“The absurdity of a double life” – Reframing the relevance of individual #climateaction

This is the eighth perspective on the #climatedilemma derived from a workshop conducted by #TheDive.com in March 2020 in Berlin. If you are interested also in the seven other perspectives which we reviewed at this workshop, you can find them here:

 I. “It`s a fact” - The Scientific Perspective on #Climatechange

(https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/fight-flight-freeze-eight-perspectives-tim-riedel/)

 II. “It scares me” – Between #climatefear and #climatehysteria (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/ii-scares-me-between-climatefear-climatehysteria-tim-riedel/)

 III. “Time to act” – Here is what we need to reverse #climatechange

(https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/iii-time-act-here-what-we-need-do-reverse-tim-riedel/)

 IV. “It`s too late” – The #climateapocalypse is coming anyway

(https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/iv-its-too-late-climateapocalypse-coming-anyway-tim-riedel/)

 V. “We are having the wrong conversation” – The solution is beyond #climateactivism

(https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/we-having-wrong-conversation-solution-climatechange-beyond-tim-riedel/?published=t)

 VI. “It`s the economy, stupid!” - The business case and the “free-rider dilemma” in #climateprotection

(https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/its-economy-stupid-business-case-free-rider-dilemma-tim-riedel/?published=t)

 VII. “The Climate Change Conspiracy” – Tracing the ideological foundations of #climatechangedenialism

(https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/climate-change-conspiracy-tracing-ideological-tim-riedel/?published=t)

Do these seven perspectives explain sufficiently why we are not reacting to climate change as we should?

We have seen what we need to do in five of these perspectives. And we have seen that we are not doing it. The trends still point into the wrong direction, and all our commitments are way below what it would take to reverse global heating. Some of our inaction, as we have reviewed in the second perspective, can be attributed to feelings of fear and powerlessness. Some resistance, as described in the seventh perspective, can be accounted for with ideological explanations. If we reject modern times and all the uncertainty and ambiguity that goes along with it, we may reject climate change as an element of it. But there must be more to it in order to understand the collective climate paralysis of our entire species.

What would need to happen so that we start taking the climate threat as seriously as we must? Even if politics or managers are tied too much to specific interest groups, why don`t we increase our pressure on them so that they do? As voters and consumers we should have the power to redirect our trajectory if we really want to. But do we? Or are we hopeless? Or just helpless? Or both?

In order to develop better strategies on how to fight #climatechange, we need to understand better why the strategies so far have failed. The following review makes this attempt, drawing on a number of statistics plus literature by Kari Marie Noorgard, Per Espen Stoknes, #luisaneubauer and Alexander Repenning, #majag?pel and #charleseisenstein.

By calling this article “The absurdity of a double life” I am following Kari Norgaard, who borrowed the term herself from Robert Lifton when writing about societal coping strategies with the nuclear threat and the experience of the Hiroshima atomic bombings: We know that our lives can end at any moment, yet we live as though we do not know this.

This article sketches out how this mechanism of societal self-deception works with regard to the climate threat, and how we can possibly escape it.

As we can see from the survey above of the renowned Pew Research Center, Climate Change is seen as a major threat by vast majorities of most countries across the globe.

In line with this, a comparative study conducted by the European Union, as can be seen in the chart above, found that 79% of respondents in the EU see Climate Change as a very serious problem (between 7 am 10 on a scale from 1 – 10), with an additional 14% calling it “fairly serious” (5-6), and only 6% seeing it as neglectable (1-4).

However, when asked about who is responsible for tackling Climate Change, only 36% agreed that they are also personally required to act. 64% delegated this responsibility to politics, administrations, environmental groups, and companies.

So we have to take a closer look. First of all, we see in the first chart of the European Commission that the perception of Climate Change as a “serious problem” did not increase dramatically (from 68% to 79%) between 2011 and 2019.

In some countries even, as the second chart above of the Pew Research Center shows, concern for Climate Change even dropped in some years despite rising evidence of global heating. This was the case for example in Germany, France, UK or Poland in 2016 and 2017, when a high number of refugees fled to Europe and other topics such as globalization, identity, terrorism and migration dominated the headlines. Or it happened in Spain in 2018 after the Catalan parliament declared independence from Spain.

