I thought this post from The Conversation by, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute, King's College London was worth sharing:
We humans have a natural tendency to focus on negative stories. We tend to assume things are worse than they really are, and going downhill fast. We forget how bad things were in the past and how far we've come.
In reality, the world is often better – and getting better – than we think, something I wrote about in my book, The Perils of Perception: Why We're Wrong About Nearly Everything. Murder rates, deaths from terrorism and extreme poverty are all down. Life expectancy, health and education levels are up. And yet, there is one vital, urgent exception to this rule: we still don't realise how badly wrong our global climate and environment have gone.
A new survey of Britons which tested understanding of some key facts about the environment reveals the extent of environmental misperceptions. Rather than asking people what they thought might happen, this study instead focused on assessing knowledge of the world as it is right now.
One question, for example, was how many of the past 22 years have been the hottest on record?
The answer is 20, but the average guess was just 12. And one in five people guessed five or fewer.
Britons also overestimated some facts, such as how much air travel contributes to greenhouse guesses. The average guess was that 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from air travel, when in fact it only accounts for around 2%. Respondents also assumed that air travel's emissions are about equal to that of all other forms of transport put together, when in reality, the latter contributes about ten times as much as flights. This is due to the relative rarity of flights compared to other forms of transport.
Yet despite aviation's relatively limited contribution to emissions overall, one of the most effective environmental actions we can take as individuals is to fly less. A study by Swedish academics puts skipping one transatlantic flight as the third most effective action we can take, only behind the much more extreme options of having one fewer child and living entirely car free. Curiously, only 25% of the British public pick out skipping a flight as one of the top three. Instead, 52% of people guessed that recycling was one of the best things we can do to reduce our emissions - when it's seventh in this list of nine actions.
And that's not our only misperception about recycling: we massively underestimate the problem of plastic waste. Britons guessed that about half of the 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic waste humans have produced globally is still out there in the environment (in our oceans, our soil, our water, even inside our bodies), when in reality it's an incredible 79%. And how much plastic waste has been recycled? Respondents guessed about a quarter, when in reality its only 9% (Read: Is there any point in recycling?).
We also don't realise just how extreme the loss of animal species over the past decade has been. Only a third correctly identify that the population sizes of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles in the world have declined by 60% since 1970.
Anxiety and other people
But our lack of understanding of the scale of the issues doesn't mean we're not worried. In fact, recent polling of Britons by Ipsos MORI measured record-breaking levels of concern. Our new polling also shows that two-thirds of Britons reject Donald Trump's assertion that global warming is an “expensive hoax” — and instead two-thirds agree with the recent UK Parliament declaration that we are facing a “climate change emergency, with the threat of irreversible destruction of our environment in our lifetime”.
Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!
Our largest misconceptions seem to be around what other people think, a phenomenon that academics call our pluralistic ignorance: our perception is that other people's attitudes are the problem.
Despite record levels of public concern, 73% believe that other people are not worried enough – while only 16% say we ourselves are not worried enough. Half of us say that other people think it's too late to do anything to prevent a climate change emergency, but only one in five of us admits to having given up hope. This misunderstanding of the norm is serious, as it affects our own sense of efficacy: if others aren't bothered, what's the point in us acting?
Its naive to think that bombarding people with facts will incite them to act, no matter how extraordinary or terrifying these facts may be. But its equally as naive to think that we can figure out exactly the right emotional buttons to push: we just don't know enough yet about how fear, hope and a sense of efficacy interact in motivating action in different people.
Nevertheless, a little more understanding of the scale of the issues and how we individually can act most effectively couldn't hurt. And perhaps most crucially, we need to remember that we are not alone in our concern. Anxiety about climate change has become the norm, and this is a fact that we can harness and put to use.
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I don’t think skipping a trans Atlantic flight will help reduce emissions.
There will always be someone else willing to take that flight. How many flights to New York have been canceled because not enough passengers?
