I have ceased to be so hung up on people changing their behaviors. No, rather, I am aiming for much lower. Attitudes will do. Because I believe most of us cannot go at it alone, and need instead the support and infrastructures from high up. What people can, and should do however, is recognize right initiatives when they are presented to them, and endorse them.
Then comes the challenge of how to change popular attitudes in the face of flagrant manipulations from special fossil fuel interests, as in behind the scenes lobbying, and massive progaganda. In climate matters, Chevron, and Exxon hold the cards, not politicians. The best way to stop this, is through the deliberate exposure of Big Oil’s dirty tricks in the media, and through counter-lobbying. Climate naives are too easy of a prey.
Another group worth paying attention to, are the powers in charge of our country. That select group of Senators, Congress people, government executives, and Supreme judges need to be educated about their new responsibilities in the face of climate change and other global world resources crisis. Intelligence and power are not immune to misinformation and unconsciousness. Counter-lobbying agents and climate ethicists have their work cut out.
A quick thought for now: Apparently, according to something I read earlier this AM, a former EPA person testified yesterday, and in his testimony (as I understand it based on what I’ve read so far), he talks about oil and coal companies, including ExxonMobil, being involved in discouraging the Bush administration from supporting the EPA’s assessment of the need to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
Apparently, a transcript of the testimony is supposed to be released today.
That will be interesting reading.
Cheers for now.
“I believe most of us cannot go at it alone, and need instead the support and infrastructures from high up.”
Indeed, I think it should be easy for someone to live green. That’s what I’m working on with my project “Utopia”. I want to give everyone who can convince his boss to work from a distance a chance to live in a much more comfortable way, while leaving a much lower environmental footprint. Specifically, I want to produce virtually food and energy at a local level, and have everyone work very close to where they live. The space must be so nice that no-one really wants to go on vacation anymore. Autarky is explicitly not a goal. There’s nothing wrong with being part of a larger nation, and being part of the rest of the world.
The advantage is that this can grow organically. You can create (or convert) buildings or neighborhoods one by one, and if you make the model (or rather the philosophy) open source, it can be started by any person with business sense.
My goal is to make the new offering have so much advantages, that people are willing to give up other things. Like with a sports car, you go faster, but you give up space. The extra push will of course come from the “feel good” factor, and a sense of inevitability. I expect the first “citizens” of Utopia to be people who know that the old way of living is not sustainable anyway. It’ll be also people just looking for something new in general.
If everyone is living life a like a PC, I want to give them a life like a Mac. Different, “better”.
(this leaves open the question if a Mac is better in absolute sense, but at least many people think so)
Of course this approach will just be complementary to “personal” energy conservation and either “centralized” or “personal” clean energy projects.
The space in between just fascinates me the most. It would be totally different than we have now.
Re attitudes: I think working on the more fundamental level is indeed more interesting. It also brings you closer to politics, as you could say that voters attitudes determine the stances politicians take.
I’m personally really hoping on the spread of a “post-materialistic” attitude. Or maybe we should call it “green” values.
Do you see a difference between attitudes and values?
Read this:
http://globalwarming.house.gov/mediacenter/pressreleases_2008?id=0022#main_content
The thing is that changing behaviour does change attitudes. It changes the attitude of the person performing the behaviour, and it changes the attitudes of people watching the behaviour. It’s as Rebecca Solnit wrote in her article Revolutions per minute,
“Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different.”
The examples she gave are of where people changed their behaviour, and this changed their own attitudes, and people came to accept that behaviour, and the new attitude spread.
As I’ve said many times before, good change always seems painfully slow, and bad change terrifyingly fast. I’d say that behaviour and attitudes both have changed a lot across the West in the last few years. To people like Marguerite or us, this change seems slow and sluggish. But in historical terms it’s astoundingly fast. Between the end of slavery and desegregation in the USA were one hundred years, and to a large degree the segregation continues. Compare with the change in attitudes to the environment we’ve seen over the last decade.
I also note that Marguerite is writing from the United States, which in attitude and behaviour with resources and the environment is the slowest to change. It’s important not to confuse that 4.5% of humanity with the whole world, or even the West generally, even if it does use 25% of the world’s resources. You’re judging the movement of the crowd by the slowest kid at the back.
Now, these changes are definitely happening, but whether they’ll be quick enough to avoid the worst effects of fossil fuel depletion and climate change is an open question. And in this I agree that government, controlling as it does laws, regulations, and the public revenue, is key. Government in a democracy exists to give power to the individual, give them choices. That’s why we have schools and hospitals and roads and railways and police forces, so that we can have freedom of choice in our affairs.
Don’t overestimate the power of corporations. It’s often said that they’re larger economies than many countries, but they can only do this by comparing the net wealth of the company with the annual income of a country; compare the net wealth of a company with the net wealth of a country and you get a rather different picture. Corporations are also subject to laws. A legislature can abolish, take over, merge, split up, or restrict a corporation with an afternoon’s debate. Corporations wanting to control government have to work more slowly.
