Don't Even Think About It (9 page)

Slovic’s research explains all too well why my friends and neighbors could become so agitated about a cell phone tower. It contained a near-perfect mixture of threats: a new technology, dread risk fears of radiation, a threat to our children as they played innocently in their school playground. It also had exceptional proximity: visible, local, immediate, and with a clearly defined deadline. Finally, the coup de grâce: It had an external enemy, the faceless T-Mobile phone corporation, which had, for its own nefarious reasons, disguised this dangerous radiation-emitting tower as a flagpole.

So I ask Slovic where climate change would sit on his scales and why it is not capable of raising the same level of concern. After all, it is also catastrophic, irreversible, new, related to technology, threatening to children, and it makes people feel powerless. Surely, I suggest, this is a royal flush of both dread and unknown risks.

Slovic is not persuaded. He fully accepts that climate change is a massive problem. Indeed, he says he would work on it himself but he is now specializing in genocide and “only works on one impossible problem from hell at a time.”

However, he says, it does not
feel
threatening, and that is the critical distinction. People’s resistance to nuclear power, toxic chemicals, or vaccination tends to emerge at the point when something is about to change: when they take their child for a vaccination or when a nuclear plant (or cell phone tower) may be placed in their neighborhood.

But once things are accepted into our status quo and assumed to be part of normal life, it requires a far higher level of threat to have them removed. People might very well mobilize against a new energy technology that causes climate change, but not against the cars, planes, and power plants that are already woven into the fabric of their lives.

Slovic argues that extreme weather events, even highly visible ones such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, are also part of our accepted way of life—our status quo—in ways that can lead us to accept rather than resist them. He suggests that extreme weather events seem familiar, and we are accustomed—in the developed world at any rate—to regard them as manageable. “Even when they do happen to us,” he says, “the storm goes over. You look out the window and, hey, it’s a beautiful day.” As I found in Bastrop and New Jersey, people are initially traumatized but dust themselves off and focus on reconstruction and moving forward.

In language theory, the term “false friends” recognizes the trap posed by words that look and sound the same but have developed entirely different meanings—as anyone shopping for clothes on the other side of the Atlantic will find when they ask for pants, knickers, vests, or jumpers. Climate change has plenty of linguistic false friends and, as I will show, there is endless potential for misunderstanding scientific terms when they are used in a wider context. But the weather is also a kind of false friend: It looks and feels familiar, and we have a wide range of available experience to draw on that can mislead us.

Paul Slovic suggests that the third major problem is that climate change is not readily imaginable. “With threats of graphic imaginability, such as terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, you lose all sense of proportion and respond with high alarm to low probabilities. The availability bias that draws on recent experience keeps the threat alive, and the uncertainty of when the next attack might come does not diminish that fear; it amplifies it.”

But because climate change does not have the same stigma, and extreme weather events have a degree of familiarity, the uncertainty of its impacts do not instill dread but rather, Slovic says, “give you the leeway to believe what you want to believe.”

Believe what you want to believe?
This is a telling phrase. Slovic is saying that even though it involves so many of the characteristics of dread and unknown risk, climate change does not
feel
frightening unless you actively
choose
to see it that way. If you are already inclined (by your values, politics, or social group) to see climate change as dangerous, then it looks really dangerous. If you are not inclined that way, then it looks exaggerated. Once again, the perception of climate change is being determined by the social lens you see it through, and, once again, there is a powerful feedback that tends to pull people apart.

12

Uncertain Long-Term Costs

Why Our Cognitive Biases Line Up Against Climate Change

“This is not what you
might want to hear,” says Professor Daniel Kahneman. “I am very sorry, but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.”

I assure him that this indeed what I want to hear and the reason why I wanted to talk to him. Kahneman, after all, received a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the psychology of decision making, and his bestselling book,
Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow
, has been a major influence on my own thinking.

In our packed cafe in downtown New York, the background noise is painfully high, and Kahneman delivers his argument a few words at a time in between long pauses for another spoonful from his seemingly bottomless bowl of tomato soup. Piece by piece, he meticulously outlines the reasons why he thinks that climate change is a hopeless problem and why it doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilizing people’s sense of threat.

His concerns are threefold. First, climate change lacks salience—by which he means the qualities that mark it as prominent or demanding attention. Like Daniel Gilbert, Kahneman argues that the greatest salience belongs to threats that are concrete, immediate, and indisputable—for instance, a car out of control driving right at you. By contrast, climate change is, he says, abstract, distant, invisible, and disputed.

The second problem, he notes, is that dealing with climate change requires that people accept certain short-term costs and reductions in their living standards in order to mitigate against higher but uncertain losses that are far in the future. This is a combination that, he fears, is exceptionally hard for us to accept.

Third, information about climate change seems uncertain and contested. As long as that remains the case, he says, “people will score it as a draw, even if there is a National Academy on one side and some cranks on the other.”

“The bottom line,” Kahneman says, “is that I’m extremely skeptical that we can cope with climate change. To mobilize people, this has to become an emotional issue. It has to have the immediacy
and
salience. A distant, abstract, and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilizing public opinion.”

