This is an interesting and important piece that’s worth reading in full. Here are a few snippets:

On Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses.

Passing the resolution might seem to be exactly what Americans want. After all, national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people.

But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.

….Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.

Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.

And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).

Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.

Bob Herbert’s column in today’s Times forces us to look in the mirror not only with regards to the Gulf oil spill but to the political-economic foundation of social and environmental problems in general:

The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. We take our whippings in stride in this country. We behave as though there is nothing we can do about it.

The fact that 11 human beings were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (their bodies never found) has become, at best, an afterthought. BP counts its profits in the billions, and, therefore, it’s important. The 11 men working on the rig were no more important in the current American scheme of things than the oystermen losing their livelihoods along the gulf, or the wildlife doomed to die in an environment fouled by BP’s oil, or the waters that will be left unfit for ordinary families to swim and boat in.

This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.

No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.

It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.

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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisjman/3338514389/

Riley Dunlap has an interesting article, At 40, Environmental Movement Endures, With Less Consensus, with new Gallup poll results that’s worth reading.

April 22 marks the 40^th anniversary of the first Earth Day, an event widely considered to be the birth of the modern environmental movement. Few social movements survive 40 years, so in this sense alone, environmentalism might be considered successful. On the other hand, the movement has had limited success in policy arenas in recent years, leading to allegations of the “death of environmentalism.”  In addition, this year’s Gallup Environment poll finds historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems (particularly global warming) and support for environmental protection. Are we witnessing the end of environmentalism as a significant social movement and, in the eyes of many, a major progressive force in the United States?

Read more to find out…

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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/southernpixel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There’s been some debate over the past month as to whether small green behaviors, such as changing out compact fluorescent lightbulbs, spur people to take bigger steps—say, buying a hybrid car, weatherizing a home, or commuting to work.

One camp says no.  In a blog post, We cannot change the world by changing our buying habits, George Monbiot argued (links his)

I’ve never been convinced by this argument. In my experience, people use the soft stuff to justify their failure to engage with the hard stuff. Challenge someone about taking holiday flights six times a year and there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll say something along these lines:

I recycle everything and I re-use my plastic bags, so I’m really quite green.

I wasn’t surprised to see a report in Nature this week suggesting that buying green products can make you behave more selfishly than you would otherwise have done. Psychologists at the University of Toronto subjected students to a series of cunning experiments (pdf). First they were asked to buy a basket of products; selecting either green or conventional ones. Then they played a game in which they were asked to allocate money between themselves and someone else. The students who had bought green products shared less money than those who had bought only conventional goods.

The researchers call this the “licensing effect”. Buying green can establish the moral credentials that license subsequent bad behaviour: the rosier your view of yourself, the more likely you are to hoard your money and do down other people.

Then they took another bunch of students, gave them the same purchasing choices, then introduced them to a game in which they made money by describing a pattern of dots on a computer screen. If there were more dots on the right than the left they made more money. Afterwards they were asked to count the money they had earned out of an envelope.

The researchers found that buying green had such a strong licensing effect that people were likely to lie, cheat and steal: they had established such strong moral credentials in their own minds that these appeared to exonerate them from what they did next. Nature uses the term “moral offset”, which I think is a useful one.

More recently, Mike Tidwell had a column in the Washington Post, To really save the planet, stop going green, in which he argued

December should be national Green-Free Month. Instead of continuing our faddish and counterproductive emphasis on small, voluntary actions, we should follow the example of Americans during past moral crises and work toward large-scale change.

….So what’s the problem? There’s lots of blame to go around, but the distraction of the “go green” movement has played a significant role. Taking their cues from the popular media and cautious politicians, many Americans have come to believe that they are personally to blame for global warming and that they must fix it, one by one, at home. And so they either do as they’re told — a little of this, a little of that — or they feel overwhelmed and do nothing.

However, a few days ago, Margaret Southern posted a column, Stop ‘Going Green’ to Save the Planet?, on TNC’s website in which she argued that there are data to back up the notion that small changes do spur us to make bigger ones (emphasis and links hers):

According to Professor Michael Vandenbergh of Vanderbilt University, co-author of “Household Actions Can Provide a Behavioral Wedge to Rapidly Reduce U.S. Carbon Emissions” (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), there is no research to support the assumption that if someone does one good thing (say, bike to work) they would be less likely to do another good thing (support climate change legislation).