This is in line with the third chart by the Pew Research Center survey as can be seen above, which shows that other worries such as Islamist Movements, international cyberattacks or North Korea`s nuclear program reached very high levels of agreement as well. The same variety of “prime concerns” holds true for the European Union, as can be seen from the chart below:

Consequently, only 41% of all Germans, as can be seen from the next chart below, were actually “afraid of the consequences of climate change” in 2019:

So while Climate Change is of increasing concern to the populace across most of the globe, it is not necessarily seen as more dangerous than other problems. The existential threat of the topic is nowhere near to being understood. On top – or perhaps because of this - the responsibility for solving the problem is largely “outsourced” to those who hold positions of authority.

Not surprisingly then, individual behavior in practice is not seeing dramatic changes towards more climate friendliness. To use Germany as an example, where a high concern with Climate Change (between 70% and 80%) is prevalent, less than 20% of all private households purchase their electricity from renewable sources (so called “?kostrom”). The market share of organically grown food is still below 6%, less than 2% even for meat. The average annual meat consumption has been steady at around 60 kg per person for years, which is more than twice as much as recommended by the German Dietary Society and hugely harmful to the climate. The number of vegetarians is at less than 10%, while only about one percent prefer a completely plant-based (vegan) diet. The average engine output of new passenger cars has increased from 130,5 horse powers in 2010 to 153,4 hp in 2019, with the market share of electrical vehicles in 2019 being less than 2%. It should be 100% electrical, though, given the average lifecycle of a car, if we want to be at a 100% electrical fleet in 15 – 20 years from now.

Likewise, the number of vacations by Germans spent outside of Europe (involving long distance airtravel) has gone up by more than 26% between 2010 and 2018, with 2019 having seen another 3% increase in intercontinental departures from German airports. Only 2% of airtravel is compensated for in carbon offsetting projects at NGOs like #atmosfair, #myclimate, #climateneutralgroup or #southpole.

So what is happening? Are we not informed enough? Or are we not translating our knowledge into meaningful action? And if the latter is the case, why not?

Maja G?pel, Secretary-General of the German Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change and a strong voice behind Scientists for Future, is very clear about the “to do`s” in her book “Unsere Welt Neu Denken” (p. 135): “Our consumeristic behavior in the rich Western societies is only possible through externalizing its [environmental] costs. … It is therefore imperative that we change the role and style of consumption if we are to live in a more sustainable manner.”

But that is easier said than done, as the German face to the “Fridays for Future” Movement Luisa Neubauer phrases it in her book “Vom Ende der Klimakrise” (p. 37/38): “Our individual fight for a more sustainable future is like a fight against windmills, as long as the structure of our societies isn`t sustainable. … This is about developing an awareness for the dilemma of growing up in a society that dumps its responsibility for the future on individuals alone. ... We want to do everything right – but we can`t. We are part of the problem ourselves. We are overwhelmed and overburdened.”

The surveys above are quite illustrative of the fact that 90% of our societies know at least that much about climate change: it is a potentially severe threat to our lifestyle and even to our lives. It therefore definitely would make sense to learn more about it. But – by and large – we don`t really want to know more.

Every relevant piece of information about the reasons and effects of climate change, climate tipping points, the risks of a self-reinforcing and irreversible “runaway climate change” and its consequences is easily available. However, even if all commitments made at the 2015 Paris climate agreement were kept, we would still be on a 3.3 degrees heating trajectory instead of the necessary 1.5 degrees. And societies – media, politicians, companies, artists, consumers, citizens – lead their normal lives, and pretend to balance out climate vs. business decisions as if these were two equally viable alternatives. There is so much more information in the news on football, on business matters, on violence and earthquakes, on community affairs, or on stars and starlets than there is on climate change and how to reverse it. Are we out of our mind?

In fact we are not, quite the contrary. Our reactions make perfect socio-psychological sense. Climate change is a threat with no enemy (we are doing it ourselves), it is potentially lethal, it is invisible, it is complex, it jeopardizes the key patterns and structures we are familiar with, and we have no solution to it. If we were really facing it, how could we keep on living our lives? It is, as Kari Norgaards describes it 2010 in her study on “Cognitive and Behavioral Challenges in Responding to Climate Change”: “In some sense, not wanting to know is connected to not knowing how to know.”

