Cognitive Barriers to Collective Action on Climate Change

A Perfect Storm

Some basic lessons of behavioral economics help explain why nations have not done more. Sadly, we have what amounts to a perfect storm, a confluence of factors that make collective action difficult. Here are the main obstacles:

1. Present bias. People tend to be much more concerned with now as opposed to later. Although scientists have been warning about the perils posed by climate change for decades, the most serious risks have often been seen to be off in the future, perhaps decades away. People have bills to pay now! It’s true that all over the planet, people are now facing risks and problems related to climate change. But at important moments, many leaders, and many voters, have seen climate change as a challenge for future generations, and they don’t vote. There is a big contrast here with COVID-19, in which the toll, in terms of illnesses and deaths, was felt in the here and now as friends, families, and political leaders got sick.

2. Salience. People can see smog, and they really don’t like it. Dirty air and water are both visible and scary. In many nations, including the United States, the public has demanded (and often received) cleaner air and water. By contrast, greenhouse gases are invisible in the air. If you can’t even see them, you might not worry about them.

3. No specific villain. For some threats, there is an identifiable perpetrator—a wrongdoer whose terrible deeds capture public attention. It’s not so hard to mobilize public attention and to spend resources to combat terrorists, especially if they are led by prominent people and determined to carry out terrorist attacks. Climate change is faceless. It is a product of the actions of countless people—effectively all of us, over a very long time. After the attacks of 9/11, the existence of a specific villain (Osama Bin Laden in particular) helped fuel an aggressive response, even though one could have argued then, and could even more easily argue now, that climate change poses a greater threat than terrorism, in terms of expected lives lost.

4. Probabilistic harms. It’s easy to see that some actions cause harms—as, for example, when one person hits another, or when a company dumps toxic materials into a local lake. The harms caused by climate change are often probabilistic, which makes it harder to reach consensus. If we see an increase in hurricanes or fires or blizzards in some part of the world, is climate change responsible? Attribution studies examine how warming changes the likelihood and severity of particular types of event. An individual event can have multiple causes, and estimating the contribution of climate change involves uncertainty. For those who seek to mobilize people, that is a problem. And even appropriately careful language is sometimes exploited by climate change skeptics.

5. Loss aversion. Loss aversion means that people are more negative about anticipated losses than they are positive about corresponding gains. Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can impose immediate costs. If everyone has to pay some new “climate tax,” loss aversion kicks in. It’s true that climate change imposes losses too—but the very worst of those losses are in the future and their magnitude is in many ways uncertain.

We are not saying that these problems are insuperable! All over the world, there is a lot of climate activism, especially but not only from young people, and it has helped spur significant regulatory activity. (Humans can overcome present bias; they often do care about future generations; the losses from climate change are increasingly salient, and many of those losses are being experienced right now; people buy insurance and know that it’s good to avoid probabilistic harms; and we can identify the big emitters.) But two additional problems apply to climate change, and indeed to environmental protection in general, and they help explain why it can be so challenging to get an appropriate response.

First, people do not get clear feedback on the environmental consequences of their actions. If your use of energy produces air or water pollution or results in carbon emissions, you might not be aware of that fact, at least not on a continuing basis. Even if you are told about the connection, it may not affect your behavior. Those who set their thermostat to a comfortable temperature and let the heating and cooling system perform its magic are unlikely to think, moment by moment or even day by day, about the costs those decisions are imposing on others. And even if you know that you will contribute to climate change if you drive a lot, will you drive less or get an electric car? Maybe so, but maybe not. The same point applies even more strongly to decisions that most people do not clearly link to climate change, such as what foods they eat or what materials are used in the products they buy.

Second, and most fundamentally, there is the problem of free riding. Progress on climate change depends on the actions of many nations and their citizens. If one family, one large company, or even one country reduces emissions, that is definitely progress. But if other families, companies, and countries are increasing their emissions, the world can end up losing ground. At times, for example, prominent leaders in the United States have thought: Why should we scale back emissions if China and India are not doing anything like that? Why should we spend a lot of money and help the rest of the world if other nations are continuing with business as usual, and thereby harming us? For their part, leaders in China and India have sometimes thought: Why should we act aggressively to reduce emissions when other, richer countries created the problem in the first place?

This is what is often called a “tragedy of the commons.” Each dairy farmer has an incentive to add more cows to his herd, because he obtains the benefits of the additional cows while suffering only a fraction of the costs; but collectively too many cows will eventually ruin the pasture. Dairy farmers need to find some way to avert this tragedy. Similar problems plague the fishing industry, and they help to explain air pollution and climate change, with the latter sometimes described as a “wicked” commons problem because of the gravity of the threat and the sheer number of people and nations involved.

Low-cost nudges alone will not make this problem go away. Some problems require more than light-touch interventions. If an earthquake creates a tsunami that sends a gigantic wave speeding toward your town, we don’t think you should try telling the wave that 99 percent of all waves turn around before reaching the end of the beach. Racing uphill is a better idea.

Unfortunately, we do not have the option of running away from climate change, but unlike in the case of a tsunami, we do have a bit more time to act. And although it is true that nudges will not solve the problem, they can help, and we need all the help we can get. It also helps to think about climate change as a global choice architecture problem. The findings of psychology and behavioral economics can help us understand how to make progress.