David Duprey/AP
DCL
Living with an eye on curbing your carbon footprint takes effort?all those that put in the legwork to lower theirs by doing stuff like buying alternative energy eating local and organic, and ditching their cars for public transit know this. But it's tougher than we ever could've imagined—to the point that our own brains may be against us in our fight against climate change.
That's the theory put forward in a recent New York Times Magazine—and it makes sense. How? From the piece:
In analytical mode, we are not always adept at long-term thinking; experiments have shown a frequent dislike for delayed benefits, so we undervalue promised future outcomes. (Given a choice, we usually take $10 now as opposed to, say, $20 two years from now.) Environmentally speaking, this means we are far less likely to make lifestyle changes in order to ensure a safer future climate.
And changing our habits to prevent something as seemingly intangible as global warming has got to be the ultimate "delayed benefit"—not only is it delayed, but it's pretty abstract and nearly conceptually incomprehensible:
Almost certainly, we underestimate the danger of rising sea levels or epic droughts or other events that we've never experienced and seem far away in time and place. Worse, Weber's research seems to help establish that we have a "finite pool of worry," which means we're unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem— a plunging stock market, a personal emergency—comes along.
Okay, so not only are we fighting an uphill battle to even convince ourselves it's worth living lives with lower ecological footprints, but once we do, we're apt to give up or get exasperated when something more pertinent to our everyday lives comes along. Well it's a challenge, but I suppose it's not so bad. Wait, what's that you say, upcoming passage I've selected?
A even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a "single-action bias." Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate—a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.
Damn brain, so self-centered. So hell bent on preserving the body whose brain box you sit in. That makes three major obstacles our very own command centers have put up to keep us from trying to straighten out the planet. It's no wonder so many people are steadfast in their denial of climate change: it's much, much easier for them to do.
So is there hope, despite all the brain-meddling?
"More or less, people have agreed on that. That means it's caused by human behavior. That's not to say that engineering solutions aren't important. But if it's caused by human behavior, then the solution probably also lies in changing human behavior.?
There are indeed human solutions, and they are indeed challenging ones—but as the psychology surrounding climate change becomes better known, perhaps we'll find ways to prod our own brains into helping us live greener. Until then, looks like it's going to have to be an old school showdown with you and your brain. Winner saves the planet.
