Scientists have spoken. The UN IPCC has spoken. The IEA has spoken. All those in the know are sounding the alarm. Seven years to get to 43% reduction in emissions, and we are still increasing emissions.
Why is humanity so dense?
Answer: It’s our psychology.
Five powerful psychological forces operate in the climate debate—denial, despair, confusion, anxiety, and optimism. They are all there, and they all have their own powerful effect on the paralysis that grips the debate. These forces tend to dig people into their positions so they can't hear each other, and we can't get where we need to go—a low-carbon future that makes life better for everyone. If you care about climate change and the potential solutions, you need to understand how these forces operate. Without that understanding, we will all end up the victims of bad instincts. Let’s try to understand.
Denial
First, there is denial. There is a strong human tendency to deny things that we don’t want to be true. Denial, for example, is often said to be one of the first stages of grief after a loved one dies. Usually, this comes out of a psychologically unconscious fear. We feel the fear, we’re not sure of its origin, and we react against it. We want it to go away. We want it to not be true.
Denial in the climate discussion is particularly potent because an entire ideology has been built up around it by right-wing media, talk radio, podcasts, and the so-called media echo chamber. This media-driven ideology arms the listeners with effective arguments not against other people, but with the tools needed to defend their psychological denial against themselves. The ideology is designed to keep awareness at bay.
Today, the primary defense is the false argument that a cabal of progressive left-leaning intellectuals and scientists made up everything known about climate change in a sophisticated attempt to change public policy toward their favorite policies. In other words, the enemy is those people. They are evil, bad people, and they are out to get the rest of us. “Climate change is a hoax!” That’s the clarion call of denialism.
Do you see how this defends the self? No one outside the deniers believes that climate change is a hoax and they will never believe that. But if you are a denier, you say this all the time to get yourself to believe it. Likewise, you need to keep telling yourself that it is a massive conspiracy so you can write off and deny the overwhelming data and evidence. The more evidence the more massive the conspiracy. And then it bends into whole youtube channels, so-called scholarly presentations, and a host of crack-pot scientific "information" that continues to reinforce the denial. If you are a denier, you have to consume this information, otherwise, you have no way to defend your denial against the truth.
The unfortunate success of these efforts results in 80 million Americans, and many more people around the world, who deny that climate change is even happening. If it is not happening, why should I take action? We need to stop all others from taking action, too, because they are just trying to take away what is rightfully ours anyway. You can probably hear the fear inside this kind of thinking as well. It tends to energize the denial.
Despair
Despair leads equally to inaction, but for different reasons. It comes from the sense that it is all just too big and too overwhelming to do anything meaningful about climate change. Yet, it masquerades as intelligent analysis. It’s the oil companies and their cronies buying off the government to push their interests and they build all this stuff no one wants and force it onto an unsuspecting public that doesn’t realize what is happening to them. Big oil will never back down, the politicians are in their pockets, consumers just keep buying stuff they don’t need, and it’s never going to change. Everyone will keep driving and flying because they are too stupid to correct course, and it would be so easy if everyone would just become a vegetarian, but they won’t so we are screwed. Huge analysis of big systemic issues that overwhelm the mind.
This thought pattern is usually followed by an insistence that we have to stop drilling, destroy the oil and coal companies, overthrow the government, and destroy capitalism. Wow. No wonder they get overwhelmed by despair. I don't know about you, but I don't see capitalism capitulating without a catastrophe. And frankly, even if it did happen suddenly, it would create its own kind of catastrophe. Heat? Lights? Industry? Travel? Shipping? Construction of homes? All would stop. We have no other way to meet those needs other than fossil fuels today. Sure, it would stop carbon to stop drilling, but the legitimate needs of 8 billion people would go unanswered. Despair indeed.
Know someone like this? Maybe they’d get something from reading this.
Confusion
Confusion is the third psychological power that is playing a huge role in the climate crisis. I worked in sales for many years and in sales, we had an old saying: Confused minds don’t buy. That notion can be translated to the climate crisis this way: Confused minds don’t act. The amount of confusion in the world about climate change, its causes, and its solutions amounts to a catastrophic betrayal of humanity by those who sowed it. It has become the confusion that many people with more urgent priorities must live with when it comes to climate change. These folks aren't deniers, it's just that they are confused by a debate they can't pay attention to because their lives are filled with children, work, getting enough money to live decently, and trying to maintain a reasonably social and energetic life. Climate change is a head trip when you think about it. It is telling us that the world is coming apart at the seams. Nothing in our spirit or DNA is prepared to handle this, yet here we are. Could it be true? Is it really happening? How much time do we have? Isn’t someone doing something about it? How the hell are we going to do this? Those are the questions of confusion, and their answer to the confusion is: I have too much to do to deal with this.
