“WE’RE NOT THE BAD GUYS”
Even people who work for fossil fuel companies feel this way. I learned this firsthand the first time I was invited to address the leadership team of an oil and gas company—not an Exxon or Chevron, but one of the big players in oil and gas drilling across the southern U.S.
“Don’t worry,” said the university alumnus who’d invited me to address their leadership team, “we won’t let our chief geologist attend. He’s the one who thinks it’s all bunk. We want to hear what you have to say.”
That did not make for an inspiring invitation, so I thought hard about whether or not to accept. If I couldn’t identify a core value or belief that I shared with them, I shouldn’t be talking to them. This was the advice I gave others—so I’d better do it myself, too. But what did I have in common with oil and gas executives?
Then, like a lightning bolt, it hit me: I am truly grateful for fossil fuels. Without them, I’d be living a life that was far shorter and much more miserable. We don’t have to spend our days gathering food for our next meal or worry about it spoiling overnight; we have refrigerators to preserve the food we buy at the grocery store. Our means of transportation were once limited to foot, cart, and horse; today we have cars, trains, and planes that move us around the planet at speeds that would shock our ancestors. And thanks to our appliances and our electricity, we no longer have to spend our days on the endless drudgery of menial tasks that occupied so many women a century ago, or wake and go to bed with the Sun. It’s not a stretch at all to say that I’m truly grateful for fossil fuels.
When I walked into the executive conference room at the top of the twenty-story headquarters, the atmosphere was strained. A few smiled, but most faces were unwelcoming as everyone took their places.
Nonetheless, I began my talk with those words. And as I said them, I could see everyone around the conference table visibly relax.
“You get it,” one man said, disbelievingly, as a smile slowly spread across his face. “People need energy, and we provide it. We’re not the bad guys!”
“That’s right,” I agreed, “and we need energy in the future, too. The question is, how are we going to get it? Because we don’t use horses and buggies or party line telephones anymore. And now that we know that fossil fuel use has many serious and even dangerous side effects, the transition is even more urgent. We need to move beyond it as soon as possible. So how do we do that while keeping the lights on and continuing to provide local jobs?”
The meeting was scheduled to run for about forty-five minutes, but the discussion was still going strong at two hours. Everyone had questions and wanted to understand: How did we know humans were changing the climate? Where had their geologist gone wrong? And what energy sources might we explore for the future?
MOVING BEYOND FEAR AND GUILT
So what is the answer, if it’s not piling on the fear with a hefty serving of guilt and shame? Interestingly, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and religion all point to the same solution, albeit from different perspectives.
First, we do need to know what’s happening. And it should make us—not panicked—but seriously concerned. Why would we want to fix something if we don’t even know it’s broken? “Worry is the wellspring of action,” researcher Brandi Morris told me. Her work combines physiology with psychology to study how our brains respond when we learn about climate change. Tony Leiserowitz seconds this. “Fear is not a great predictor of policy support for climate action,” he says, “but worry is.” And what makes us worried is understanding that yes, climate change is real, it’s human-caused, and its risks are serious.
But second, we need to know that we can fix it. There are solutions. It also helps to reframe these as “consistent with upholding, rather than destroying, our social system and ensuring its stability and longevity,” Wong-Parodi and Feygina find. Being on the same side as the solutions rather than seeing them as in opposition to us is more likely to bring us on board. Going a level deeper into the function of our brains, positive rather than negative reinforcement is key to motivating long-term change. If our brain is hardwired to move forward toward a reward but to freeze in response to fear and anxiety, as Tali Sharot explains, then to spur ourselves and each other to action we must provide a positive incentive to act, not just an apocalypse to avoid.
And third, our burgeoning awareness or knowledge of what’s “good” versus “evil” also needs to be able to offer a clear and legitimate pathway to alleviating our guilt. In researching Don’t Even Think About It: How Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall did something very unusual: he decided to tour American megachurches because, he argues, they hold some key lessons on how we think and talk about climate change. Sermons on hellfire and damnation are only effective in spurring action if there’s a chance, however slim, of redemption and forgiveness.
WHAT FAITH CAN TEACH US
As a Christian myself (though not one who attends a megachurch), I find it particularly striking how the Bible talks about fear and action. In the apostle Paul’s letter to Timothy, he states simply that God has not given us a spirit of fear. So if we feel fear and respond to climate change out of fear—fear of either the solutions or the overwhelming nature of the impacts—that fear is not coming from God. Instead, Paul continues, God has given us a spirit of power, which enables us to act, instead of being frozen or paralyzed. We have been given a spirit of love, to have compassion for others, which means caring for others, putting their needs first as we act. And finally, we have been gifted with a sound mind that we can use to make good decisions based on facts and data that God has given us and made evident to his creation.
So how do we move beyond fear or shame? By acting from love, I believe. Love starts with speaking truth: making people fully aware of the risks and the choices they face in a manner that is relevant and practical to them. But it also offers compassion, understanding, and acceptance: the opposite of guilt and shame. Love bolsters our courage, too; what will we not do for those and that we love? And finally, it opens the door to that most ephemeral and sought after of emotions, hope.
