Don't Even Think About It (10 page)

Environmental campaigns around climate change also manufacture deadlines to create urgency. Back in 1990, I was an intern in the smoke-filled offices of the
Ecologist
magazine as the editorial staff pulled together a new book warning of environmental collapse with the title
5000 Days to Save the Planet
. The deadline ran out in the same year that the British think tank Institute for Public Policy Research released its own deadline report: “Ten Years to Save the Planet.”

And the baton kept being passed on. In 2007, an international team of celebrities united under the banner Global Cool said that ten years was the deadline to “save the planet.” That year, the World Wildlife Fund warned that five years was the “small window of time in which we can plant the seeds of change.” Each successive climate conference provides a countdown, and I am already receiving action alerts on the run-up to the Paris conference in 2015 telling me how many months we have left to save the world.

In 2008, the London-based New Economics Foundation launched the campaign 100 Months to Save the World. Prince Charles became a strong supporter of the deadline, declaring shortly after, from a podium in his modestly appointed pad in St. James’s Palace, that there were now only ninety-six months left to reverse what he calls “de-souled consumerism” and that the “age of convenience” was over.

But it was not over at all. Charles may have converted his fleet of cars to run on wine-based ethanol, but in every other respect, life appears to be largely unchanged. I ask Andrew Simms, who invented that campaign slogan, what happens in 2016 when, as Slovic says, we open up the windows and find that it’s still a beautiful day. “Of course,” Simms says, “we never said that the sky would set fire and all forests burn. Really what happens is that it becomes more, rather than less, likely that we go over the safe threshold and positive feedbacks kick in.”

And here lies the problem. Without an explanation, the deadline can seem to be arbitrary and imposed. However, as soon as it has an explanation, the campaign is immersed back into the tangle of probabilities, uncertainties, and cost-benefit analysis that it originally sought to avoid. No one is ever going to march under a banner of “100 Months Before the Odds Shift into a Greater Likelihood of Feedbacks,” especially given that many experts fear that we may have already crossed that line.

But even if climate change has no pressing deadlines, this does not mean that the
anticipation
of future threat will not motivate us and enable us to overcome any tendency we have to discount the future.

For the past twenty years, George Loewenstein, professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, has been exploring the effect of anticipation on our attitudes to future loss. Fearful anticipation is, he says, highly motivating. He agrees that we do tend to discount the future but feels that it is “easy to exaggerate its importance.” His research suggests that the anticipation effect is likely to be even stronger in a case, like climate change, in which people anticipate a deteriorating condition, what he calls a “decline sequence.”

Anticipation was, for example, a major factor in people’s fear of nuclear war, another issue whose future impacts face great uncertainty. Risk specialists talk of the signal value of individual incidents, such as nuclear accidents, which portend future disaster. In this sense extreme weather events offer a string of signal events that feed the anticipation of future loss, which explains why climate disasters can heighten concern among those already disposed to accept the threats of climate change.

However, Loewenstein stressed to me, people’s primary response will always be to mitigate the dread, even if this means avoiding the problem itself. There is, he warned, a very narrow boundary between not believing that the problem is happening at all and being so afraid that you are immobilized. So, he says, “from a psychological point of view, the crux—the key issue—is our capacity to generate our own arguments that can interfere with that fear response.” These arguments include our capacity to, in Slovic’s phrase, “believe what you want to believe.”

So there is a legitimate question to ask: Given our ability to deliberately construct a narrative that can reduce our sense of fear, is climate change really a distant issue for future generations, or have we just decided that we want to see it as one?

Certainly there is nothing new about climate science. The science of the greenhouse effect goes back to the theories of Joseph Fourier in 1824. In 1896 the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first calculated the impacts of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide on global temperatures. He estimated that it would raise global temperatures by five to six degrees Celsius, well within the range that climate scientists, with their powerful computer models, now fear is in the offing.

Nor is there anything new about climate change as a political concern. The first major political warning emerged in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Scientific Advisory Council cautioned that the constant increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide could “modify the heat balance of the atmosphere.” In 1992, every nation in the world signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and an entire generation has grown up in its wake.

The impacts of climate change are hardly in the future either. I write this after the 350th month in a row that is warmer than that month’s historical average. Although temperatures vary from year to year, the trend is also very clear.

Scientists, though, always stress the importance of natural variability in climate systems and only start to express confidence in their models in the time horizon that most people see as being beyond their immediate concerns—typically 2050, a date that researchers have found to be set so far in the future as to be “almost hypothetical” for the general public.

Politicians are all too happy to talk about climate change in these terms so that they can postpone difficult decisions as far into the future as possible. Western governments, in particular, wish to look forward and have no desire to remind anyone of their historical responsibility for two hundred years of emissions from industrial growth and land clearance.

So climate change is a future problem. But it is also a past problem and a present problem. It is better thought of as a developing process of long-term deterioration, called, by some psychologists, a “creeping problem.” The lack of a definite beginning, end, or deadline requires that we create our own timeline. Not surprisingly, we do so in ways that remove the compulsion to act. We allow just enough history to make it seem familiar but not enough to create a responsibility for our past emissions. We make it just current enough to accept that we need to do something about it but put it just too far in the future to require immediate action.