In fact, Professor Vandenbergh told NPR that behavior change is contagious:

There are a number of psychological phenomena that suggest that we might actually induce more support for behavior change. When someone becomes committed to a certain behavior, they’re more likely to follow through in other areas as well.

So, those already concerned about conservation might become even more concerned about it as time goes on.

So, while I agree with Tidwell that the conservation-concerned should turn up the heat on Congress and other decision-makers on creating real climate change policies, we don’t have to set aside our green habits — even temporarily — to do so. I don’t think that setting a good example for personal changes that people can make (that collectively would make a huge difference) is confusing people that either don’t know how to change or don’t care to change.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/guillermoduran/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Excerpts:

In the rich world the idea of progress has become impoverished. Through complacency and bitter experience, the scope of progress has narrowed. The popular view is that, although technology and GDP advance, morals and society are treading water or, depending on your choice of newspaper, sinking back into decadence and barbarism.

….The Economist puts more faith in business than most. Yet even the stolidest defenders of capitalism would, by and large, agree that its tendency to form cartels, shuffle off the costs of pollution and collapse under the weight of its own financial inventiveness needs to be constrained by laws designed to channel its energy to the general good.

Nor does economic progress broadly defined correspond to human progress any more precisely than does scientific progress. GDP does not measure welfare; and wealth does not equal happiness. Rich countries are, by and large, happier than poor ones; but among developed-world countries, there is only a weak correlation between happiness and GDP. And, although wealth has been soaring over the past half a century, happiness, measured by national surveys, has hardly budged.

….And it is not just that material progress does not seem to be delivering the emotional goods. People also fear that mankind is failing to manage it properly—with the result that, in important ways, their children may not be better off than they are. The forests are disappearing; the ice is melting; social bonds are crumbling; privacy is eroding; life is becoming a dismal slog in an ugly world.

….Such values are the institutional face of the fundamental engine of progress—“moral sensibility”. The very idea probably sounds quaint and old-fashioned, but it is the subject of a powerful recent book by Susan Neiman, an American philosopher living in Germany. People often shy away from a moral view of the world, if only because moral certitude reeks of intolerance and bigotry. As one sociologist has said “don’t be judgmental” has become the 11th commandment.

But Ms Neiman thinks that people yearn for a sense of moral purpose. In a world preoccupied with consumerism and petty self-interest, that gives life dignity. People want to determine how the world works, not always to be determined by it. It means that people’s behaviour should be shaped not by who is most powerful, or by who stands to lose and gain, but by what is right despite the costs. Moral sensibility is why people will suffer for their beliefs, and why acts of principled self-sacrifice are so powerful.

People can distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Torture was once common in Europe’s market squares. It is now unacceptable even when the world’s most powerful nation wears the interrogator’s mask. Race was once a bar to the clubs and drawing-rooms of respectable society. Now a black man is in the White House.

There are no guarantees that the gap between is and ought can be closed. Every time someone tells you to “be realistic” they are asking you to compromise your ideals. Ms Neiman acknowledges that your ideals will never be met completely. But sometimes, however imperfectly, you can make progress. It is as if you are moving towards an unattainable horizon. “Human dignity”, she writes, “requires the love of ideals for their own sake, but nothing requires that the love will be requited.”

