Climate and the Psychology of Loss
Rockridge Fellow Joe Brewer offers insights into the use of fear to quell climate action.
An article today in the Washington Post is using fear to inhibit action. Juliet Eilperin boldly declares "climate is a risky issue." Essentially saying, "Be careful! You are going to lose something of value." She then goes on to frame efforts to address the climate crisis as costly, while ignoring all of the serious risks to society that come with doing nothing.
Instilling fear in the populace, it seems, makes for good journalism. But it is bad for informing citizens about the real threats we face as a nation.
Riddled throughout the article are references to loss. I stopped counting after fifteen. Examples include "costing billions of dollars," "the cost of coal could quadruple," and "huge costs associated with limiting emissions." It is almost as if Eilperin understands the importance of repetition for reinforcing neural associations in the brain.
Every time climate change is referenced in the context of economic loss, the brain binds them more strongly to each other. The consequence being that people miss this key truth: Protecting the environment is essential to strengthening our economy.
Placing loss on the correct side of major decisions is extremely important because fear and uncertainty are powerful motivating factors. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon; it is called risk aversion. Simply put, we feel more strongly about avoiding loss than seeking gain. When outcomes are uncertain or unfamiliar, motivation to change our behavior plummets further.
This is why people stay in abusive relationships. The harms are well known, but what will happen if you leave? A big question mark – and plenty of anxiety – encourage you to reconsider. The devil you know is better than the devil you don't.
This way of thinking leads to more abuse. And it leads to more harm from the climate crisis. Our fear of losing what we have places us at jeopardy of losing much more. This recklessly places us all at risk of unacceptable consequences.
So what can we do when a major threat is looming on the horizon? First off, we don't frame it in a way that misleads people about where the losses reside. Energy costs are already going up. And job security is becoming more like a joke without a punch line every day as manufacturing is moved overseas and profit motives compel wealthy executives to cut benefits. So the losses plastered on climate action are already lurking at our doorstep – without doing anything about global warming!
Instead, let's look at the real costs of inaction in the face of the climate crisis. Our children get asthma before enrolling in kindergarten. We pay for increased medical visits. Severe storms – flooding, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes – ravage our cities with greater intensity and frequency. We pay for rebuilding after devastation. Viruses carried by mosquitoes threaten our health security at higher elevations and for longer parts of the year. We pay with our livelihood.
You get the picture.
Everywhere in the world there will be more risk. Increased risk of crop failures as rainfall patterns change. Increased risk of mass migrations as sea levels rise. Increased risk of regional conflict as natural resources become more scarce.
Eilperin got it wrong. The real "risky issue" is staying put and doing nothing: continuing to spoil our air and ignoring the harm we're already suffering.
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Earth
We only have one planet. Continue on the current course of Global Warming and humans will go the way of dinosaurs. As in, “There is no economy, because human are extinct”.
I think the tipping point for saving earth was last summer when a British economist came out with the frame of “pay now, or pay A LOT more later. Joe and Al understands this fact about Global Warming. Juliet and Dick is in dinosaur denial – sickening toward extinction in Cheney’s mega billion dollar scam.
economy as more then stuff
It is absurd to argue that there won't be loss in any reformation of existing consumption practices. If extraction and consumption drives the world economy, and those same behaviors result in the destruction of the earth, then despite your reluctance to give voice to the arguments that there will be loss if we modify our behavior, there will be. The issue is what is lost. What Meadows knew then and what we must affirm is that there are limits to this cycle of consumption. So in addition to extending the calculus to include the off the books costs of health and quality of life that would get closer to true accounting, the fact is that less stuff is less stuff. If you count the quality of your life in stuff and your ability to consume it, you will suffer losses. If you measure the quality of your life and the volume of your economy by a different matrix, say one that values sharing, you will lose nothing. If I have access to stuff, and we share it, a library model for example, we create and burn less stuff but have a richer life.
adding value to the whole
If we shift our perspective to what is of true value, we can see that we have much and gratitude plays a role in shifting this perspective and sustaining it. I would suggest anyone contributing to this site has much to be grateful for starting with the education that affords us the ability to contribute which many are still not offered or without because of a host of distractions.
