If one had to choose a false spring in Americans’ attitudes toward climate change, the year 1999 would rank high.
Gonna Party Like It’s 1999
That March, climate change researchers published a paper containing the now-famous “hockey stick” graph, showing that air temperatures in modern times were rising rapidly, to levels higher than at any time in recent history.
Weeks later, in early May, an F5 tornado with winds reaching 300 miles per hour —the highest wind speed ever recorded globally—carved a 38-mile-long path of death and destruction through Oklahoma.
July brought an extreme heat wave to Chicago, with some recordings showing 100-degree-plus temperatures nonstop for a day and a half.
In August, eastern and southern states began to experience severe to extreme droughts. In October, a “super cyclone” hit India, killing almost 10,000 people and more than 400,000 livestock.
Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore, an early activist on climate change, was on the campaign trail, beating the drum for more action.
Aided by other climate events of the year, the result was astounding: following one of the lowest levels of concern about global warming, 50 percent registered at the beginning of 1998, our concerns skyrocketed to one of its highest levels ever recorded (72 percent) by early 2000.
Climate Week and Year and Century
Had this level of support held, 1999 would have likely constituted a progressive’s dream of the public policy process. New, rigorous research removes the scales from the eyes of technocrats. Dramatic, colorful events reframe the received wisdom of common folk. A durable political consensus is formed. Solutions are implemented.
Supporters of climate change activism had even more reasons to be optimistic.
Since the early 1980s, researchers into cognitive biases, such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, had identified with increasing accuracy the ways in which humans have distorted reasoning and make bad decisions. This had wide-ranging implications.
By the mid-2000s, ever more experiments were underway to use small “nudges” that would help people make better decisions.
What could be more exciting in public policy than small, logical, low-cost interventions that could be instituted without the maddening grind and horse-trading of national and global politics?
Progress, of course, is never so simple nor linear.
Here We Are, Happy Together, Untogether
The level of frustration over slow progress at Climate Week 2023 illustrates that vividly.
As I attended events during Climate Week, collective frustration permeated most curated discussions, panels and informal catch-ups.
At this rate, we will be lucky to hit our climate goals by the end of the century much less 2050. With this cynicism, regional convenings on climate action are underway in the hope that local action will alleviate global pause.
Sludging It
Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, a preeminent nudge scholar, recently offered a redefinition of the word “sludge” to describe nudges that are essentially the antimatter of well-intentioned changes in the options we present to citizens and consumers.
Nudges clarify, sludges dupe. One sludge, for example, might be obliging someone to return to a gym in order to cancel their membership. Another might be burying authorizations of privacy invasions in the tiny type of the disclaimers that we click on to download apps.
With climate change politics, we have witnessed sludges on steroids since 1999.
Those who defend the status quo of the fossil fuel economy, as climate scientist Michael Mann points out, have shown just how adept they can be at employing such sludge tactics at the societal level.
His shorthand for such tactics is summarized by “d-words”: denial, division, delay, downplaying, doomism, and disengagement.
Many of these tactics are rooted in the manipulation of social norms. Denial: those suspicious of elites are encouraged to question the findings of researchers. Division: highly motivated partisans are stoked with fears of shadowy plots by opponents. Doomism: cynics are given space to indulge in the worst-case scenario.
Hope and Humility
The solution to climate change is not to despair over this internecine warfare over norms.
We should recognize that, while climate change emerged from the painstaking work of elites and breakthrough innovations are enticing, this challenge will be largely won or lost from the “bottom up”.
It will take more early education focused on numeracy in statistics, a greater recognition of the role nudges and sludges, retail politics, small group dynamics, trial-and-error politics, and economic reforms.
Identifying the scale of climate change was one of the signal achievements of modern technology, science, and administration—a cause of hope.
Addressing it will take grassroots creativity, innovation, patience, and humility.
Stay tuned. There’s a lot more to come on this topic in this space.
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