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/ / CC BY 2.0

• I believe that all of us working for a habitable planet should have focused more clearly on politics and on the question of how good ideas move across the chasm from being right to being effective in the conduct of our public and international business.
• I think we should have learned to be more adept, personable, and creative in talking to the public and the guys down at the truck stop and the women working two jobs to make ends meet. I think we might have gone to fewer scientific conferences in exotic places and to more Rotary meetings and  tedious city council sessions. We should have talked less often to ourselves in a scientific jargon and more often to the public and in the common tongue. And we should have mastered the art of persuasion on radio and television the way some others have. We in the “environmental movement” are sometimes accused of being effete, overly intellectual snobs more concerned about nature than people, and there is some truth to that.
• [W]e know enough right now to make far better decisions than we typically do about wildlife, ecosystems, and landscapes….What ails us, rather, is  fundamentally political and is the result of the yawning chasm between the  world of science (and intellect generally) and that of public affairs.
• [T]he worldwide conversation about sustainability and the human future is  larger than just the issues of biodiversity, pollution, climate change, land use,  and resource scarcity.
• [W]e are rapidly becoming an indoor species with fewer people spending time  outdoors and with fewer experiential connections with nonhuman nature.
• Finally, 21 years ago it would have been difficult to plausibly imagine the scope, scale, and rising intensity of the global movement to build a decent, fair, and sustainable world. The resilience of the human spirit in difficult times is the news of our age.

¹Orr, D. (2009) retrospect and prospect: The unbearable lightness of conservation. Conservation Biology23, No. 6, 1349–1351

• People don’t know enough about how human and environmental systems work and interact.
• Personal actions don’t match required solutions.
• Bad mental models facilitate underestimation of the problem and the time scale to deal with it.
• Environmental literacy is affected by how we structure disciplines in higher education

Let’s build on this last point and broaden the focus to higher education and environmentalism.

Many thanks in advance to friends and colleagues, most notably Matt Klingle (Bowdoin), Joe Bandy (Bowdoin), David Hecht (Bowdoin), Kim Smith (Carleton), Jen Everett (DePauw), and David Orr (Oberlin), who helped shape my thinking about this issue.

Related post: Why don’t people engage climate warming? Problem 1: Environmental literacy

There’s a new guide to shopping that looks interesting.  It’s called Good Guide, and it helps people learn more about what’s in their products that might not be healthy–to you, the environment, or society.

It’s easy to click on many different product types—from food to personal products to air fresheners to toys.   For example, ever wonder about different kinds of mac and cheese?

Here’s more information about them:

What chemicals are in your baby shampoo?
Was sweatshop labor used to make your t-shirt?
What products are the best, and what products should you avoid?

Increasingly, you want to know about the impacts of the products you buy. On your health. On the environment. On society. But unless you’ve got a Ph.D, it is almost impossible to find out the impacts of the products you buy. Until now…

GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.

With GoodGuide, you can:

• Find safe, healthy and green products that protect you and your family
• Search or browse over 70,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to see what’s really beneath the label
• Use expert advice and recommendations on products to quickly learn the impacts of what you buy
• Find better products and make purchasing decisions based on what’s important to you
• Create a personalized favorites list with the products that are right for you and your family

Related post:  Do our daily routines put our health at risk?

]]> http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2009/11/good-guide-learn-what-product-labels-dont-always-tell-you-about-the-things-you-buy/feed/ 0 http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2009/11/american-environmentalism-distinct-flavors-porous-borders-and-effective-action/ http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2009/11/american-environmentalism-distinct-flavors-porous-borders-and-effective-action/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:19:49 +0000 Phil Camill http://www.globalchangeblog.com/?p=1754

Earth First.  Greenpeace.  Sierra Club.  Apollo Alliance.  The Nature Conservancy.  The Wilderness Society.  National Resources Defense Council.  Sustainable South Bronx.  350.org— Organizations that share a common interest in the environment but with fundamental philosophical differences.

In an earlier post, Can’t we all just get along?, we looked at a paper by Clare Saunders, who suggested that social movements like environmentalism are comprised of many different organizations, each fostering a collective identity that is often incompatible with other organizations in the same movement.  Ordinarily, we think of the overall movement goals as having a binding effect among these subgroups.  Apparently not.  Her work suggested that people form identities with other individuals cut from the same ideological cloth rather than the identity of the social movement itself.

In a recent issue^1,2 of Organization and Environment, Debra Salazar designed a study that lets us look at this problem in more detail.  Specifically, to what extent are environmentalists identifying with different flavors of environmentalism, and to what extent are beliefs shared across individuals?   Where disputes arise, what’s driving them? How can coalitions be built, and why might certain groups be better positioned to lead, given the circumstances of particular environmental problems?