14

Costing the Earth

Why We Want to Gain the Whole World Yet Lose Our Lives

Arguments around climate change have
always been based on the short-term and long-term costs. Advocates of action tend to emphasize the long-term costs of inaction and, taking a leaf from the book of health campaigners, stress that there are immediate economic benefits from moving to a sustainable economy. Opponents of action play the same game in reverse, emphasizing the short-term costs and the painful disruption to the status quo while playing down the long-term costs of climate change impacts, or rejecting the existence of the problem altogether.

When the issue first emerged in the early 1990s, arguments for government action were often phrased in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. In retrospect, these read as overly rationalist and almost deliberately evasive of any emotional or ethical component. One influential report from 1993 argued that “a comparison between the costs of greenhouse prevention and the benefits of avoided warming is the backbone of an economically rational greenhouse response.” Another, released around the same time by the British Royal Society, argued for an “optimal level of safety where the extra cost of any extra reduction [in emissions] just equals its benefits but goes no further.”

In 2006 Sir Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank, wrote the hugely influential
Review of the Economics of Climate Change
,
which claims—though his critics argue otherwise—to provide a balanced economic evaluation of the short- and long-term costs of climate change. From his seven hundred pages of dense analysis, Stern produced a key finding: that reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change will cost us around 1 percent of our annual income for the next fifty years. However, he warned, if we do not do this, the annual costs from extreme climate events will rise to anything from 5 percent to 20 percent of our annual income—indefinitely.

This sounds like an unassailable argument for immediate action—and indeed it would be if we evaluated costs in the same way that we weigh up benefits. However Daniel Kahneman’s research found that we are far more prepared to take risks on losses than gains, especially if the losses lie in the future.

For example, to paraphrase one of Kahneman’s experiments, imagine that you have been offered nine hundred dollars. Would you be prepared to take a 90 percent chance of boosting it to one thousand dollars with a 10 percent chance of losing it? The majority of people say no. Imagine, then, that this is a loss and you are required to pay nine hundred dollars. Would you be prepared to accept a gamble that offered a 10 percent chance of being let off the full amount, but with the 90 percent chance that your debt would rise to one thousand dollars? This seems more tempting even though the actual condition is exactly the same. The large majority of people would take this chance.

Research has also found that people give an overwhelming priority to the short term over the long term and that they discount the future—
discount
here being an economic term for reducing value over time. When results for different time scales are plotted on a chart, the resulting curve is hyperbolic—that is to say that the sense of relative loss is most acute in the near future but declines in the distant future. Hence—not too surprisingly—this is called hyperbolic discounting.

Taken together, this research relates directly to climate change, suggesting, as Kahneman feared, that people will be strongly disposed to avoid short-term falls in their living standard and to take their chances on the uncertain but potentially far higher costs that might come in the longer term.

As predicted by the hyperbolic discounting model, governments have proven to be extremely unwilling to incur costs in the short term but perfectly willing to accept far greater costs in the future. The governments of the European Union, the U.S. state of California, and the Canadian province of British Columbia have all declared a long-term target of reducing emissions by 80 percent within forty years. So far, they have managed to achieve a meager half a percent reduction per year.

The larger measures that might achieve the target are safely placed further down that precipitous slope of parabolic indifference, always just over the horizon: sometime soon, but not quite yet, and, as skeptics like to point out, surrounded by a remarkable vagueness about what they might cost. Much recent climate change policy has been based on treading water—what the U.S. National Academy of Scientists calls a “muddling through” strategy.

Clearly, rational cost-benefit analyses do not stimulate a sense of threat or motivate action among policy makers. If anything, they seem to encourage them to take a chance. When Sir Nicholas Stern offers them a choice between a certain one percent decrease of income now or a 5 to 20 percent decrease of income at some point in the future, it feels disconcertingly like one of Daniel Kahneman’s experiments in temporal discounting.

What is more, senior politicians and business leaders are inveterate risk takers who have been successful through a string of lucky gambles, which they prefer to credit to their unique talents. Inviting such people to take a gamble on the future is like inviting an alcoholic to pour himself a drink.

But the more important question in trying to understand why people are so unwilling to accept climate change is whether humans as a whole are
innately
disposed to disregard any threat that requires sustained payments in order to avoid greater, but less certain, long-term losses.

Clearly, this is not necessarily the case. Each year people and businesses pay more than $4.3 trillion in insurance premiums as a protection against uncertain future risks. In the year of Hurricane Sandy, insurance payouts for climate-related damage soared to a record $44 billion, with an additional $21 billion from the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program.

Even greater costs are involved for military defense. Every year governments around the world justify $1.7 trillion in military expenditure in order, they claim, to protect citizens against entirely uncertain and ill-defined threats. Since 2001 American politicians have approved $300 billion in federal government spending to defend the United States against further terrorist attacks. This profligacy in response to an entirely uncertain and unquantifiable risk has the support of the large majority of Americans, including many people who, in other regards, would strongly oppose government spending.

Again we are reminded that the cognitive biases that appear under the tightly controlled and artificial conditions of a psychology experiment are, in real life, subservient to people’s culture, social norms, and in-group identity.