s PLoS One, Robert McDonald and colleagues1 examined land use change for 274 metro areas (figure 1) in the U.S. to determine tends across cities.
Their results were interesting (excerpts):
- 1.4 million ha of open space was lost, and the amount lost in a given city was correlated with population growth.
- American cities vary by more than an order of magnitude in their MSA-wide per capita land consumption. Generally large cities have small per capita land consumption, with the five smallest in 2000 being New York (459 m2/person), Miami (476 m2/person), Philadelphia (519 m2/person), Los Angeles (535 m2/person), and Washington, DC (536 m2/person). Conversely, many small cities have large per capita land consumption, with the five biggest in 2000 being Grand Forks, ND (5394 m2/person), Bismark, ND (3913 m2/person), Flagstaff, AZ (3381 m2/person), Enid, OK (3249 m2/person), and Cheyenne, WY (3073 m2/person).
- The per capita land consumption (m2/person) of most cities decreased on average over the decade from 1,564 to 1,454 m 2/person, but there was substantial regional variation and some cities even increased.
- Cities with greater conservation funding or more reform-minded zoning tended to decrease in per capita land consumption (scroll to table 1) more than other cities.
- The inequality of land consumption varied geographically, with less inequality on the East Coast compared to the West Coast (scroll to figure 4).
They provide a simplified snapshot of how development changes with history and geography (for a more-thorough yet readable treatment of land use in the U.S., check out Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson):
The process of development plays out differently in cities with different socioeconomic histories. Moreover, cultural differences exist among and within many U.S. cities, leading to varying spatial patterns of development. However, a general historical pattern exists. In many U.S. cities, an urban core existed in the decades or centuries prior to the widespread use of the automobile, and these neighborhoods have high population density and small amounts of developed area per capita. The surrounding suburban and exurban areas, created predominately after WWII, contain residents living at lower population density and consume more land per capita. There are substantial economic links between these two zones, and in contemporary U.S. cities commuting occurs in both directions. Northeast U.S. cities that developed before the automobile typically follow this narrative. Many have a relatively dense urban core, but have adopted zoning policies that ensure contemporary suburban settlements occur at lower density. While they remain dense compared to other U.S. cities, they are getting less dense over time, as proportionally more of the population is in suburban areas. The declining manufacturing cities of the Rust Belt and the Southern Appalachians are an extreme example of this spreading out of population.
Southeastern U.S. cities, excluding Florida, are often newer and have less of a legacy of a dense urban core. They do not appear to be getting markedly denser, and the relatively fast population growth of these cities implies that their total impact on natural habitat in coming decades will be large. In contrast to the Southeast, Western cities appear to be getting denser, including those that do not have a historical legacy of a dense urban core such as Phoenix. These Western cities are often still growing quickly and consuming a great deal of land, but contemporary development is making these cities denser than they were previously. Many of these Western cities have a strong conservation culture, and the degree of conservation funding and reform-minded zoning correlates with how much denser they are getting. However, it should be noted that contemporary development in Western cities is still well below the densities found in the dense urban core of Northeastern U.S. cities, posing problems for designing effective public transit systems.
1McDonald, R., Forman, R., & Kareiva, P. (2010). Open Space Loss and Land Inequality in United States’ Cities, 1990–2000 PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009509
_____
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobjagendorf/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
Posted in behavior, land use, nature and culture, policy, population, sustainability, transportation, urban | No Comments »
Lindsey Graham on climate warming: “I am doing something different”
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
In a previous post, I mentioned that it’s worth listening to Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to understand what might move conservative politicians towards a serious conversation about climate warming.
Tom Friedman does just that in Sunday’s NY Times.
Graham’s reasons for taking climate change seriously: politics, jobs, and legacy. His story is unusual and refreshing:
“I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are 30 or younger this climate issue is not a debate. It’s a value. These young people grew up with recycling and a sensitivity to the environment — and the world will be better off for it. They are not brainwashed. … From a Republican point of view, we should buy into it and embrace it and not belittle them. You can have a genuine debate about the science of climate change, but when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people.”