Here’s how she approached this challenge and what she found…

She interviewed 42 environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest, USA.  Her goal was to understand how individuals identify (or not) with a set of political claims, allowing her to define groups emerging from these responses and to identify where commonalities and differences lie.  Note that this approach is different than asking questions like, “Do you agree with environmental group x, y, or z on this issue” because that predetermines what kinds of categories exist, and it doesn’t allow us to see if there are commonalities or exactly why differences show up.

She chose several hundred political claims that spanned four broad themes, including

• democracy and citizenship (DC)
• political economic institutions and processes (PEIP)
• social justice (SJ)
• environment or nature (EN)

When presented with each claim, people ranked themselves from -5 (most unlike my view) to + 5 (most like my view).  Based on the responses, Salazar was then able to group the 42 individuals into clusters defined by similar views.

Her results:

Four environmental types emerged, each with the following general opinions about the themes (excerpted and paraphrased from Table 3):

(1) Civic republican

Mantra:

civic engagement seeking consensus around common good

Values:

• (DC) valued public deliberation with a view that common good will emerge; work within existing political institutions
• (PEIP) need bioregional institutions; policies are moving in the right direction so stick with them
• (SJ) protect both economic livelihood and environment; we don’t owe landowners compensation for protecting the environment
• (EN) nature and people are part of spiritual whole

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

Being pro-business is a way to educate people and bring them around to responsible behavior…We need to be responsive to how people can have a livelihood, to create economies that are tailored to local ecological circumstances…I rarely go to church anymore but I do need to get out regularly in God’s creation.

(2) Liberal ecocentric

Mantra:

Scientific enlightenment and liberal democracy in the protection of nature against  human forces of destruction

Values:

• (DC) activism is essential to reclaim democracy; compromise can undermine goals
• (PEIP) political system is broken; corporations have taken over; science has priority over politics and culture
• (SJ) humans must adapt to protect the environment; we don’t owe landowners compensation for protecting the environment
• (EN) protect other species; people have lost touch with nature; population is a central problem

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

Businesses have control over politics. I see it getting a lot worse before politicians will make the necessary changes…Until a broad cross section of the public is willing to take on responsibilities of citizenship, we will be in trouble…I would like to believe that indigenous people have a right to carry on cultural traditions. But their desire to do so does not supersede environmental interest . . . I’m a meat-is-murder kind of person. We all need to make sacrifices….I’m ticked off at the loggers for siding with the corporations . . . Big union guys bought the corporate line and they should have known better…Yeah, people lost their jobs and . . . nobody makes buggy whips anymore either…I see no racism in the environmental movement. If you walk into a room of environmentalists they’ll be mostly white, but not because they’re racist. It’s because they have the money, time, and vision into what is wrong…We’re in trouble because of corporate power that dominates the globe, not because of racism.

(3) Green justice

Mantra:

environment is embedded in race/class hierarchies in the political economy

Values:

• (DC) we have a right to a healthy environment; activism is essential to achieve goals
• (PEIP) political institutions are too responsive to corporations; experts don’t have all the answers
• (SJ) address race-based inequalities; respect autonomy of indigenous cultures; find ways to protect livelihood and environment
• (EN) environment is more than wilderness; protect a balance of nature

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

A lot of people in the environmental community see civilization as bad.
Concentration of people is good and not unnatural. To distance ourselves from cities is to distance ourselves from society, to distance ourselves from our selves…Environmentalists who think this is not important are ignorant about the political viability of their movement. Look at smart growth—most environmentalists support this and it makes a lot of sense environmentally. [But] it is politically vulnerable—why will smart growth fail? If it is only supported by environmentalists. Why would people of color and working class White people not support this? Because they don’t see that they will get any benefits; instead they fear they will be displaced…In advocating for a specific change, are we willing to support the people who will undergo the changes?

