The Guardian: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change and what to do about it

[GliderGuider]

Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change and what to do about it

The primary reason is that our innate sense of social competition has made us acutely alert to any threat posed by external enemies. In experiments, children as young as three can tell the difference between an accident and a deliberate attack. Climate change confounds this core moral formula: it is a perfect and undetectable crime everyone contributes to but for which no one has a motive.

There is no outsider to blame. We are just living our lives: driving the kids to school, heating our homes, putting food on the table. Only once we accept the threat of climate change do these neutral acts become poisoned with intention – so we readily reject that knowledge, or react to it with anger and resentment.

Even worse, climate change appears to contain a royal flush of other qualities that are notoriously hard for our brains to engage with: it requires immediate personal sacrifices now to avoid uncertain collective losses far in the future. The cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his studies of how irrationally we respond to such issues, sighed deeply when I asked him to assess our chances: “Sorry,” he said, I am deeply pessimistic. I see no path to success.”

So my fellow advocates for action create this enemy narrative with dramatis personae from our past struggles – corrupt politicians, malignant corporate executives, fat bankers, lazy journalists, slippery lawyers and an apathetic public. All the while, however, our opponents are mirroring these actions. During a raucous evening with members of the Texan Tea Party I was told in predictably blunt language that liberal environmentalists are the real enemy, and that we have invented this scam to extend government control. Like most conservatives, they failed to see that it is climate change itself that poses a threat to their values, freedoms and property.

This tendency to confuse the facts of climate change with the narratives constructed from them is just as common among politicians. I can safely predict that the leaders gathering in New York will stress the urgent need to control greenhouse gases but remain mute about the $1tn a year spent bringing yet more fossil fuel reserves into production. In 25 years of negotiations, no measure to control fossil fuel production has ever been discussed. It does not exist anywhere in the official narrative.

Each of our bodies contains the end results of half a million years of evolution, all of which, ironically, actively prevents us from dealing with the threats our neocortex has created in just two hundred years.

[Nihil]

1. That's an excellent article - thanks!

> I can safely predict that the leaders gathering in New York will stress the urgent need
> to control greenhouse gases but remain mute about the $1tn a year spent bringing
> yet more fossil fuel reserves into production.
> In 25 years of negotiations, no measure to control fossil fuel production has ever been
> discussed. It does not exist anywhere in the official narrative.

This is the elephant in the politico-diplomatic room.

The "decision-makers" who attend these self-serving PR talking shops are completely owned
by the fossil fuel industry and are easily manipulated to use the (closely-tied) military industrial
complex to progress the goals of the fossil fuel industry.

Dumb monkeys with everything from guns to nuclear weapons but no fucking perspective.


There was also a good summary in one of the comments:
>> We also don't deal well with big numbers, and big numbers of people.
>> Without very direct pressure - the word "war" comes to mind! - we don't co-operate very well.
>> We're smart monkeys who evolved to deal with events over a few years,
>> with distances of a few miles and with (at most) a few hundred people.

[The2ndWheel]

2. Short term thinking vs. Lonng term thinking

Either way, we're stuck. In the short term, obviously it helps us today, but it will come at a cost at some point down the road, because it always has, but we've managed to get where we're at, which means we've continued, time after time, to find ways around the stop sign. In the long term, we have to give something up today, which is a competitive disadvantage. Some Native Americans may have had the 7 generation idea, but where are they today? Exactly.

Short term, long term, it all works until it no longer works.

As the article says, why should we not be able to just simply go about our lives how we want? I think if you went deeper into that question, that would open up a different discussion, which could go in all sorts of directions.

[adirondacker]

3. Excellent! Thanks for posting! nt