Per Espen Stoknes, author of ”What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming”, calls these reasons for our non-action distance, doom, dissonance, and identity. Climate Change is happening in faraway countries and in the future, it is putting our lives and that of our children in danger, we are causing it with our own behavior, and it is unstoppable unless we dismiss everything we have been told about ourselves since we were children.

We have no answer to this. Even if we did change our behavior individually by 180 degrees, it would have no effect on climate change, unless we all change. Our personal contribution to the problem is as irrelevant as our personal impact on the solution can be. We feel overwhelmed and overburdened.

So we react with the classical psychological defense mechanisms: Displacement (e.g. fighting the messenger instead of the message, or resisting immigration), Denial (either not believing the problem, or accepting it but not drawing the necessary conclusions), Suppression (keeping information out of our conscious awareness), Sublimation (e.g. buying “eco-efficient” products, banning plastic straws), Projection (e.g. blaming China, or politicians, or greedy managers), Rationalization (e.g. casting doubts on science, discussing the cost disadvantages, believing that a carbon tax will stop global warming, or that a technical solution will come up in time), Regression (e.g. focusing on trivialities instead, or going “revenge shopping”), Acting Out (e.g. overambitiously fighting climate deniers), or Compensation (e.g. buying an SUV out of spite or overemphasizing the advantages of our current lifestyle).

As Norgaard describes observations from her research: “People describe feelings of guilt for their own actions, and the difficulty of discussing the issue of climate change with their children. It isn't a topic that people are able to speak about with ease - rather, overall it is an area of confusion and uncertainty. Yet feeling this confusion and uncertainty goes against emotional norms of toughness and maintaining control. Furthermore, thinking about climate change threatens our sense of individual identity and our trust in our government's ability to respond. At the deepest level, large scale environmental problems such as global warming threaten people's sense of the continuity of life.” We don`t want to be reminded of the subject. If we are, we change channels. And we hate those who are reminding us, because we hate ourselves for being so inadequate.

Politicians, Managers, and Journalists are of course not immune to these unconscious defense mechanisms. They are human beings. On top, they are the most successful products of the system that has created the problem which they are now asked to solve. Their dissonance is multifold that of normal citizens.

In addition, they are serving a constituency (voters, customers, readers) that does not reward “bad news” or strong changes. And they are exposed to interest groups (lobbyists, shareholders and investors, political allies) who invest enormous resources in order to distort their judgment and to manipulate their decisions. How can we expect them to change, if we cannot do it ourselves?

So in a reverse of distance, doom, dissonance, and identity, if we want to make climate change successful, we need to make it 1) near and local, 2) lively and hopeful, 3) in line and connected with our everyday lives and experiences, and 4) acknowledging and appreciative of how and why we have lived differently up to now.

As Per Stoknes puts it in an interview on “How to overcome apocalypse fatigue around climate change”:

“More than 80 percent of all news and mainstream media play up the issue of doomsday or catastrophe. From psychological research, we know that if you overdo the threat of catastrophe, you make people feel fear or guilt or a combination. But these two emotions are passive. They make people disconnect and avoid the topic rather than engage with it.”

> What is their call for action?

The solution therefore, as Norgaard and Stoknes describe it, is beyond the individual level. “Both the reasons for and the process of denial are socially organized. A focus on individuals in the absence of attention to immediate culture or economic context leaves out relationships between individual cognition and the larger social context.” (Norgaard).

In a review of the effect of social norms on climate friendly behavior (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8791/b3ce170ee1328adb2df83d75c36fdad326e9.pdf) researchers have discovered many examples of how we change our behavior the most, when we see or assume that other people around us are doing it, too – and vice versa. In one study around 4,000 households were asked by their municipality to conserve power or energy. One quarter of these households each were asked to do so a) for environmental reasons, b) to conserve power for future generations, c) to reduce their utility bill, or d) since their electricity consumption compared negatively with that of their neighbors. The fourth explanation had twice the effect of any of the other three reasons.

So it is the feeling of community, of joint efficacy, and of being part of a group effort behind a positive and shared target which makes people change most easily.

Hence Norgaard concludes that we should:

• Create a sense of community by building on the knowledge that individuals are part of larger committed and motivated citizenry.
• Provide specific opportunities to engage in realistic actions. People must be given not only information, but something to do.
• Build on positive stories of success.