(4) Global ecocentric

Mantra:

global wilderness is central to the good life, and connection to nature is essential

Values:

• (DC) too much at stake to rely on conventional politics; need a global environmental movement
• (PEIP) corporations control politics; public lands should not be managed for profit
• (SJ) Humans must adapt to protect the environment; experts don’t have all the answers
• (EN) No right to destroy other species; nature and people are part of a spiritual whole

Representative perspectives (excerpts):

[I]t’s beyond racism. It’s sexism; it’s classism. . . speciesism…I don’t think that corporations are the only problem. People are still people even if we get rid of corporations…The root of any environmental problem—a person thinking they own something means other people don’t…the mentality around here—‘it’s my property, I’ll do what I want with it….You can find another job, but you can’t find another extinct species.

Summary:

If you compare the four groups, there are several spots where the boundaries are permeable, and there is more agreement than disagreement (potential opportunities for inter-group coalition building):

• All shared a strong sense of democratic commitment
• Most were skeptical of the ties between government and corporate America.
• None shared an instrumental view of nature (nature’s value lies in it’s usefulness to humans).
• The notion of equal consideration for all species shared broad support.
• There was a shared value of nature protection.
• Public concerns take precedent over private property claims.

Nevertheless, there were often sharp distinctions around the familiar issues of jobs and race/class:

• Although most groups believed in democratic participation, how groups handled this differed.  Civic republicans and green justice folks tend more towards coalition building, whereas the liberal and global ecocentrics believe that coalition building and seeking consensus compromises principles.
• How race gets handled in environmental discourses differed strongly between green justice and liberal ecocentrism.  Ecocentrists tend to emphasize human population growth and its threats to other species, whereas green justice folks see race and class as key antecedents to engaging people in the environment.
• How jobs get handled in environmental discourses differed strongly among groups.  Here, liberal ecocentrism and global ecocentrics join forces in opposition to protecting workers from job loss caused by environmental protection.  Instead, people and cultures have to change to adapt to environmental protection.  In contrast, green justice folks made economic concerns a necessary precondition for engaging environment.

Bottom line:

Although some commonalities exist, the major philosophical differences among environmental groups remains a challenge for coalition building.  But just because there’s disagreement, does that mean it’s hard to get things done?  Not always.  Focusing specifically on the Northwest, Salazar suggests that green justice might offer the best approach for dealing with many of the difficult challenges of past decades, such as logging, agricultural pesticides, and gentrification, which also matter to people of color and the working class.  This approach may also be the best for unifying multiple fronts of progressive politics that include environment, labor, and race/class/gender.

Related post:  Cant we all just get along?

¹Salazar, D.J. (2009) Saving Nature and Seeking Justice: Environmental Activists in the Pacific Northwest. Organization and Environment 22(2): 230-254.

²Bowdoin people can access the article here.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Prerequisite posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication

In earlier posts, we examined climate change engagement as problems of environmental literacy and communication.  There is no doubt we can do better with both of these.  But as we will see, proponents of environmental literacy and communication make a mistake if they believe engagement is simply a matter of getting more information to people.  Science, it is believed, will speak for itself.

Unfortunately, it often doesn’t.

A political scientist recently told me that before the age of 25, people use information to shape their value system and perceptions of the world.  After 25, they start cherry picking information that simply reinforces these beliefs (hence the world of cable news).

Although this is is a rough generalization, it suggests that a person’s values development may have a shelf life.  It also reveals why issues like climate change may not resonate with people cut from certain ideological cloths—no matter how much information they encounter.

The psychology, sociology, and ethics literature has a lot to say about this problem.  For simplicity, I want to pull out four challenges I think are among the most common and important with respect to climate change…

Challenge 1: Problems that are global in nature and distant in the future are not considered urgent

Matt Nisbet’s article¹ that we looked at last time contained another Pew poll that came out earlier this year, asking Americans which issue should be Obama’s top priority:

If you look at how priorities of Americans are changing over the past two years, some pretty obvious trends show up:

• It’s the economy—people are worried about their jobs.
• At the bottom of the table, the percentage of people who think protecting the environment is a top issue has fallen from 57% to 41%.
• Climate warming is dead last, falling from 38% to 30%.

These kinds of data are not new.  Quality of environment is generally a latent concern for most people.  But when asked to rank the importance of things like climate change against other issues that are personal (economy, health care) or are easily manipulated for political gain (terrorism, deficits), environmental concerns usually lose.