This combination of short-term and long-term decision making under conditions of uncertainty is the essence of Kahneman’s lifework. During his twenty-year collaboration with the psychologist Amos Tversky, Kahneman challenged the prevailing economic assumption, called utility theory, that choices are made with a rational evaluation of future benefits.

They argued instead that our decisions are more likely to be directed by a set of inbuilt and largely intuitive mental shortcuts—what they called cognitive biases. Biases help us to apply our previous experience to new information, enabling us to decide what to heed and what to ignore. They are an invaluable tool when dealing with simple day-to-day decisions but can generate serious systematic errors when applied to complex decision making. Kahneman and Tversky found that people are consistently far more averse to losses than gains, are far more sensitive to short-term costs than long-term costs, and privilege certainty over uncertainty.

Kahneman sees climate change as a near perfect lineup of these biases. An issue is challenging enough if it concerns only losses and no gains. And it is challenging if those losses are long-term not short-term. And it is challenging if it has substantial uncertainty. Climate change appears to be the perfect combination of all three factors. I will examine each of them, in turn, in the following chapters.

I ask him whether these cognitive barriers could be overcome if people understood them better—this is, after all, one of my hopes for this book. Professor Kahneman pauses for another contemplative spoonful of tomato soup. “Actually,” he says, “I’m not very optimistic about that either. No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living. So that’s my bottom line: There is not much hope. I’m thoroughly pessimistic. I’m sorry.”

13

Them, There, and Then

How We Push Climate Change Far Away

Politicians constantly describe climate change
as a long-term issue and a threat to future generations. In his keynote speech on climate policy in June 2013, President Obama spoke of how we have to be caretakers of the
future
, stand up for the
future
, look after the
future
, not fear the
future
but embrace the sustainable energy
future
. Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, is more blunt—coming from the land of French cuisine, she fears that “future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried, and grilled.”

The public duly regards climate change in the same light. In surveys, the most revealing answer comes when people are asked whether they think that climate change will affect them or future generations. In both America and Britain they give the same answer: A large majority (usually around two-thirds) say that it will
not
affect them personally. And a large majority—often of exactly the same size—say that it
will
affect future generations.

Time is just one aspect of salience. It is an innate feature of our mental categorizing that we define things in terms of their closeness: prioritizing the things that affect us, here and now, and disregarding those that affect others, there and then. In experiments, people tend to amplify this bias by deliberately choosing to regard something that is distant in one aspect as distant in other ways too.

People’s perception of the risk posed by climate change duly ratchets up in steady increments the further away its victims lie. With each remove, it becomes more hazardous: first for other members of their family, then for their community, then for other Americans, then for other people in rich countries, then for poor people abroad, then for other species, and finally—the most distant category of all—for people in the future.

This tendency to distance potential impacts works in close partnership with another bias identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky: the tendency for people to assume that they face lower risks than others do. This “optimism bias,” as they named it, has been found in many different situations: people believing that other smokers are more at risk of a heart attack than they are, that other housing estates have more crime, that other drivers are more likely to have an accident, and, as I have already mentioned, that the next big hurricane will hit somewhere else.

This also applies to the environment. There is a near-universal belief that the environment is in better condition in one’s own area—indeed, in a study in eighteen countries, people in sixteen of them were convinced that they had the best environmental conditions.

Climate change has other timing problems. Daniel Kahneman argues that when impacts come in intervals—such as business cycles—people’s availability bias leads them to focus on the most recent event and miss the longer trend. Like Slovic, Kahneman is concerned that each successive extreme weather event then becomes accepted into our status quo and become the new baseline against which we measure change. A heat wave or flood is judged against the level set in the last heat wave or flood and we may not notice the overall scale of change over the longer term.

This is why lesser problems that deliver a single exceptional impact at a predictable moment can galvanize a far higher level of attention. Take, for example, a threat that combined an unprecedented technological cause (what Paul Slovic would call an unknown risk) with a precise and deeply symbolic timing: the prediction that the world’s computer systems would collapse when the date changed on New Year’s Eve 1999.

I remember vividly my local bookshop building an entire display of the opportunist books warning of the coming social collapse from the “Y2K computer time bomb,” after which law and order would break down, starving mobs would roam the streets, and, as the antinuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott warned, accidental missile launchings could lead to “Armageddon.”

And, of course, nothing happened in either the United States, which had poured an estimated $134 billion into the pockets of software analysts and computer programmers, or in South Korea, Italy, or Ukraine, countries that had done next to nothing. On January 1, a few slot machines and cash registers became momentarily confused, that was all.

Campaigners have always struggled with climate change’s un-engaging timeline and tried to find ways to generate the same compelling sense of urgency and symbolism as Y2K. In 1947, the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
had hit on the novel image of the Doomsday Clock, which is always close to striking midnight, to dramatize the risks of nuclear weapons. In 2012, the hands were moved to five minutes to midnight to recognize the coming climate change catastrophe, and the following year, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, announced its latest report with the words “We have five minutes before midnight.”