Hannah Malcolm is a theologian who grew up listening to her grandfather, pioneering climate scientist Sir John Houghton, talk about the urgent problems facing humanity. “Whole countries will be underwater in fifty years if we don’t do something now!” she recalls him saying. She sees the echo of modern scientists’ warnings in the apocalyptic language of biblical prophets, warning of catastrophe if the status quo continues. But she points to a key next step: “The words of the prophets—living and dead—can help us learn to talk about our apocalyptic fears. They teach us to be honest about the realities of sin, greed, and grief. They call for radical, upside-down changes, not small adjustments to existing systems. And they teach us how to be absurdly hopeful, painting visions of peaceful futures when that seems impossible.”
SECTION 3: THE THREAT MULTIPLIER
8 A FARAWAY THREAT
“We are navigating recklessly towards our future using conceptions of time as primitive as a world map from the fourteenth century, where dragons lurked around the edges of a flat earth.”
MARCIA BJORNERUD, TIMEFULNESS
“We’ve looked at what our own data is telling us, and it’s very clear. It’s getting warmer and we have to prepare or we’ll be hung out to dry.”
MAN AT A WATER PLANNING MEETING IN TEXAS
Over scrambled eggs at a diner in Salt Lake City, I was being treated to some of the wildest polar bear stories I’d ever heard. I knew they were all true, though. Steve Amstrup is the chief scientist for Polar Bears International, and his work tagging and examining hundreds of individual bears and tallying their numbers has led to polar bears being listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. We both happened to be in Utah to give talks later that day, so we’d seized the chance to meet up for breakfast.
I jokingly asked Steve how many bears he’d given the kiss of life. Instead of laughing, he did some men
tal math before replying, “As many as a dozen.” And then he told me about the trip his team takes every fall to Churchill, Manitoba, to observe the bears before they head out on the ice for the winter.
“Why not come see the bears for yourself?” he asked.
I wanted to go—who wouldn’t? But I already had a hectic schedule planned for the fall, including the Paris climate conference in December, and my work focuses on how climate change affects people, real humans, in the here and now. Not only that, but I believed that when polar bears are used as the symbol for climate change, it does the rest of us a disservice by making the issue seem remote and distant. Melting glaciers and starving bears are real, and serious. But genuine concern about climate change, concern that motivates long-term action, usually has to be based on something closer to home.
My reluctance must have shown on my face because Steve then said something that completely changed my perspective. “We care about the polar bears because they’re showing us what’s going to happen to us,” he said. “If we don’t heed their warning, we’re next.”
That’s when I decided to go after all.
WHAT POLAR BEARS CAN TEACH US
The life of a polar bear revolves around sea ice. It’s where they feed in the winter on seals, their preferred prey. But today, Arctic sea ice is in a kind of death spiral. As the top of the world warms, its ice cap thaws, exposing the ocean beneath it. That dark water absorbs more of the sun’s energy than the reflective white ice—so the Arctic heats up even more, triggering a cycle that is causing it to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Arctic sea ice is declining by an area the size of Ireland, on average, every year. In 2020 it hit the second-lowest extent on record, almost half what it was when the satellite record began in 1979. Submarine and satellite measurements show that the average thickness of the ice has also declined by nearly half since 1958.
The bears’ feeding ground is literally melting. As sea ice disappears earlier every spring and forms later each fall, more polar bears are spending more time on shore, fasting. But the prey they catch on land isn’t a viable substitute for what they catch on the ice. That’s why polar bears are one of the first and most visible species to suffer the effects of a warming climate. When I went to the Arctic with Steve’s team in 2015, I saw this with my own eyes.
Historically, the ice on Hudson Bay refreezes in early November. But when we arrived in Churchill after a nearly two-thousand-mile trip, there wasn’t a piece of ice in sight, just plenty of ravenous bears. My son, then eight years old, had come along. Our second night there was Halloween, and he was wide-eyed at the sight of grown-ups patrolling to keep trick-or-treaters safe from bears that often stray too close to town. During our first morning out on the tundra, he shook me awake as the sun appeared over the horizon. “Look outside!” he said, pointing. “This bear has been waking me up all night, standing up and peering in the window at us.” And, sure enough, there was a giant bear right outside the window of the tundra buggy: curious, bored—and hungry.
Many consequences of climate change are far more subtle than a famished bear inches from a third-grader, but they are no less proximate and life-threatening. And they impact our food sources, not just the bears’. In her TED talk, How Climate Change Could Make Our Food Less Nutritious, public health researcher Kristie Ebi explains how higher carbon dioxide levels make plants such as rice, wheat, and other crops grow faster; but as they do, their protein and nutrient levels decrease. Then there’s the impact of warming temperatures on pests and yields; from 1981 to 2002, for example, it’s estimated that climate change was responsible for an average annual loss of $5 billion worth of wheat, maize, and barley around the world. These crop losses often happen in poor countries where people already live on a few dollars a day. When the price of food doubles, families go hungry.
