Author : Aboagye Kenneth David
If people are motivated to avoid threats to their existence, why is it so hard to get people to act on climate change?
Unfortunately, climate change involves a combination and blend of factors that make it hard for people to get motivated and energized to carry out a preventive action.
Unfortunately, climate change involves a combination and blend of factors that make it hard for people to get motivated and energized to carry out a preventive action.
Acting on climate change represents a trade-off between short-term and long-term benefits, which is the hardest trade-off for people to make. A deep understanding about human needs points out that we overvalue benefits in the short term relative to benefits in the long term.
- People don’t save enough money for retirement, preferring to spend money now rather than having it in their old age
- People find it hard to stick to their long-term goals as they enjoy the fruit of their labour within the present periods.
- People overeat in the present, despite the problems that obesity can cause in the future.
Ignoring the menace of climate change in the short term has benefits both to individuals and to organizations from the financial and economic perspectives.
KEY NOTE
Individuals do not have to make changes in the cars they drive, the products they buy, or the homes they live in if they ignore the influence their carbon footprint has on the world.
Companies can keep manufacturing cheaper if they don’t have to develop new processes to limit carbon emissions.
Governments can save money today by relying on methods for generating power that involve combustion rather than developing and improving sources of green energy, even those that are more cost-effective in the long run.
Many effects of climate change are distant from most people. When there are weather disasters that are probably a reflection of climate change (like wildfires or extreme storms), they tend to happen far away from where most people live. As a result, most people are not forced to grapple with the specifics or experience the negative effects of climate change, but rather can treat it as an abstract concept. And abstract concepts simply don’t motivate people to act as forcefully as specific ones do.
WE SHOULD NOT BE SELFISH
Ultimately, we have to be willing to be explicit about the values we are acting on. If we choose to enrich our lives in the present at the cost of the quality of life of future generations, that is a choice of values that we rarely like to make explicitly. We have to be willing to look in the mirror and say that we are willing to live our lives selfishly, without regard to the lives of our children and grandchildren. And if we are not willing to own that selfish value, then we have to make a change in our behavior today. However we need to understand details of climate change and believe it exist before we can preach to the world about the menaces and its related preventive measures.