The planes still fly, the fuel is still burnt, the CO2 is still emitted. If there are not enough passengers to fill all seats, then prices reduced until they are, and currently its cheeper to catch a new york flight, than to travel to london from Manchester by train.
The only way this can be fixed is by legislation to put a hard limit on the amount of flights.
There is an issue of aggregate demand
Airlines are very sensitive to it
Draw a circle 1 metre in diameter, with an HB pencil, as the earth is 8,000 mIles across each mm = 8 miles, therefore the habitable zone is less than the thickness of the pencil line.
And?
Thanks Richard,
This is interesting. However, I am dismayed that the conclusion implies a theory of social change around shifts in individuals’ norms and behaviours rather than/ or as well as significant laws and regulation. Perhaps the author is implying a shift in norms and beliefs is an intermediary step to influencing corporate behaviour and or electing the kind of governments that are brave enough to adopt and implement necessary regulation?
I think both are essential
CathyS says:
” I am dismayed that the conclusion implies a theory of social change around shifts in individuals’ norms and behaviours rather than/ or as well as significant laws and regulation.”
I’m not sure that is the conclusion. The tables tell us 88% of greenhouse gas emissions come from ‘Energy and heat production’, ‘Transport excl Air Travel’ and ‘Manufacturing /construction’
Setting aside the objection that the total comes to 101% (which I assume is a quirk of rounding up figures) approximately 90% of emissions are coming from activities we have, as individuals, little control over.
This tells me that it is the politicians who need their ears bending, because we certainly are not going to make major change to emission levels by changing our individual day to day behaviour.
Energy and heat production is the biggy. We need to be generating MASSIVE amounts of sustainable clean electricity …so that no only is the electricity we currently use (no pun intended) clean and emission free, but also we are needing to replace a massive amount of oil and gas heating and without surplus electricity a shift to electric powered vehicles is for the birds.
Will the private sector drive this change ? No. Probably not at all and certainly not rapidly enough. So we need to be pressing for action coordinated by central government to take control directly of electricity generation or to legislate to …encourage let us say, the private sector to get its ‘ass in gear’ (as the Americans would say.)
If that’s going to happen we need to vote for a government that will do it. I’d say the government which has spent the past decade doing doodle-eye squat about it ought to get hammered to extinction in any election that occurs soon. The polls say that is not likely to happen. 🙁
No wonder we feel high levels of anxiety. Collectively we are ‘worried’ about the problem, but apparently we are not intending to do anything about it. Lack of control is the classic source of much of the stress we feel.
The tables don’t show the emissions output of the pharmaceutical industry’s production of psychotropic medication ! Perhaps we could vote our way to a better collective state of mental health (?)
Have you read Jem Bendell’s deep adaptation paper?
https://jembendell.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-collapse-they-thought-you-should-not-read-yet/
It’s an academic paper that got rejected by a journal but subsequently went viral whose premise is that near-term societal collapse due to climate breakdown is inevitable.
It is hard hitting as it appeals both to the head and the heart ie. What should / can we do in the face of this, but even before we can get to that- what do we actually need to come to terms with, psychologically and emotionally, individually and as a community.
It’s a tough read but I found deep inside his message there is hope, “Radical Hope”. But not the hope that things will remain the same.
Whether you believe near-term social collapse is inevitable or not , I think his paper has done a great service in getting the discourse out there.
People might say this is fear-mongering but I am reminded of when happens when one joins a company: the health and safety induction. When I ask my employer what are the procedures in event of fire I don’t expect them to reply, don’t be silly, that’s not going to happen, you are just fear-mongering. That response would just serve to make my fear even greater. What is our government’s response to societal collapse? We don’t complain or bat an eyelid when we are made to go through a fire drill. I would suggest near term societal collapse is more likely than a fire at work and yet, what procedures are in place?
The paper also contains a section addressed to academics, and a brilliant summary of neoliberalism:
“The West’s response to environmental issues has been restricted by the
dominance of neoliberal economics since the 1970s. That led to hyperindividualist,
market fundamentalist, incremental and atomistic approaches.