Steve was right: what’s happening to the bears is happening to people, too. Yet all too often, we seem to be even less conscious of it than the bears.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTANCE
The idea that we’re invulnerable to anything the planet might throw at us isn’t unique to climate change. In Lubbock, Texas, where I live, no one doubts the reality of tornadoes. Yet as tornado warnings went out on May 11, 1970, veteran west Texas broadcaster Bob Nash dismissed them, saying, “You have less chance of being hit by a tornado than being trampled by a dinosaur.” Within hours, up to a quarter of the buildings in the city had been damaged or destroyed, more than thirty people had lost their lives, and hundreds had been injured. To this day, the 1970 Lubbock tornado remains one of the strongest tornadoes to hit the business district of any American city.
This very human tendency to ignore certain types of threat is called psychological distance. It’s part of a theory that posits that the further away something is from us—in time, or physical distance, or social relevance—the more abstract and unimportant we will consider it to be. In contrast, the closer something is to us, the more concrete and more relevant it appears.
This explains how effective it was, for example, for Senator Jim Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and longtime climate Dismissive, to hold up a snowball in the U.S. Senate in 2015 while claiming that global warming wasn’t real. A real snowball dripping onto the carpet of the Senate made for a much more salient, physical example to many people than decades of temperature data showing that Washington, D.C., the U.S., and the world are warming.
WHY CLIMATE CHANGE SEEMS SO FAR AWAY
More information about why climate is changing, or even information about its impacts on polar bears, may satisfy our curiosity. But the concept of psychological distance explains why it doesn’t necessarily make us more concerned about climate change or more willing to support or engage in climate action. Climate change falls prey to nearly all the types of distancing explained by this theory.
First, it’s abstract rather than concrete. Unlike air pollution, climate change is caused by invisible heat-trapping gases that we can’t see, feel, or smell. Compounding the problem is that it’s typically represented by global temperature. Getting a handle on that requires adding up daily records from thousands of weather stations around the world for at least a few decades: a nebulous concept, as compared to the weather here and now.
Then there’s the issue of actual distance, in space and time. People often think of climate change as something that happens to people and places far away: to Steve’s polar bears or to people who live on low-lying islands in the South Pacific with unfamiliar names, like Tuvalu or Nauru—but not to them. They also think about it as something that will affect their children or grandchildren sometime in the future, but not them, today.
And finally, there’s the issue of social relevance. Global warming is often perceived as a niche issue. We think it’s something that matters to people who proudly own the label of “environmentalist” or “tree hugger” or “save-the-whales campaigner,” people who vote for Bernie Sanders or their country’s Green Party. But if we’re not people who would describe ourselves this way, then all too often we don’t think it matters to us.
The Yale Program on Climate Communication tracks public opinion throughout the U.S. and Canada across more than two dozen questions related to climate change. You can still see the effects of psychological distance in their regional polling data. As of 2020, over 70 percent of people in the U.S. agree that global warming is happening and that it will harm plants and animals (things that are not as relevant to us as our own lives) and future generations (people in the future, not now). Sixty-five percent of people agree global warming will harm people in developing countries (who live far away) and 61 percent even say that it will harm people in the U.S. (who are not them). But when the Yale researchers ask “Do you think climate change will harm you personally?” the percentage drops precipitously, to a mere 43 percent. Somehow, the majority of us imagine that climate change will affect the world we live in, people far away, even our grandchildren and our neighbors, but not us.
HOW TO FLIP
OUR PERSPECTIVE
“When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news,” writes psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. In other words, when we live in rare times, as now, the way we think puts us at grave risk of underestimating the harm we might face—which in turn increases our risk.
Psychological distance is a more widespread challenge than whether or not we accept the science of climate change. Many of us who acknowledge that global warming is happening still see it as just one more item on our overflowing list of priorities. News headlines are full of urgent problems: a global pandemic and looming economic crisis; refugees and immigration; water, energy, and our finite resources. As individuals our daily attention goes to our health, our safety, our jobs, and our families.
This might sound daunting, but Chris Chu, a communications researcher from my own university, Texas Tech, has flipped the issue around. Rather than looking at why we distance ourselves from climate change, he studies how we can stop doing it. His work confirms that when we tell people about what’s happening on the other side of the world—telling Americans about the impact of climate change on Indonesia, for example—they see it as distant and less relevant to their lives. Our strong frames of political polarization continue to impose their overwhelming filters on the information we receive and dominate our opinions on climate change.
But when we talk about what’s happening here, locally, in ways that matter to us, all of a sudden our perspective shifts. For example, when we understand how local sea level rise affects us, we’re more willing to cut our carbon footprint. Not only do we recognize climate change’s relevance to our lives, but our political polarization decreases. In other words, we are more likely to agree that climate change matters when its impacts are presented to us as here and now.
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