Confusion is understandable, but it is still an enemy. The reality is that climate change is overwhelming, it is a huge force, its causes are many, and the solutions are hard to find—or where easier to find, hard to implement. While most of the confusion was originally wrought by the fossil fuel industry to protect itself, much of it has been created by people trying it hitch their favorite wagon to the attention climate change is getting. Some of these issues are closely related to climate, like biosphere depletion, overharvesting of resources, and criticism of the global agriculture system. To some extent, it is understandable why people would conflate these issues with climate change—they all reflect ecological systems in various levels of breakdown. If you are predisposed to antagonism toward consumption and contemporary lifestyles—especially those of the west—then this conflation created an easy target. When you define the problem as all those people who engage in that lifestyle, it should be no surprise that many of them, confused or not, resist whatever medicine you are prescribing.
A far worse mode of confusion is to conflate the issue with every other progressive issue out there, much as the so-called Green New Deal did. A program by that name would have been great if it remained focused on carbon, investment in green tech, jobs, training, and everything needed to actually solve climate change. Instead, the Green New Deal conflated climate change, which is caused by carbon in the atmosphere, with racial injustice, income inequality, indigenous rights, socialism (and the end of capitalism), absolutism about fossil fuel usage, anti-consumerism, and an insistence on veganism. No wonder it didn’t pass, and no wonder people are confused. We have a problem with carbon in the atmosphere and the solution is purported to be dependent on solving racism? It makes no sense.
Social movements tend to splinter this way. In this case, it is easy to find the thing to protest: “Do something to stop climate change! No more oil! Leave it in the ground!” Those are great rallying cries. Impractical, true, but clear and to the point. When it starts to be that and “income equality now!” or “death to capitalism!” or “Stop eating beef!” the message is lost. Most people who are casually paying attention—i.e., those whose attention activists are usually trying to get—become overwhelmed and confused, and there is no way to clarify it because it is, in fact, very confusing. No wonder people clam up. Life is just easier if you ignore it and let it be someone else’s problem… at least, it is today until climate change has turned your life upside down.
Anxiety
There is also anxiety. Let’s call it climate anxiety. Any time our imminent destruction is held over our heads and there is a sense it is absolutely out of our control, anxiety floods the psyche. Everything becomes tentative, a victim of the sense of doom. I remember this in the 1970s and 1980s when, as a teenager, movies, political discourse, and general culture focused on nuclear annihilation. The anxiety was palpable. Climate change is today’s nuclear nightmare. It has the same power to destroy human life on earth, but it is incremental and the news continues to flood the psyche every day. Unlike the nuclear threat, it’s not the result of a possible madman getting his hands on the wrong triggers. No. Climate change is more like the proverbial frog in hot water. Throw him in, and the frog jumps out. Place him in it cool and start heating the water, and he will slowly boil himself to death, never getting out of the water. Climate change is doing that to us now. We know deep in our minds that every day, it is a little bit worse. But we look around and say: “Whew! Made it another day.” But our situation is worse and the nuclear threat has not gone away.
Anxiety has a caustic effect. It underlies each of the other three psychological forces in climate change—denial, despair, and confusion. In denial, anxiety is the force that powers the denial. There’s a fear of impending loss that hasn’t happened yet, and this makes us think we can deny our way out of it.
Anxiety also drives despair and its powerful sense of hopelessness. It comes from the sense that the problem is just too big, no one can solve it, we can’t impact it, and catastrophe is inevitable. Tragic inaction results.
I think the most powerful impact of anxiety, however, is its impact on confusion. Confusion blurs two worlds for us—the world of our intellect and the world of our emotions. Intellect says, "I can't deal with this, it's too big." Emotion says, "I can't deal with this, it's too big." Both senses are driven by anxiety as the force that compels them and prevents clear thinking and clear self-reflection. The power is so overwhelming that we tend to go numb, and people who pay attention to these things have a hard time facing it. How do you meditate toward peace when the world is coming apart with climate change? How do you find acceptance in a world that is radically changing the potential for human life on earth—yours, your children's, and subsequent generations? The problem is that when you think you get the emotions figured out, the anxiety infects the intellect. Once you have the intellect sorted out, the anxiety inflames your emotional side. Understandably, the human reaction is to shut down the anxiety, and the only way to do that is to hide from it. So people do. They hide. They ignore the crisis. They run from it. But like the ostrich with its head in the sand, this is no real protection.
Pollyannish Optimism
Pollyannish optimism is the force that takes us down a very different rabbit hole. It is actually a pretend denial. “Everything will be fine. Good people will figure it out. Don’t worry.” This is immorality on a grand scale. It displays ignorance of the devastating impacts so many people have already suffered, it refuses to think about the worst effects of climate change coming to us, and it pretends there is nothing to do. It is a la-la land of naïve happiness in the face of the devastation that other people are suffering.