Peace is of great value and comes when there is at least an attempt toward balance bwt social, environmental and economic goals and when each of us realizes our impact on the whole.
Who is the biggest fear mongerer?
A bit surprising to see the Washington Post as fear mongerer. The Bush administration holds a firm grip on this role. Why don't we just refuse to be afraid any more? Interesting comment from Michael Moore's "Sicko": "In France, the government is afraid of the people; in the US, the reverse is true". (Perhaps not word for word). I suggest we begin to calculate the present costs of global climate change; i.e., present a daily or monthly dollar cost tally of what is occuring faster than anyone believed a couple of years ago.
John Swindells
Feelings
We can also learn to look fear in the eye and realize that uncertainty is an essential component of life from whence miracles are born.
Yesterday I felt regret in my stomach, I looked at it and it dissipated; it is good to be aware of our influences and impact so as to be responsible for our minds and habits.
If I am allowed to share this work, here is wonderful poem by Vera Pavlova from Poetry in Motion, NYC subway as I saw it most recently:
If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.
I assume most if not all in this post have already acted to sign on
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/sbmopenletter/
If 100,000 people demand it, Congress has to listen.
Climate and the Psychology of Denial
Yes, and a further fine point: don't you mean that instilling fear is a cheap trick of stimulating tabloids and action flicks, not the means of good journalism? It's so important to distinguish between critically thinking, active journalism and the trivial, distracting entertainment and PR that substitutes for it.
In contrast to Eilperin, Bill McKibben makes a startlingly cogent assessment that many Americans see the anthropomorphized economy as more real than the physical world in which we live. He makes clear that we depend on the earth more fundamentally than we do the present economy, and how absurd her kind of perspective is. I'm referring to his interview in the film "Everything's Cool", a very well made documentary (aka video journalism) on climate change and forces shaping public perception:
http://everythingscool.org/article.php?list=type&type=4
This film also touches on loss in a more mature manner - the matter of grappling with loss of existential proportions, or at least as you say, of unknown proportions, in the risk of losing our home the planet. If this potential loss is overwhelming, people may transpose their fear and grief to something more manageable. The more we can talk about the emotion of the larger, more fundamental issue openly, the less isolated and more courageous people may feel in facing it.
placing our efforts on an emergency footing
It isn't easy to predict the world 5-10 years from now. It's easier to forecast a set of longer term scenarios. But we've got to set the frame on climate change. If the activists from, for example http://climatecodered.net/ , can get together with you all, then we have a chance. Below is a (significantly condensed and slightly revised) summary of their "5 keys to a safe-climate future":
1. Our goal is a safe climate future – we have no right to bargain away species or human lives (Lacking the collective will to act in a sustainable manner is no excuse for bargaining away our right to a safe-climate future.)
2. We have the capacity and duty to undo the damage and act in a sustainable manner, to cool the earth back to the safe-climate zone. We have this power (to do something about it) because we created the looming catastrophe of global warming in the first place.
3. For a safe climate future, we must take action now to stop emissions and to cool the earth. It is no longer a case of how much more we can "safely" emit, but whether we can quickly enough stop emissions and produce a cooling before we hit tipping points and positive feedbacks — such as carbon sink failure and permafrost loss — that will take the trajectory of the earth’s climate system beyond any hope of human restoration.
4. Let's recognize a climate and sustainability emergency, because we need to move at a pace far beyond business and politics as usual. We face a multi-factor sustainability crisis and systemic breakdown and must plan a large-scale transition to a post-carbon economy and society. An imaginary, large-scale program comparable in scope to the "war economy" or the transformation of the Asian "tiger" economies is required. Even moderate goals (25-40% below 1990 by 2020) now require immoderate rates of change only achievable by shifting to an emergency footing.
5. The obstacles to implementing climate solutions are political and social in character, not intrinsically technological or economic. These imperatives are incompatible with the “realities” of “politics as usual” and “business as usual”. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep, quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model. Climate policy is characterized by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure
New! risk aversion
"...And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn away,
And lose the name of action... "
(From Act 3, scene 1 of "Hamlet, prince of Denmark, by Ann Shakesphere's husband, Will.)