Psychologist Renée Lertzman goes further, pointing out that talking about climate can challenge some of our most deeply held beliefs and stir up some of our biggest fears—which we typically prefer to avoid doing. And people who are anxious and alarmed can’t remain alarmed forever. Eventually, we overload and check out. In her TED Talk, How to Turn Climate Anxiety into Action, Renée explains that when we humans experience stress of any kind, if it becomes more than we can tolerate, we collapse. One possible outcome of this collapse is depression, despair, and shutting down.
Other possible outcomes of the collapse Renée talks about are anger and denial. As you can tell, I spend a lot of time trying to understand denial; understanding the anger, though, comes naturally. I’ve felt it myself, most memorably after the 2015 Paris climate conference. I’d been there to support negotiators from poor countries who couldn’t afford to bring their own scientists to the meeting. I spent a lot of time talking with people from those countries, hearing stories of the suffering they’d already witnessed. Then I went home, back to an environment where people who claim to share my values think it’s okay to close their eyes and their ears to what’s happening in the world. I was so angry that it took weeks before I could trust myself to have a civil conversation without feeling like I wanted to scream at them, “How could you be so selfish? Don’t you care?”
Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican diplomat who shepherded the climate negotiations that culminated in the Paris Agreement. I was there for just one event; she lived in this environment for years. In the book she cowrote with Tom Rivett-Carnac, The Future We Choose, she talks about the grief and pain we experience when we see what is happening to the world. She offers hard-fought wisdom that parallels Renée’s. “Anger that sinks into despair is powerless to make a change,” she says. “Anger that evolves into conviction is unstoppable.”
Even though they seem radically different, anger and denial can be two sides of the same coin: they are both manifestations of our human response to fear, attempts to control a situation that is wildly beyond our control. But it’s what we do with them that matters. When we share scary information about climate change, we’re trying to get people to act. Fear does make us sit up and pay attention, at least until our bandwidth is depleted. If people aren’t worried about climate change, they should be.
But if we don’t immediately connect those fears to people’s everyday lived experiences and provide viable and appealing options for dealing with the threat, all too often what happens is exactly the opposite: people disengage or get angry. And if that weren’t bad enough, these fear-based information dumps can stimulate another equally two-edged emotion—guilt.
7 THE GUILT COMPLEX
“No one can unilaterally choose to live in a low carbon economy. The goal is not self-purification but structural change.”
LEAH STOKES, ALL WE CAN SAVE
“People need energy, and we provide it. We’re not the bad guys!”
FOSSIL FUEL EXECUTIVE TO KATHARINE
When we’re afraid, and when fear-based messages don’t seem to be working well enough (on either ourselves or others), the next step is often guilt. And when we serve up our facts with a side of shame, it gets even worse: because how we judge ourselves and how others judge us is directly linked to our sense of self. Most of us have already decided whether we think something is right or wrong. So when we’re shamed for doing what we think is right, that’s where it gets ugly.
I experienced this myself, in spades, a few years ago. I was at a brainstorming session in Austin, Texas, with other concerned Christians. We were going around in circles on how to get the climate message out to our community. By mid-afternoon one man, who’d been describing the low-carbon lifestyle he lived in his Catholic community, had had enough. Leaning forward, he fixed us all with a stern gaze.
“All these ideas are very well,” he said with emphasis, “but the real problem is sin. Every time you turn on your car, you are sinning. That is the message we need to share.”
My reaction was so visceral, I can still feel its echo today. “Oh really?” I thought. “So—how did you get here? Don’t tell me you walked. Are you saying this meeting is sin?”
And the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I live in an area with no access to public transportation. So when I take my child to the doctor, as any caring mother would, I’m sinning? When I go to work, as any conscientious teacher would, does he think that’s a sin? When I drive to church, as any devout Christian would, that’s sinning, too?
He’d meant what he said to be motivating, but it had exactly the opposite effect on me. I felt judged for doing what I thought was good. It made me defensive, and angry.
Why do we hasten to heap guilt on others—and on ourselves? When we do what we perceive to be wrong, we feel bad. When we do what’s right and good in our eyes, we feel good. When we judge others and put them down, we feel even better (we are righteous and they aren’t!). So when others attempt to impose their value system on us, we understand, fundamentally, that it is about making themselves feel better at our expense. Shaming is a zero-sum game. One person wins only at the expense of another.
You can probably think of a time when you had a similar experience. There you were, doing something you thought was just fine—until someone started yelling at you, judging not only what you were doing but who you were. The unfairness of such experiences can rankle for years and even decades. It’s one thing if we knew we were doing something wrong and got found out; it’s something entirely different if we were doing the right thing (or thought we were) and were judged and condemned as if we were doing something terrible. No one wants to be called out that way.