This weird psychological force takes different forms. For some, it is a spiritual acceptance—what will be will be. For others, it is a Christian acceptance of God’s supposed will—if it is happening, it must be God’s will for us. For still others, it is a secular, non-religious faith in humanity figuring it out. It puts blind trust in fate, technology, or the development of society to solve everything, but takes no account of the agony it will take to get there. Pollyannish optimism might as well be denialism. It is a fake world that does not exist. A corollary for some people is to just say: Hey if you don't like the climate where you are, move! as if there is an escape from climate change.
This pollyannish optimism infuriates people who are truly concerned, but we often don’t know why. I’d submit it has to do with the profound immorality at its center. We don't think of it as immoral to believe that life will be alright, but in the world as it is today, the claim that all will be fine is to write off the suffering of those who are not fine and haven’t been fine. People flooded out in Pakistan, let’s say, or those who died in the 2022 European heat wave. None of that suffering is just alright. You have to write it off to claim all will be fine. It’s not. It wasn’t. And it won’t be.
Climate Psychology and that Devil Within
The climate crisis does not just call us to awareness of the science and the world. It calls us to an inner awareness—one that helps us confront our own internal psychological forces and see them for what they are. Some of us fall into our shells of denial. Some of us overwhelm ourselves with our thinking and fall into despair seeing no way out. Some of us are just plain confused and uncertain about what to do, if anything. And some of us are overwhelmed by anxiety or just take a pollyannish view of the future. There has never been a time more important than this to find the foundations under our own feet, stand strong, face the facts of what we are in, and think clearly about the step needed to resolve our situation.
The Only Antidote—Clear-Eyed Optimism
Clear-eyed optimism gives us all another choice. It is the “make lemonade from your lemons” approach. To describe it feels more like a choice one makes in the face of the psychological forces I’ve been describing rather than a force in itself. Yet it seems to spring from a source that one can believe in. Okay, we have this problem. We have a lot of people who can't see a way out—denial, despair, and even confusion. How do we address that and help find a path that can break the spell of those forces that freeze people into inaction? That's the question I have been working on, and it has led to this optimism.
There are a few ingredients to this optimism. First, we must see the problem clearly. It's not to be denied and it is not to be conflated with every other problem in the world. You see that scientists have known for fifty years that bringing fossil fuels would increase accumulated carbon in the atmosphere, that it would have a warming effect on the planet, and that the consequences of that warming are unknown. You stand strong in the face of the temptations to deny and despair, and you fight confusion with study. It’s about carbon. That should be a problem we can fix.
Second, we see that some solutions for certain parts of our world are available. We can generate electricity renewably. We can electrify our appliances. We can drive EVs. Adoption of these technologies would eliminate direct emissions. Some solutions need utilities to adopt them, and others we can do ourselves. At the same time, some of the technologies we need are still developing. Rather than trashing those technologies as worthless, we can put some trust in the development, and maybe even change careers to earn more money solving some of the tough technical or marketing challenges. We need to win widespread adoption of the necessary tools and technologies, and everyone can play a part. And then you realize that all these things could actually make life better for everyone, and we should be doing it anyway—with or without climate change.
Third, you look at the grander scale of political action, carbon capture technology, and other paths forward, and knowing that there is a solution to carbon in the atmosphere, you work for those things that will affect it.
This is how optimism leads to better action. When you realize that we are on the verge of better products leading to higher paying jobs and lower costs for everyone, you realize that this crisis is driving a long overdue change for humanity. We don’t need to keep burning stuff and choking ourselves to live well. Indeed, living well, increasingly, means that we don’t burn and choke, but that we convert sunlight and wind to the energy we need, we get better jobs that pay more, and lower cost of living. It is technologically oriented, but not as a panacea. It recognizes that vigilance remains important, especially so that the benefits of avoiding carbon are part of everyone’s world.
I hope that we can all examine our psychological blocks on climate and find a way to move forward with cautious optimism. Denial, despair, confusion, anxiety, or pollyannish optimism will kill us. We can do better, and we must.
Note: If you see a different psychological force at work, I would love to hear from you in the comments. Carbon 350 is all about the discussion, so let’s have it.
Anthony Signorelli
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Tony-- WOW! Great analysis, great writing. I was transfixed, and read until the end. I appreciate the simplicity of how you describe the causes of inaction. I saw myself in all five. The reference to nuclear Armageddon was also spot-on. I was a ‘Nuclear Freeze’ activist during the Reagan years. And, the warming planet seems so much more difficult to prevent. Thank you for investing yourself in solving this problem, and for your dedication to research, analysis, and good writing. I would enjoy a conversation with you.