Changing the Mental Climate

Undoing Global Warming  (Part II)

When I went to high school in the seventies, cigarettes were the most heavily advertised consumer product in the country. Then everyone smoked: in restaurants, bars, parties, in pediatrician's offices.  For hours after you hung out with other people, you could press your nose against your skin and there was the stale stink of human interaction.  Now, hardly anyone smokes.  What happened and what successful strategies from that fight can we use to help us fight climate disruption? 

The change with smoking first started when the Surgeon General began publishing reports about the dangers of this addiction.  Following this deluge of scientific information came the lawsuits.  During these cases, the tobacco executives were shamed as all the strategies and lies they'd used were revealed in court.  Memos were shown with the executives' names on them.  The memos explained how to muddy the public's understanding of nicotine addiction and lung cancer, and how to attract new users, especially children.

Yes, the companies lost a LOT of money in the settlements, but those memos hurt even more.  They were read on the news and reprinted in newspapers across the nation.  Before then, people in a store looking at a pack of cigarettes thought about the cheap price and the cool taste of the smoke in their mouths. However, after those memos, cigarettes began to look different.  Now people imagined stuffing their hard-earned dollars into the pockets of those arrogant execs who had manipulated them.  They pictured gasping for their lives in a hospital bed.  They imagined through taxes paying for millions of uninsured people to die in such excruciating pain. 

The psychological term for this is called cueing.  Through those memos, people were getting cued to remember their anger at the tobacco companies every time they saw a cigarette ad, a hospital or an ashtray.  The public understanding that started with the Surgeon General's warning was made uncomfortably vivid.  Stories hold power.  The narrative about smoking changed from being a fashionable habit that cool people did.  Instead it became a self-destructive addiction that funded the greedy lies of Big Tobacco.  And people started quitting smoking in droves. 

With the change in the narrative, the tobacco companies lost their hold on the American mind and anti-smoking laws were rapidly passed in cities and states across the country.  High taxes were levied on each box of cigarettes, cigarette advertising was tightly restricted and smoking in public buildings began to be legislated against

This shift in narrative is what we have to do for a different kind of smoking, the kind our tailpipes, chimneys and power plants do.  We have to make driving a gas-guzzling car, building an inefficient power plant, and leaving your lights on seem immoral, socially-destructive and all around stupid.  Conversely, we have to make it seem fiscally responsible, patriotic, planet-respecting, obedient of God's wishes, protective of our children's future and all around sexy to be highly efficient and mindful in our carbon emissions.

From Science to Lawsuits

So much of what happened to Big Tobacco seems set up to happen to the fossil fuel industries.  The IPCC and NASA and many other science organizations have issued their version of the Surgeon General's reports.  In their dry scientific way, they have screamed it from the rooftops.  Now the lawyers are stepping in to back them up.  There are a whole bunch of legal suits concerning climate change hitting the courts now, dealing with everything from:

* the Inuit suing the US for defrosting the very ground the culture rests on

* California suing the six biggest car companies for hurting the state's past and future earnings in everything from agriculture to tourism,

* 12 states suing the EPA for not regulating CO2 emissions.  This last case is the most exciting for it has reached the Supreme Court and the decision could reverberate across the nation in a variety of legal and financial ways.

The first few test cases about carbon emissions have set great precedents.  For instance, Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General sued a utility company because the emissions of its power plants impacted New York's air quality and health.  Those power plants were hundreds of miles away in Virginia.  Still, the case wasn't thrown out of court, but settled through the utility company sharply decreasing its emissions and paying over one billion dollars in damages. 

A billion dollars is no small amount of money for anyone to pay, but my hopes for the upcoming climate cases aren't so much for huge settlements as for some really seedy revelations getting trumpeted by the mass media.  For instance, it would be great if everyone knew about the 19 million dollars that MobilExxon's ex-CEO, Lee Raymond, paid out to confuse Americans' understanding of the science of climate disruption.  He used these millions to A) fund the science of climate skeptics, B) set up fake non-profits to disseminate this research widely and C) contribute to Republican politicians who obediently thundered about climate change being a hoax.  I'm betting a few of those in-house memos discussing these disinformation strategies would be juicy reading, rife with arrogance, greed and marketing data.  If excerpts of these memos were read while video clips were shown of Raymond getting into his stretch limo with all his corporate lawyers, the narrative about Big Fossil Fuel companies would change.  The story would shift from fossil fuels being a necessary industry that allows us to drive in our big safe SUVs in the all-American pursuit of happiness.  Instead we would have a narrative of big-oil fat cats deliberately misleading Americans so the future of our children is threatened.  Raymond's cynical disregard for the truth and the wellbeing of this planet would cue the public to feel rage every time they see a gas station or the heating bill.  Looking at a gas pump, instead of thinking of the cheap price of one gallon of gas, people should begin to imagine monster hurricanes and increased asthma and food prices soaring from massive droughts.  Turning on the air conditioner, they should think of species extinctions and New Orleans under water and smirking fossil-fuel execs. 

Given this sort of a narrative, I think a lot more people might begin to invest their money in renewables, insulate every inch of their house and vote only for politicians who are for getting us away from such an environmentally devastating, inefficient and old type of technology.

With any luck these court cases could create such bad PR no one would accept a job with MobilExxon (the same as they wouldn't accept one at RJ Reynolds) for fear their moms will take their photos off the wall and their spouses divorce them.