….And for those Republicans who think this is only a loser, Senator Graham says think again: “What is our view of carbon as a party? Are we the party of carbon pollution forever in unlimited amounts? Pricing carbon is the key to energy independence, and the byproduct is that young people look at you differently.” Look at how he is received in colleges today. “Instead of being just one more short, white Republican over 50,” says Graham, “I am now semicool. There is an awareness by young people that I am doing something different.”
Posted in behavior, climate economics, energy, solutions | No Comments »
Science Magazine considers whether decreasing meat consumption can increase global food security
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
In this week’s special issue devoted to food security, Science asks what it will take to feed 9 billion people by mid century.
Food insecurity—the inability of people to feed themselves—may rise if food supply cannot keep pace with population. This is a concern that goes back over 200 years to Thomas Malthus.
One theme shows up in a few articles: Can reducing meat consumption help in the battle to feed more people?
Erik Stokstad’s news feature (subscription required)1 provides a nice lead:
The United States, for instance, has just 4.5% of the world’s population but accounts for about 15% of global meat consumption. Americans consume about 330 grams of meat a day on average—the equivalent of three quarter-pound hamburgers. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that most people consume just 142 to 184 grams of meat and beans daily. In the developing world, daily meat consumption averages just 80 grams. Those numbers suggest that people living in the United States and other wealthy nations could increase world grain supplies simply by forgoing that extra burger or chop.
However, he interviews researchers and cites studies that raise a number of issues potentially complicating this story…
Tags: meat and diet
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture, population, solutions | No Comments »
The humanities are key to environmental messaging
Friday, February 12th, 2010
It’s been an incredibly busy week, which explains the dearth of posts. But good things are happening, which I look forward to sharing.
As most of you know, there’s an energetic, ongoing debate about environmental messaging. With polls showing waning interest in climate warming as a serious issue, there’s a sense that the battle is being lost.
I mentioned in an earlier post that it’s often assumed that climate change science speaks for itself. All we have to do is publish good science and show the public a bunch of data, and this will lead to a collective consciousness demanding action on climate warming.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
One main problem is the failure to connect with people on a personal level. Thinking about the environment is not just about climate or wild nature; it’s about human nature, human experience, the intersection of nature and culture, how we interact with one another—things squarely in the domain of the social sciences and humanities. In order for society to connect with contemporary environmental issues, it’s critical that these voices become part of this conversation.
Yesterday, we brought back to campus Bowdoin alum Paul Miller (a.k.a., DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) to perform his major work, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.
Paul’s work is a beautiful illustration of how one artist has been able to put a human touch on climate warming. His show was packed with a hyped-up audience that cut across a wide swath of young and old.
Try doing that with a science seminar.
Amanda Little reminds us that there are no silver bullets for solving climate warming, only silver buckshot. Paul’s work (and the work of other popular artists like him) is a great example of one of those buckshot.
____
Photo Credit: Tiffany Gerdes, Bowdoin Orient
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, nature and culture, polar ice, solutions | 2 Comments »
Why do people vary so much in their environmental attitudes?
Monday, February 1st, 2010
New research by Jacob Hirsh in a forthcoming article in Environmental Psychology1 suggests that your personality may hold a big clue:
Excerpts (citations omitted):
…[E]nvironmentalism has been examined from the perspective of the “Big
Five” taxonomy of personality traits, which describes variation in human personality across the five broad dimensions of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. These broad trait dimensions can be used to predict more specific attitudes and value orientations. Two of these traits, Agreeableness and Openness, have emerged as significant predictors of pro-environmental values. These findings are consistent with theoretical models that relate pro-environmental attitudes to higher levels of empathy and self-transcendence, which appear to be related to Agreeableness and Openness, respectively. Individuals who are more empathic and less self-focused appear more likely to develop a personal connection with nature, which in turn predicts their pro-environmental attitudes. Indeed, developing such an emotional affinity toward the natural environment can bolster one’s motives for environmental protection.