WHY PEER PRESSURE WORKS
Don’t get me wrong: guilt and embarrassment can and often should be an appropriate and temporary response to doing something wrong. These emotions remind us of our moral compass and thus serve an important function in human society. As psychologist and marketing expert Robert Cialdini explains, finding out what other people think is one of the most frequent shortcuts we use to determine what is acceptable and what isn’t. Awareness of what others think helps us avoid actions that will harm or offend others, such as throwing the contents of our toilet out of the front door as people used to in the Middle Ages, or having a screaming meltdown in the grocery store like a toddler might do when they’re out of her favorite cookies. Over time, these habits become ingrained to the point where we all observe them. Since being taught to recycle as a child, I find myself literally unable to throw something out if it’s recyclable. I will walk around carrying it until I find a bin to put it in. Not that a single cup matters in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the social norm I was raised with and now it’s ingrained into my psyche.
As our collective sense of what’s considered socially acceptable shifts, it can effect long-term changes in our behavior. For a long time, driving the largest SUV you could find was a status symbol. Now, however, it’s more likely to be a speedy electric Tesla than an enormous gas guzzler. In Europe, where the train system is electric, extensive, and fast, there is some evidence that “flygskam,” or “flight shame,” is reducing air travel in Sweden and Germany. People have begun to take trains and explore more local vacation options. And these changes can have a real impact on our personal carbon footprint.
When I first measured mine, though, I was shocked to find that most of my carbon emissions came not from my car or my diet or trips to see family but from flying to scientific meetings, conferences, and climate talks. So I decided to fix that. I set out to be as effective as possible with both my time as well as my carbon. My target was to transition most of my talks to virtual, and fly only if I had enough events in one place that the carbon footprint of traveling to each would be roughly equivalent to driving a reasonable distance from home in my little plug-in hybrid hatchback.
Making the change wasn’t easy. But it has significantly paid off in terms of cutting my carbon emissions and inc
reasing my ability to reach people. By the time coronavirus hit in 2020, I was already giving 80 percent of my talks online; and when I do fly, I’ve assembled as many as two dozen events per trip. When I went to Alaska in fall 2019, for example, I calculated that if I persuaded just eight of the hundreds of people I spoke with there to reduce their own personal carbon footprint by 10 percent, that alone would cover the carbon of my trip. I also offset all my travel with Climate Stewards, a U.K.-based charity whose motto is “reduce everything you can first, then offset the rest.” My donations support clean cookstove, agroforestry, tree planting, and ecosystem restoration projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere or prevent it from being emitted in the first place.
Guilt can motivate us to change. Like fear, though, it can shut us down if we carry it with us long-term, or if it’s used as a weapon against us. That’s what I’d call shame—and I’ve been on the receiving end of that more than once.
WHY PURITY TESTS ARE UNHELPFUL
Before I travel, I post a list of my scheduled talks online, so as many people as possible will hear about them. A few years ago, when I did this for one of my bundled trips to Alberta, a fellow academic from the U.K. replied immediately, demanding to know why I was not taking the train from Texas. By flying, I had failed his purity test and his response was to shame me.
Now just to be clear, although I know that flying is the biggest part of my personal carbon footprint, I also know that one climate scientist—or even all the climate scientists in the world—never flying again is not going to make a dent in the climate problem. We tried that in 2020. All the coronavirus-related shutdowns together, not just people not flying but all the other reductions from industry and transportation, dropped global carbon emissions by just 7 percent, and even that drop was temporary. We have to make it permanent, and do it every year, to meet the Paris Agreement targets.
But since his response most likely arose from our shared awareness of how bad the situation was, I bit back a sharp retort. Instead, I calculated what it would take for me to take the train from Lubbock, Texas, to Edmonton, Alberta. First, I’d have to drive 6 hours to the nearest train station, in Oklahoma City. Then it would be 57 hours up to New York City, 12 hours to Toronto and an overnight layover, and another 61 hours to Alberta. By the time I arrived I’d have been travelling for 136 hours—more than five days—and then I’d have to turn around and head back a few days later. I pointed out that if my colleague took a train eastward from the U.K. he’d be in Irkutsk, on the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, by the time I got to Alberta. To his credit, he recognized the impossibility of the standard he’d set.
Peer pressure is effective when there is a viable alternative. When there is a bin for the recycling; when we see others using reusable water bottles; when there is a train we can take that will get us where we are going in a reasonable amount of time; when the alternative is relatively (or even more) affordable.