By hyper-individualist, I mean a focus on individual action as consumers,
switching light bulbs or buying sustainable furniture, rather than promoting
political action as engaged citizens. By market fundamentalist, I mean a
focus on market mechanisms like the complex, costly and largely useless
carbon cap and trade systems, rather than exploring what more
government intervention could achieve. By incremental, I mean a focus on
celebrating small steps forward such as a company publishing a
sustainability report, rather than strategies designed for a speed and scale
of change suggested by the science. By atomistic, I mean a focus on seeing
climate action as a separate issue from the governance of markets, finance
and banking, rather than exploring what kind of economic system could
permit or enable sustainability.”
It’s very good paper
Being rejected in academia is something goof thinkers have come to expect
Academia is mainly about pinheads, still
I discovered Jem Bendall a few months ago,
his perspective is pretty commonplace on the fringes of the web,
people like John Michael Greer and James Howard Kunstler have been exploring this for over a decade,
it’s the elephant in the room the mainstream adamantly refuses to acknowledge.
it does seem to imply to me that broadly speaking the public understands there is a need to make changes, are willing to give it a go, but maybe aren’t entirely sure what is the best course of action,
the inertia that needs to be overcome doesn’t seem to be public opinion,
if anything is holding back it does rather look like govt’s and corps.
is public misunderstanding of the worst offenders somewhat down to the media?
although the media does put out some good articles on specific areas of concern it still pumps out endless garbage about lifestyle & consumption,
I find it hard to read an article about some ecological tragedy unfolding infront of our eyes and then scan down to articles about exotic holiday destinations and fasionable imported foodstuffs, the latest consumer gadgetry and fancy new car reviews,
advertising always seems to be there trying to lure people back to consumerism.
If you really want to think about this
Read “The Uninhabitable Earth”
http://archive.is/XFxJQ
I had just finished it when Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas.
“It equalled the highest winds ever recorded for a hurricane at landfall when it struck the Abaco Islands.”
http://archive.is/KGDgr
As the book says
Some people are already living and dying the climate change conditions we imagine are the future
A tech comment on the 49% CO2 emissions by heat & elec.
Reducing this to the level of households. In the case of electricity most households (with a roof) can reduce their emissions due to electricity by 60% through the relatively simple expedient of installing around 3.5kW of PV on the roof and roughly 6.5kWh of batteries (garage/basement/outhouse). This will man 60% of elec consumption over the year is provided by the PV & batts. I have modelled this, the numbers are not guesses.
In the case of heating – we are talking gas here – average household consumption is around 20MWh/year. Modern double or triple glazing, 270mm of loft insulation and cavity wall insulation will halve this demand.
I used to work for Sony as their factory services engineer. The factory motto was: cost-down & go where the big money is. This could/should apply to CO2 reductions. The big number is elec & heating. The residential sector is the largest consumer of gas in Europe & government policy has been, at best, sporadic and/or a joke with respect to a consistent policy on reducing this demand. This has to change – fast.
Discliamer: no financial interest whatsoever in any of the above tech/insulation products.
The UK govt intends to remove gas from the heating of homes by 2025….it will be replaced by “low carbon heating sources” (for 2025 read Meh)
My residence is heated by an air-source heat pump system….. 1KW of electricity extracts 3.2KW of heat from air.
As for air travel: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207886-it-turns-out-planes-are-even-worse-for-the-climate-than-we-thought/
Yes! and reducing the use of fossil-fuel-generated electricity by one unit saves about 13 units of energy according to Prof Kevin Anderson and others: dig or drill, extract, transport – trucks, ships, pipelines, trains, burning is the biggie, transformers, transmission lines, inefficient end use.
So Mike’s proposals address that.
But, GENERATING one unit only saves one unit. REDUCING DEMAND by one unit saves thirteen units.
Rationing would do it – with reduced rations year on year.