The power of a corporation is simply that its donations get them time to sit down with elected representatives and talk to them. MPs and Senators are no different to you and I, in that all of us are inclined to listen to the advice of those we know, and ignore the advice of people we don’t know. Most people never contact their elected representatives. They can’t listen to us if we never speak to them. The only ones who speak to them are the corporations, so what a surprise, they listen to them. So if our elected representatives do the bidding of corporations, that’s our fault. It’s like plonking your kid in front of the tv and never interacting with them, letting them hang with the rough kids in town, then wondering why they turn into antisocial shits.
So this is another behaviour which can change attitudes, and thus behaviours – we ought to regularly contact our elected representatives and tell them what we think, as I’ve said before. And this helps the natural change in attitudes and behaviours we’ve seen speed up a bit. I hope, fast enough to avoid the worst.
Kyle, excellent commentary!
“I also note that Marguerite is writing from the United States, which in attitude and behaviour with resources and the environment is the slowest to change.”
I also note that Marguerite is writing from California, which citizens are known to be the trendsetters on climate in America:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008155.html
This makes for a very interesting perspective.
I follow technological innovation quite closely, and I think on this terrain, there’s almost no stopping to the Californian innovation machine, both for clean energy and energy conversation.
I expect the Californians to be leading us into the future.
Thanks Jeff, for your great job at unearthing critical piece of info on Big Oil and others’ dirty work behind the scene. This NEEDS to be brought out in broad daylight. Citizens have the right to know that kind of manipulation, as they are the first ones to suffer its consequences.
Kyle, agree with you about link between behaviors and attitudes and circular nature of connection between the two. That is a well established notion from cognitive/behavioral psychology (I have made that point repeatedly in various comments and posts in this blog). Here the question is of where to intervene most effectively. My belief is that right now, the most practical strategy is to work on nudging attitudes. I am also convinced, government actions in the next few years will be key. I may not have it in me to change my driving habits on my own, but if I understand the necessity and value of such a behavior change, I will be more inclined to support new laws aimed at encouraging other modes of transportation.
Meryn, yes, I feel very blessed to live in California. We are a bit ahead of the game, although still far from where we need to be. The biggest difference, and this ties to the point of my post, is that people’s attitudes here are much more progressive and open to change.
Marguerite: Maybe you could take questions from the PEW surveys (or others) regarding attitudes, choose the answer you believe is the “right” attitude (intuitively) and then look at how close you, your neighbors (or co-workers, or people on this blog), Californians in general and – lastly – Americans in general are in the various (but likely not independent) dimensions.
This is more or less what Inglehart does with his research of “modernization”. I expect we’re now going through a new modernization wave, and that we’re at the head of the pack.
Inglehart takes only national data though.
This is more like Inglehart plus Christakis (spread of stuff through networks).
I also have the intuition that Kyle is probably the most “modernized” of us all.
“if I understand the necessity and value of such a behavior change, I will be more inclined to support new laws aimed at encouraging other modes of transportation.”
Yes I like that notion. If you know you’ve got a problem, you might not take the time to fix it yourself, but you will accept help more easily.
Also, it helps with the issue of “fairness”, which Kyle described so good a while ago here and on his own blog.
Changing attitudes will also motivate business owners and entrepreneurs to create new offerings, or make changes in existing ones. This I have commented on when you blogged about the biking distance to the nearest supermarket (or was it the nearest Whole Foods? – doesn’t matter).
Now (I suggest) read this, or at least the first few paragraphs in the Summary:
http://portal.acs.org:80/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_SUPERARTICLE&node_id=1907&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1
I know: It’s more fun to be in Europe than to read this stuff. But . . .
Also, a very revealing interview in the Times today, of ExxonMobil’s Tillerson, who essentially says that they will keep on doing what they are doing, i.e., oil and gas. Contrast that statement with the position statement at the link, above.
Cheers.
What’s it mean to be “modernised”?
I mean, I don’t have solar panels on the roof or a quantum heat pump or any of that stuff. I am just a bit frugal, is all.
[...] …but also stick to the politics (like glue) and to the emotions (as attitudes need to change) [...]
Kyle, modernization (as Inglehart uses it) applies to values held by people, not what kind of things they own. Sometimes these two could be related of course. For example, I’d consider it a good value for someone to always choose “appropriate” technology. This might mean solar panels or heat pumps, but not necessarily so.
If my hypothesis of a new – green, frugal – wave of modernization is correct, I think you’re the most modern of us here, because I think you have managed to free yourself the most from dogma’s on what’s necessary to live a comfortable life.
I remember one time trying to defend air-conditioning on your blog… You made it clear that you think that a fan is enough. That could really mean you’re ahead in some of your thinking.
Of course, I can’t say for sure if we all going to adopt frugal habits eventually, but right now I think so, and of course I hope so. I also think that when we do, it will become permanent, and in ten or twenty years we’ll look back at consumer behavior in the 20th century as a merely a temporary aberration in history.