A selection from a week of climate crisis: floods in Australia, the 3,300-meter-high Marmolada glacier in the Dolomites breaks down and kills at least six mountaineers, the US Supreme Court blocks President Biden’s climate measures and the North Sea level has risen one millimeter faster per year since the early 1990s than before. It leads to equally disastrous and spectacular images.
Canoeists on the streets of Sydney. Hikers who watch in awe as the enormous avalanche of ice and rocks races past them at a short distance. Live and on the spot, I was able to observe during the weekend how the North Sea is gnawing at the dunes and the beach is partly turning into a mud flat. Operation sand nourishment is in full swing off the coast of Wijk aan Zee.
news hour closed the triptych on Sunday, the day before nitrogen producers blocked distribution centers and ports with tractors The state of the climate on the subject that is constantly gaining topical interest. After it was already established in the first episode that the climate goals – limiting global warming – have become virtually unattainable according to experts, Sunday was about the (im)possibilities to bring about behavioral changes among citizens.
Such an Armageddon film about the melting Marmolada – it thaws 10 degrees – looks alarming, but inciting us to action does not work, behavioral and environmental psychologists said. Just saying how bad the climate is, indeed leads to more awareness, but also gives a great feeling of powerlessness. And to what has been called ‘unrealistic optimism’: the delusion that it will eventually ‘be all right’.
At the same time, civic behavior change for the better can lead to gigatonnes of reduction in CO2 emissions, so it pays off to get the ordinary man and woman into action. Not by “kicking them till they get a conscience” as Louis Paul Boon once suggested in another context, but by sending the neighbors after them. The neighbor is usually unsuspecting, does not come to you and does not want to earn money from you: we would like to be convinced by such a person to insulate the house or take a shorter shower. And so we saw ‘social influence’ in practice: the ‘secret weapon’ was a climate-conscious Apeldoorn who convinced the neighbor at the kitchen table to lower the central heating. ‘Do you know the trias energetica?’ No? He was happy to explain.
Don’t tell people how to save money by living energy-efficiently, advised Linda Steg, environmental psychologist and lead author of alarming reports from the IPCC climate panel. ‘Then they just think: phew, what’s the point of it all.’ Ultimately, it is about a long-term change. Behavioral psychologist Liza Luesink drew a parallel with changing smoking habits. “When I was growing up, you sat in a smoking compartment with your Railrunner, and my father smoked in the bedroom.”
Unthinkable now, but how many years have passed over that change in behaviour?