“When the Second World War began in September 1939 petrol was the first commodity to be controlled.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom “On 1 July 1942 THE BASIC CIVILIAN PETROL RATION WAS ABOLISHED [emphasis added; zero private use – none!]. Henceforth vehicle fuel was only available to official users, such as the emergency services, bus companies and farmers. The priority users of fuel were always, of course, the armed forces.”
The nation survived the second world war. How will it get on when our coastal areas – such as East Anglia – are inundated by the sea?
Our people will meet the need – IF THEY ARE TOLD THE TRUTH.
Why do you tell me that cutting demand is unrealistic?
People understood they were at war – and even then it took time to accept rationing
They do not know the climate crisis is its equivalent, as yet
Rationing would not be accepted
The issue of plastic waste recycling is worrying.
Because it doesn’t impinge greatly on the greenhouse gas emission scale here doesn’t at all mean it is unimportant…on the contrary we seem to be massively underestimating its potential for harm.
As someone pointed out, if William The Conqueror’s troop had bought their lunches from a Normandy supermarket and carried them in plastic carrier bags archaeologists would still be unearthing the bags.
We mustn’t lose sight of the wider environmental pollution issue by focusing solely on climate change. There is going to be huge environmental damage (and social damage as in the Congo for example) caused in the scramble to mine various metals for battery electricity storage. We need to have better solutions particularly to grid-scale electricity storage.
“Rongke Power, in Dalian, China, for example, is building the world’s largest vanadium flow battery, which should come online in 2020. The battery will store 800 megawatt-hours of energy, enough to power thousands of homes”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/new-generation-flow-batteries-could-eventually-sustain-grid-powered-sun-and-wind
While I agree surveys like this provoke discussion, I can’t help feeling that basically they are nonsense. Why should an “ordinary member of the public” know that recycling, which we are alway encouraged to do, is only number 7, while having 1 fewer child (or better still, none) is such a taboo subject it’s no wonder so few realised it was no. 1? Most people don’t study these issues in the kind of detail that would enable them to have the facts and figures at their fingertips. And why should they. Most of us have more pressing issues, like will I be able to afford to……etc.
It would be very worrying, however, if most of the public thought like Trump.
Far more interesting and relevant would be to ask politicians and other opinion/decision makers the same set of questions. It seems to me that politicians, the ones who can actually make the changes required, like kick-starting the GND, still haven’t understood the urgency of the situation and are either deaf or hoping something will turn up.
@Graham Hewitt
“….politicians, the ones who can actually make the changes required, like kick-starting the GND, still haven’t understood the urgency of the situation and are either deaf or hoping something will turn up.”
The only thing likely to ‘turn up’ to reverse global climate heating is what a friend of mine would have described as a “fuckoffbig” volcanic eruption that blots out the Sun for a while.
It might create a few alternative difficulties however.
At last the herd of elephants in the closet has been noted- POPULATION. It is not politically correct to talk about the issue of population when considering climate change, population growth will be the main factor in the demise of human life on this planet. We can talk about energy usage, recycling, cutting down on travel, plastic straws etc etc; and every point is valid and must be addressed to extend our survival a bit longer, but population will kill us in the end.
Providing for the large population will be what causes a collapse of the planetary ecosystem.
But reducing birthrate will lead to a collapse of the population.
Unless you can come-up with a cunning plan where a rapidly-ageing population can be provided for, by a diminishing young population.
Now, if you go for the unpleasant, and probably unacceptable, route of not allowing people to age to a point where they become a burden?
Anyway; perusing several govt reports paints a depressing picture
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/livinglongerhowourpopulationischangingandwhyitmatters/2018-08-13 (updated below)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/livinglongerhowourpopulationischangingandwhyitmatters/2019-03-15
This one is moving towards frightening
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthcaresystem/bulletins/ukhealthaccounts/2016
Noted….
“If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth–massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.”
http://archive.is/QhNgT
http://archive.is/QhNgT
I suggest not