Stoknes adds to the last item by stressing the need for better storytelling:

“Like the story of smarter, more resource-efficient growth, where we reduce waste while improving our lives. This story fits well with businesspeople. Another is that what we’re really looking for in life isn’t more stuff, but the good life. The good life includes better relationships, more meaningful jobs, and connecting to nature. That’s the happiness story. Another story is a shift from dominance over nature to stewardship of God’s creation, which is an ethical story.”

And how can we provide answers to the problem which are near, hopeful, connected, and appreciative instead of distant, doomed, dissonant and identity threatening? By creating collective efforts to make our communities climate friendly. Putting solar panels on local roofs or installing windpower on a municipal level. Starting urban gardening projects. Restoring the local rivers or forests together with youthgroups. Setting up an action group to replace or refurbish air conditioning, insulation, and heating systems in the neighborhood. Making products and manufacturing processes in companies more circular. Organizing carpooling. Convincing the local bank to start a loan program for investments in energy saving or renewables. Starting a network of “Architects for Future” in order to promote climate positive building technologies. Adopting a partner community in Africa and helping it to preserve or restore their rainforest. Joining community supported and regenerative agriculture projects, or supporting your local farmers to create such an initiative. Changing the menu in the canteen, or in the local fast food restaurants. Organizing an exhibition on nutrition, health and climate change. Finding investors for a municipal and low priced charging station for electrical vehicles, or reserving extra parking for them, perhaps in cooperation with the local supermarket.

There are so many things that can be done together, that are fun, that create community and connection and help to protect the climate at the same time. We can work with the groups we are in anyway, e.g. the company we work for, our neighborhood council, the local tourism or trade and industry agency, our church group, our boy or girl scouts, the volunteer fire fighters or our sports club in order to start something like this together. We can kick off these initiatives, celebrate and share them, feel good about them, and motivate others to do the same. Plenty of such projects already exist and have great effects. Documentaries like “Tomorrow” (tomorrow-documentary.com/) “2040” (whatsyour2040.com/about/), or "Power to Change" (powertochange-film.com) have displayed many concrete examples of how such efforts can work out to substantially increase not only the environmental, but also the social and the economic quality of our lives.

Surely all those activities will not be large enough to prevent climate change on their own. Changes in policies, regulation, subsidies and taxation will have to follow suit. But as we have seen above: Politicians and managers are human beings. They are part of the system. They follow social norms and they want to please their constituencies. If society goes ahead, they will follow.

> What is their underlying assumption?

The first underlying assumption of this perspective is very comforting: We are not bad people. Even though our climate actions are completely insufficient, our characters are not.

As Charles Eisenstein phrases it, we are in a “double bind” situation: on one hand we are required to spend our money and time on buying and producing products which are harmful to the environment; on the other hand we want to protect it. We cannot do both, so we strike a poor compromise in favor of our “normal life”, and we feel guilty and inadequate about it. We know that we are not doing the right thing, but we see no alternative, so we safeguard our self-esteem by ignoring, avoiding, downplaying, sidelining, or diluting our knowledge. We are helpless, not hopeless.

The second assumption is equally promising: If we are not a lost cause, then we have apparently just not received the right invitation yet. We need better avenues for climate action which are near, hopeful, connected, and appreciative. Dear Climate NGOs, this is your call to attract us to more tangible climate action. Dear governments, this is your chance to leverage your resources, to gain support and to multiply your climate efforts at very little costs by funding grassroot climate projects. Dear companies, this is your opportunity not only to fight global warming in a very cost efficient way, but also to engage your employees and to add purpose to your brand.

As mentioned above, this kind of efforts cannot replace changes in regulation, taxation and large scale political strategies. The political climate approach is still needed. But they have the power to break the two circular mental gridlocks we have subconsciously created for ourselves:

1) We do nothing, since the others are also doing nothing. They are doing nothing, because we are doing nothing.

2) We feel ashamed, guilty or scared about doing nothing. So we evade the topic and keep doing nothing.

The third assumption is derived from this, and it is perhaps the most powerful: Individual climate actions may be irrelevant in terms of their greenhousegas effects. But they are not meaningless. They draw their relevance from the effect they have on our environment in the broader sense.