Hirsh tested this idea with a much larger sample of people than studied previously—about 3,000 German adults. Bottom line: These predictions were confirmed: If you are an agreeable person open to new experiences, you are more likely to be concerned about the environment. There was an unexpected twist that neurotic and conscientious people also showed a slight tendency towards environmental concern as well.
What’s more agreeable than German guys dancing in Lederhosen?
1Hirsh, J.B. Personality and Environmental Concern, Journal of Environmental Psychology (2010), doi: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.01.004
____
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/phineasx/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior | 1 Comment »
Is There an Ecological Unconscious?
Monday, February 1st, 2010
That’s the title of a recent article in the NY Times by Daniel Smith. Another example of why it is useful to link Environmental Studies and Psychology in higher education.
Excerpts:
Last August, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” News-media coverage of the report concentrated on the habits of human behavior and the habits of thought that contribute to global warming. This emphasis reflected the intellectual dispositions of the task-force members who wrote the document — seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management — as well as the document’s stated purpose. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting,” Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, “in order to understand how to get people to act.”
Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”
…. Philosophically, the field depends on an ideal of ecological awareness or communion against which deficits can then be measured. And so it often seems to rest on assuming as true what it is trying to prove to be true: being mentally healthy requires being ecologically attuned, but being ecologically attuned requires being mentally healthy. And yet, in its ongoing effort to gain legitimacy, ecopsychology is at least looking for ways to establish standards. Recently, The American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, invited the members of the organization’s climate-change task force to submit individual papers; Thomas Doherty is taking the opportunity to develop his categorization of responses to environmental problems. His model, which he showed me an early draft of, makes distinctions that are bound to be controversial: at the pathological end of the spectrum, for example, after psychotic delusions, he places “frank denial” of environmental issues. The most telling feature of the model, however, may be how strongly it equates mental health with the impulse to “promote connection with nature” — in other words, with a deeply ingrained ecological outlook. Critics would likely point out that ecopsychologists smuggle a worldview into what should be the value-neutral realm of therapy. Supporters would likely reply that, like Bateson, ecopsychologists are not sneaking in values but correcting a fundamental error in how we conceive of the mind: to understand what it is to be whole, we must first explain what is broken.
Posted in behavior | No Comments »
Thoughts on addressing population and climate change in a just and ethical manner
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
That’s the title of a new article1 by Suzanne Petroni in the latest issue of Population and Environment (subscription required). She begins by acknowledging the complex history between these issues:
There is, in the field of population and reproductive health, a present debate around the merits and deficiencies of bringing the issue of global population growth back to the public agenda. Many see the current attention to the issue of climate change as an opening in which to make the case that global warming can not be alleviated or reversed without slowing population growth. They believe that linking population growth and climate change will help governments to see the exigency of the matter, and will place family planning back into the political realm as an urgent matter of national and environmental security….
But others worry that focusing on the environmental impacts of demographic change places at risk the hard-fought and long-developed global consensus that individual rights and empowerment are what matters most in fostering just and sustainable development. They fear that a renewed focus on the impacts of the growth of our global population poses a risk of drawing the international community back to numbers-driven policies and programs, which have not always prioritized individual interests…
- [D]oes the right of the community to live on a healthy planet trump the right of the individual to decide for him or herself, without external pressure, their own desired level of fertility?
- Does the United States, which emits a hugely disproportionate amount of greenhouse gases, have a right to suggest that other countries reduce their rates of population growth in order to somehow compensate for our profligate and consumptive lifestyles?
- How can we best balance a duty to future generations with the values of individual freedom and equality among the planet’s current occupants?
- And, while coercive means of population control have been widely condemned in most parts of the world, does making the ‘‘population-climate change connection’’ run the risk of countries seeing population control as an ‘‘easy fix’’ to the environmental challenges we face?
In light of these huge questions, what are her recommendations?
Posted in behavior, gender, health, population | No Comments »
Subscribe & Share
