Climate Action and Moral Urgency

Post date: Jul 30, 2012 5:46:45 PM

Here is an excellent blog post describing a new paper by Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff (subscription required). The basic premise is that there should be strong moral motivations to act quickly to attenuate and adapt to climate change, but people in general don't feel that way. Why not? The authors suggest that climate scientists and communicators have done a poor job of accounting for human social and behavioral psychology.The most interesting suggestions:

• Focus on the costs that inaction will incur, but provide positive emotional feedback for beneficial actions

• Don't focus on effects on "outgroups", either ethnic, temporal or spatial; instead, talk about how climate change will affect us and our kids

• Harness existing moral values, e.g., the common religious view that humans should act as stewards for a divine and sacred Nature.

These suggestions all seem to appeal to elements of human psychology that I find deeply disconcerting: an inability to appreciate future benefits, disregard for distant people, reliance on revealed wisdom for personal guidance. I suppose that is what makes these suggestions pragmatic, and potentially effective.

Still, that last suggestion troubles me. I know that co-opting existing moral frameworks has been essential for social and environmental movements in the past (e.g., Civil Rights in the 1960s, the rise of environmental conservation in the late 19th century). But as the authors point out in this article, one should be wary of using "extrinsic motivators" to compel action. They were talking about using the promise of "green jobs" during an economic recession to boost support for climate change mitigation and adaptation action. As they conclude,

"given that economic incentives and benefits for green behavior and industries are bound to change over time, the present focus on such extrinsic motivators for individuals and corporations may be shortsighted and, in the the long run, counterproductive."

I feel the same way about relying on Judeo-Christian theology to motivate action. It is unlikely that Americans will stop being zealously religious any time soon. But the most sustainable motivators - and those easiest to transfer from one culture to another - are natural and rational, not supernatural and revealed. I think that this is important when we consider that we don't just need Americans to stop pumping fossilized carbon into the atmosphere, but that we need Chinese and Indian and Iranian and Indonesian and Brazilian people to join us as well.

But that's not very pragmatic, is it? Nor does it account for psychological realities underlying human behavior. I suppose that the first thing is to get us Americans to stop ignoring our effects on global climate. If we get lucky, we can worry about our neighbors later.