If we do something that is near, hopeful, connected, and appreciative, the others will join in. We will not only feel good because we are doing something of value to the climate, but also since we are doing something of value for them. We do not only save the planet somewhere else and sometime in the future. We save it here and now. Our feeling of guilt can disappear, because we do something meaningful. And we are not doing it for somebody anonymous, and we are not doing it out of a moral obligation. We are doing it for us, and because it brings us joy to do it. If we don`t enjoy it, we should look for something that does, or else it will have no effect. 

Per Espen Stoknes, when asked about what gives him hope facing the climate catastrophe, describes a very similar frame of mind:

“There are versions of hope that are passive: Somebody will fix this problem with technology and soon magically remove the CO2 from the air. That hope is dependent upon a kind of magical, technical fix. And there is a more active, optimistic hope: If we just fight hard enough, we’ll turn society around.

I have hope that is not dependent on what happens around me, but is grounded in my inner values. I do this work because it’s aligned with who I am.

It gives me joy to take action today. It brings out a sense of satisfaction in me, because I’m contributing. I’m not passively waiting for a fix or magically expecting my own contributions to solve the problem. I’m part of something larger. And, sensing that connection to a larger call to action, working through and in me, I feel connection — to the air, to society, to a larger transition. It brings me a feeling of flow, participation, groundedness, and sense of purpose that is larger than me.”

Individual climate action may be the decisive factor to a true and deep environmental transformation of our economies and societies. But this will not happen because we save CO2 or reduce plastic with it. If it happens, it will happen because we start leading different lives, which are more near, hopeful, connected, and appreciative. How can a society which is leading such a life keep ruining the planet?

> What is their positive and encouraging impetus?

The exciting part of this perspective is that it resolves many of the dilemmas of the traditional frames of individual climate action:

• It resolves the contradiction between my “normal life” and my climate ambition, since it allows me to be part of the good side (contributing to meaningful changes) and part of the bad side (still emitting sizeable GHG) at the same time. I don`t have to be perfect to be good, since I can be inadequate and still make a difference to the better. I shouldn`t not do something because I know that it will be insufficient anyway.
• It resolves the frustration of not making a difference regardless of how hard I try. Whatever I do will have a positive impact, as long as my approach is near, hopeful, connected, and appreciative. If the others are not doing it (yet), it`s not such a big problem anymore, since I am not doing it for them or for the world, but in order to improve my personal environment. Nobody can take that away from me.
• It resolves the risk of “climate depression”, since it does not tie climate action to the one and ultimate success of reversing global warming. The solution is not big, and it is not black or white, it can actually be quite small and colorful. So my efforts can be organized, celebrated, shared and reinforced around many small steps and successes which make the world a better place, regardless of the big outcome of the planet.
• It resolves the need to draw a separating line between “me” and “them”. Since none of us is only “good”, none of us is only “bad” either. So everybody is welcome to join in and contribute, if they are serious about it, even if they eat meat, drive an SUV or work for a fracking company. If they do join in and contribute, they are part of the solution.
• Last and not the least, this perspective resolves the need to be stronger than the other side. We don`t have to be the majority to start, or more powerful to win. We can start out of our own right, anytime. And we always win, since we create value with what we do. Every tomato in an urban gardening project is a win, every ride shared, every frog saved, every veggie burger liked.

> What is their frustration potential, how do they draw from our sources of energy?

This perspective may sound like giving up. If my goal is to save the planet, how can I find fulfillment in a tomato? Isn`t this an invitation to reduce our ambitions to a minimum? By following this approach, are we perhaps just managing our expectations downwards, so that they can match the pitiful low level of climate protection which we have succeeded to achieve?

It may feel that way, and some people may take this line of thinking as an excuse for their inaction. But that won`t hurt, since those people are inactive already. For the others, it is a chance of revitalizing their hopes and their energy.

This perspective is not calling to give up on political lobbying, scientific arguments, campaigning, or legislative work. But it is adding another avenue, which may be better suited to truly mobilize and transform our societies.

There are reasons why we have not been successful up to now. Some of these reasons are described in this article. We can keep trying the old ways, try harder, and hope to see better results. Or we start trying a different approach.