But increasingly, climate guilt is being exploited today less to promote societal good behavior than as a way to shame people, to make ourselves feel better by pointing a judgmental finger at someone else. It’s also being used to determine who’s in, when it comes to doing the right thing and being a card-carrying member of the “climate action team,” and who’s out. Shame can be manipulated just as fear can—and perhaps even more damagingly, because it strikes so close to our sense of identity and self-worth. And when there’s nothing we can do about it—or at least nothing that seems reasonable, because how do I even get to work without “sinning”?—our reaction is rarely positive. One study found that when people were told to change their behavior, receiving instructions that implied their choices were being judged as inadequate at best, bad at worst, their willingness to take personal actions to reduce their carbon footprint decreased. They were also less likely to support pro-climate political candidates, and even their trust in climate scientists dropped.
The Opower experiment is often cited as a rousing success in the use of peer pressure to effect change. But it, too, ran headlong into this problem. Opower was a software package that allowed utilities to add a small section to each customer’s power bill stating how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors. Simply by including this information, the utility companies saw consumer power usage drop by an average of 2 percent, saving a total of over $1 billion in bills over eight years. But here’s the catch: a follow-on analysis tracking long-term customer behavior found that “households that were politically conservative and that used more electricity than the norm, did not donate to an environmental organization, and did not pay for renewable energy” increased their electricity usage after they got similar information on their bill. If we think we’re being shamed into doing something, it makes us feel—or sometimes even do—exactly the opposite.
What social scientist Rebecca Huntley calls the “Puritan ethos of disapproval” that emanates from much environmental messaging can be profoundly counterproductive. But there is an alternative: showing someone that action can make you feel good. Studies have shown how anticipating the pride of making a choice is much more motivating than our guilt at failing to do so. So when people ask me about flying, I don’t shame them. Instead, I say there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and I offer some ideas. For the future, I’m excited about the potential for short-haul electric and long-haul hydrogen- or biofuel-powered flights. But for now, why not “travel thoughtfully”? For some, that might mean not flying. For others, a hybrid approach like mine might be better. Still others might choose to be an advocate: contact an airline and encourage them to accelerate their transition to new low-carbon technology.
In the end, though, my British colleague’s comment wasn’t really about me. It was about his fear. When we can’t control those we really want to—in this case, the airline companies and the fossil fuel corporations and the government and, really, the entire system in which we live—we turn our fear on others and use shame to try to control them instead. We might temporarily feel better, but it just makes things worse long-term.
WHY WE GUILT-TRIP OURSELVES
We even regularly shame ourselves without any help. “I’m a farmer—I need my truck!” said one Dismissive Texan defensively after we’d been talking about how rainfall patterns are shifting. I hadn’t mentioned trucks or even fossil fuels or climate change at all: I was just following his lead, talking about how he’d be affected by drought. Even so, his immediate reaction was to defend himself from the guilt his brain, not my words, immediately associated with the issue.
Recently I listened to the results of a survey of suburban women’s views on climate change. “Most women describe themselves as pro-environment,” said a researcher on the broadcast, “but they immediately follow that with a statement about how they don’t do enough, so they’re not sure if they really ‘count.’ They don’t recycle enough, they don’t drive a small enough car, they aren’t vegan and they travel, they say.”
Mary Annaïse Heglar works for an environmental nonprofit in New York. In a 2019 essay published in Vox titled “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle,” she describes how people approach her to confess their environmental sins. They don’t drive an electric car, they tell her, or they took a vacation this year that required an international flight. And here’s what she says:
I don’t blame anyone for wanting absolution.… But underneath all that is a far more insidious force. It’s the narrative that has both driven and obstructed the climate change conversation for the past several decades. It tells us climate change could have been fixed if we had all just ordered less takeout, used fewer plastic bags, turned off some more lights, planted a few trees, or driven an electric car.
The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous. It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’
t uphold these ethics.
When people come to me and confess their green sins, as if I were some sort of eco-nun, I want to tell them they are carrying the guilt of the oil and gas industry’s crimes. That the weight of our sickly planet is too much for any one person to shoulder. And that that blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom.
We are all part of the system that depends on the fossil fuels, the deforestation, and the agriculture that are changing our climate. As behavioral scientists Gabrielle Wong-Parodi and Irina Feygina point out, however, this system also provides our safety and security, stability, and meaning. Climate change doesn’t just threaten our system, they add. By being a problem that’s caused by the same system that keeps us safe, it also poses a threat “to one’s sense of personal integrity—a view of oneself as capable, consistent, and adhering to strong moral and ethical principles and values.” We want to be good and to be viewed as such, so we respond defensively to any information that may call into question our sense of adequacy or worth, they conclude.
It’s no surprise, then, that when it comes to climate change, we feel helpless. We’re told that essential aspects of our lives—driving to work, or to the doctor, or feeding our kids, or going on vacation with our family—are bad. But we can’t envision how to live otherwise. Or even, how to exist otherwise. So when we’re shamed, we defend ourselves because we feel, just like I did that day in Austin, that we have no other option. We are just doing our best to get by.
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