With these memos, the fossil fuel industry might lose their hold on the American mind.  Enabling a lot of legal and financial changes to rapidly follow.

Our Current Circus

It was a hot July day in 1944.  The Barnum and Bailey circus was in Hartford, Connecticut.  Filling the world's biggest tent were over 8,000 people, mostly children with their mothers, watching the Flying Wallendas step out on the high wire.

Then the southwest tent wall caught fire.

Psychologists who study people's reactions to disasters talk about the difficulty of breaking out of normal behavior patterns.  Although we all know we're supposed to run from a fire, in an actual emergency we simply don't believe this is real.  We don't want to embarrass ourselves by running screaming from a hoax or misperception.  Dulled from a lifetime of safety, we glance out of the corners of our eyes to see how others are reacting.  Of course, they're struggling to look calm too.

John Darley of Princeton University became famous for his series of experiments into the 'bystander effect.'  He never told the subject of his experiment that the experiment had already started, but simply left the person in a room with instructions to fill out forms for the “upcoming” study.  After a few moments, he started pumping dark smoke into the room through the air conditioning vent.  The smoke got thicker and thicker, while he timed how long it took the subject to leave the room for help. 

The only variable was if there were other people in the room.  These people were stooges who Darley paid to act as if nothing was going on.  If the subject asked about the smoke, these stooges shrugged, as though it wasn't anything special. 

We all know the polar ice is melting, that the world's temperature is rising.  We can feel in our guts the weather is changing, becoming unbalanced. 

If the subject was alone, there was a 70% chance s/he would get help within four minutes. 

The coral reefs are dying, winter is getting shorter, rain and drought are becoming more extreme.

If the subject was with stooges, however, there was only a 12% chance s/he would get help.  Instead subject after subject stayed there for the whole experiment, filling out forms until the smoke was too thick to see the paper anymore, until s/he couldn't see a hand held in front of the face.  The results of this experiment have been confirmed and reconfirmed by different experimenters over the past three decades.

The arctic permafrost is made up of millions of tons of carbon in the form of frozen plant matter.  It's never had a chance to decompose into the atmosphere because it's always been frozen.  It's starting to defrost now.  This carbon could dramatically speed up the change in the climate.

The top of the circus tent was waterproofed with melted wax thinned with gasoline. One couple was talking with a pregnant woman and her children about what to do.  She said they should stay, the fire would soon be put out. 

All of us read about global warming and wonder what to do.  Looking around, we see our neighbors getting in their cars to drive to work, their expressions neutral.  At work, no one brings the subject up. 

William Moomaw, Director of Tufts University Institute of the Environment, said, "We see global warming as too monumental, our actions won't make a difference."  Even if we have the internal strength to keep conscious of what we believe to be a huge problem, we think we are all alone in our feeling.  Individually, we feel too small and self-conscious to make a difference.

Lauren Slater --celebrated psychologist and author of the book, Great Psychological Experiments of the 20th Century-- is an expert on Darley’s bystander effect.  “The feeling of safety in a crowd isn’t accurate,” said Slater.  “Research shows the more people around, the more you feel beholden to social etiquette.  If there’s the slightest ambiguity about the danger inherent in the situation, you won’t act.”

The world's population is over six billion, creating the ultimate bystander effect.

When the flames reached the circus roof, they streaked up a waxy seam. The fire moved so fast, people stood up entranced, rather than run, a reaction psychologists call "collective disbelief." As soon as the fire reached the center pole it split in three directions, following the fuel along the seams.  Everyone who saw it had a different metaphor: cellophane on fire, tissue paper, a fuse.  It moved faster than the fastest man.

Darley has found in emergency situations, once one person starts to help, others are much more likely to act. In the case of the circus fire, a few people finally started to run, breaking the frozen horror of the rest.

Moomaw found the most effective exercise he ever had his Tufts environmental policy students do was to calculate the net result of their life style choices on the environment: the resources they consumed, the tons of carbon each of them individually emitted.  Twenty years after taking his course, he's had students approach him to say this resource exercise was the most transformative experience of their college career.

Slater explained this lasting effect.  “Moomaw is putting them through the first three steps of the five-stage model of stopping the bystander effect. Noticing the problem and taking responsibility for it are the first two steps.  Once they imagine their own impact multiplied by six billion other people, they reach the third step of recognizing it as an emergency.”  The final two steps of this process are deciding on an action and doing it.

Slater continued, “What’s interesting with Moomaw’s students is they managed to sustain the effect of the exercise all these years later.  Perhaps this is because of cueing.  For the rest of their lives, these students are being cued to remember the experience every time they eat or do their laundry [every time they use resources]. To give a different example, with nuclear weaponry, there aren’t constant social cues.  We don’t see streets lined with silos so we tend to forget about them.”

Slater added, “Environmental activists are people who are able to pick up cues to resource-depletion in their normal lives.”

In the 1944 circus fire, the stampede for safety started too late.  The temperature in the tent quickly rose, becoming unbearable, people screaming.  Burning pieces of the wax-encrusted roof began to fall.  Over 160 people (mostly women and children) were burned or crushed by the panicked crowds.  The rest managed to flee out the exits to safety. 

From a burning world, there is no exit.  What we desperately need now are more activists, a lot of them, ones who’ll jump out of their seats, scream noisily at the top of their lungs and lead the rush to safety.