Update: The new Bureau of Labor Statistics data out today are grim:

Challenge 2: Cultural identity shapes perceptions and responses to environmental issues

Earlier this year, the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication published a report¹ called Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis (Maibach et al. 2009).

There were a number of important outcomes of this study that have wide-ranging implications for climate change, environmentalism, and environmental studies programs.

The first interesting point is that they identified six clusters of Americans falling along a spectrum from alarmed to dismissive about climate change:

There are three larger groups here:

• Those that get climate warming—the alarmed and concerned (54%)—make up a majority of Americans.
• The cautious and disengaged (31%) are on the sidelines, either not sure about climate change or not perceiving it to be a salient issue.
• The doubtful and dismissive (18%) are the climate warming skeptics and deniers.

So what do these groups mean in terms of engagement with and commitment to climate warming?

These statistics are eye-opening:

• A full 82% of Americans have not yet engaged climate warming personally.
• Almost half (49%) have not yet been convinced that warming is happening or they are actively hostile towards it.

Who are these folks relative to what a “typical” American looks like demographically?

These data are also eye-opening.  You can read the demographic breakdowns in the figure, but a number of things stand out:

• This is why climate warming is also an issue of race, gender, class, education, and religion. All of these frames shape personal values regarding climate warming.  It means that we need to do a better job of engaging all of these constituencies.
• People of color are falling out disproportionately in the disengaged group.
• Blue-collar folks are in the cautious group on the sidelines.
• Religion is a correlate with those doubtful or dismissive of climate warming as well as those disengaged.

Challenge 3:  People don’t see personal harm arising from climate change within their lifetimes

The Maibach article also speaks to this challenge.  In the figure below, they ask two questions:

• How much do you think global warming will harm you personally (left panel)?
• How much do you think global warming will harm future generations (right panel)?

As you can see in the left graph, there’s a lot of brown (only a little and not at all) and gray (don’t know).  More people think they will die from cancer, a heart attack, or an auto accident than being harmed by climate warming.

However, when the audience thinks about future generations, they think that there is greater risk of harm.

This distinction may help with the climate change communication challenge in the earlier post.  In fact, if you’ve had a chance to see climate modeler James Hansen talk recently, this is one of his pitches.  He frames the impacts of warming in terms of the harm his grandchildren will experience.

Challenge 4: Some climate-impacting behaviors are easier to change than others

Dramatic reductions in carbon emissions in a short period of time are going to require significant behavioral changes in transportation, diet, and powering our lives.  Unfortunately, we are creatures of habit.  And our lifestyles are locked in based on things like how our homes, cities, and roads were designed decades ago and the kinds of transportation available to us.

As mentioned in an earlier post, a paper out this week by Tom Dietz and colleagues suggested that policy measures like cap and trade could take years to implement.  Why not take a look at how much readily available technologies in U.S. homes could potentially reduce emission in the short term?

How much of a difference could households make? According to Dietz et al., they are

• 38% of the overall US carbon emissions
• 8% of global emissions
• larger than the emissions of any single country except China

So if we could modify behaviors associated with household energy use, we might be able to bring about relatively quick and possibly large reductions.  The outlook is mixed, however, as suggested by this table:

Some main points:

• Home weatherization is behavioral low-hanging fruit.  People are willing to do these things because they both save money and are good for the environment (probably in that order).  The good news is that there are sizable reductions that can be achieved.
• Driving is the tough nut to crack.  People are simply unwilling to change driving behavior or carpool.  The bright spot here is fuel efficiency.  People are willing to drive cars with better gas mileage, so this behavior should continue to be encouraged with tax credits for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Related posts:

• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Overview
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Why don’t people engage climate change?  Problem 2: Communication

¹References:

• Dietz, T. et al. (2009) Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce U.S. carbon emissions. PNAS 106(44):18452-18456.
• Maibach, E. et al. (2009) Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An Audience Segmentation Analysis. Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication
• Nisbet, M. (2009) Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement. Environment 51(2):12-23.

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/ / CC BY 2.0