Yesterday I posted a diary collecting and summarizing posts from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones which looked at climate plans from top tier Democratic candidates, ranked them, and discussed Drum’s larger point that the plans mean nothing as long as people are unwilling to do what needs to be done to realize them. And so far, they aren’t.
Drum is arguing that people will not change their behavior if they feel the price of doing so is too high. He’s calling for research as a necessary part of any climate proposal to find ways to make that price low enough to get past that inherent human resistance. He also points out any serious climate proposal is going to have to find ways to encompass the world; America cleaning up its act is not enough to save the world all by itself.
Needless to say, this generated some interesting discussion (go see the comments on the original post) and a fair amount of pushback.
Several people pointed out that there is no shortage of ways to bring down carbon emissions, that the sacrifices Drum says people will not make are not an issue because we can already minimize them. The word isn’t getting out (lack of awareness, push-back, and outright disinformation was cited as reasons for some of that.)
Others also brought up ways to tackle the problem from the other end — there are things we can do to increase drawing carbon out of the atmosphere via changes in agriculture and other practices.
Some were upset with way Drum critiqued the assorted candidates on their climate plans. (Nobody did better than a C+ by Drum’s ranking.)
And some rejected everything Drum had to say.
I think that some of what Drum has to say can be subject to debate — but his observation about the human factor as a serious obstacle is not one that can be brushed aside. (Take a look at Jared Diamonds “Collapse — How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” for examples from history) Going by the poll results, a good chunk of the people who bothered to make a poll choice for the question I posed appear to agree with Drum.
If you find this of interest, I strongly suggest you check out the original post, both for the links, the quotes, and the comments. Otherwise, here’s my wrap-up with some additional observations. (I included most of this as an update on the original post, but I’ve elaborated it a bit more here.)
Kevin Drum has pointed to a critical problem.
The technology is there, now, to start doing things to bring down carbon emissions. If anything, there’s no lack of answers — and that doesn’t include draw down technologies as some have pointed out. But here’s the problem Drum is pointing to that is the real obstacle: humans.
To summarize his three criteria (and reorder them):
- Any proposal to deal with climate change has to be one that will be supported by the public — and that support will have to be broad and deep enough to enable a program on the scale necessary — or it will never get enacted. The perfect program that will never happen is not an answer.
- Any proposal to address climate has to be broad enough to cover the entire planet. It has to work everywhere, or just doing it in America is not going to be enough. (And if you think the rest of the world will accept a low-carbon future if it means their standard of living is frozen at a level below the developed world, well good luck with that.)
- Human behavior and history show that people will not do what needs to be done if they think it’s going to impose too great a burden on them. It’s not enough to say “We have an answer” if you can’t get people to pay the price for that answer.
Number three is the big one. That’s why Drum puts such a high priority on research to find ways to make that price trivial enough to not matter, or to provide solutions that are so attractive on their own merits, people will rush to adopt them.
Let me do a little more to flesh out that last point. If you could market an electric car that would sell for the same price as ICE cars, had the same load and size capacity, had unlimited range and could fully charge in minutes instead of hours, and could charge itself just by leaving it parked in the sun… people would be lining up to buy them.
Or let’s look at another problem that shows how hard dealing with people is. Every one knows being overweight and out of shape carries serious health risks — yet obesity is a huge problem in this country. It imposes huge costs on our healthcare system. We also have an effective answer to the problem: 1) Eat less, 2) eat right, and 3) exercise more.
Putting a health club on every block and giving everyone a membership, subsidizing the purchase of home exercise machines with tax incentives, banning fast-food franchises and imposing calorie limits on meals — those would all work, but what are the odds of that actually being supported by the voting public? You also have to factor in market forces and the profit motive; there’s a lot of money to be made selling people things that are bad for them — but they love doing. Super-size me, right?
And it also points up something that has come up in discussions here on climate. You can try to motivate people to lose weight by scaring them to death and telling them they’re going to die. Creating a sense of urgency — especially when it really IS urgent — can work up to a point. Several commenters have noted that approach can be counter-productive; people stop listening to what they don’t want to hear or sink into apathy believing they’re doomed.
You can try to motivate them by telling them how much better their lives will be. That can work as well — but without urgency, the tendency to put things off, do less than necessary, or not even start because it looks too hard to get to that better life… well that approach has its limits too.
You can kill the messenger all you want, fault Drum for whatever sins you think he has committed — but take another look at the poll question and the responses to it. (See the graphic above.) Don’t dismiss what Drum is saying until you have an answer for that.