If you're watching this video, which of course you are, then there's a decent chance you're already
aware of the climate emergency we're facing and you may even have started to make some changes
in your own lifestyle to contribute towards an overall reduction in your emissions of greenhouse
gases. But a new survey conducted across nine western nations suggests that the majority of
people have convinced themselves that the most important climate actions also just happen to be
either things they can achieve without affecting their current lifestyle at all or their large
scale activities that are outside the control of individual citizens. So does this view reflect
reality or is it yet another case of our amazing human ability to shove our heads in the sand?
Hello and welcome to Just Have Another Think, our monthly look at the ecological environmental and
social consequences of our 21st century climate emergency. The recent COP 26 climate conference in
Glasgow was a perfect example of the power of mass self-delusion. Nearly 26,000 delegates all got
together in the same place and all of them were in possession of the same crystal-clear scientific
data demonstrating the impact that greenhouse gas emissions are having on our global atmosphere
and the severity of the consequences if we don't take radical and immediate action.
But instead of agreeing urgent and rapid timelines to implement those measures,
the delegates essentially did little more than congratulate themselves for having
recognized the problems and agree to come back next year to have another chat about them,
just like they've been doing for more than two decades since the first COP meeting took place in
Berlin back in 1995. And that delusional state of mind has become an intrinsic part of the messaging
that our governments and corporations provide to consumers like you and me, which means most
folks still don't have a clear idea of what needs to be done and how quickly it needs to happen.
To coincide with the COP 26 meeting a public policy research organisation called Kantar Public,
whose clients include many mainstream organizations like these,
conducted a survey of 9,000 representative adults aged 18 and over across these nine countries
asking specific questions about the environment and climate. And at first glance it looks like
the general public generally gets it. Overall 78 percent of people across the nine countries
said they felt concerned about climate change. And when asked to prioritize the three main
environmental challenges facing the world, 62 percent put climate change firmly at the top.
But when the survey respondents were asked to evaluate their own personal commitment
to protecting the environment and planetary ecosystems they gave themselves a mean rating of
6.4 out of 10, with 36 percent giving themselves a rating between 8 and 10 out of 10, compared to
only about 5 out of 10 for media, government and even other people in their own neighbourhood!
And the perception of the actions of large corporations was even harsher.
Big companies came bottom of the list of good and bad actors with a mean rating of only 4.5 out of
10 for their commitment to environmental issues. Across all the countries only 17
percent of respondents gave their national governments a rating of 7 or more out of 10,
with Germany, France and Poland all particularly scathing about their current administrations.
42% said their governments needed a higher sense of responsibility with 34% suggesting
there should be a greater willingness to invest more in tackling the climate challenge.
So I think it's fair to say that we consumers have got a pretty positive view of ourselves
and a pretty dim view of others. But is that perception borne out by the facts?
Well the survey drills down into more detailed analysis to come up with the answers to exactly
that question. Here's an interesting juxtaposition of results to demonstrate the ambiguity of
attitudes. While more than three-quarters of respondents said they would be prepared to accept
stricter rules and environmental regulations, it seems that many of them don't think those rules
would apply to them because fewer than half think that they need to change their own habits at all.
So already we've got a bit of a disconnect between what people say and what people are actually
prepared to do. And the gap between personal environmental values and individual actions
grows ever wider as the survey goes on. According to the Kantar report, when asked about potential
solutions to the climate crisis people tend to prefer innovation and technological solutions
over individual and collective efforts to affect change. And when given the choice of legal
enforcement and obligation or encouragement and persuasion to preserve the environment
suddenly the majority of people would much rather take the second option.
Funny that isn't it. But perhaps the most revealing result of the entire survey
comes when people are asked to place a set of very specific climate mitigation actions
in priority order of importance. Here's where the accuracy of our collective climate perception
really begins to unravel. The most important activity to save the planet, say 57%
of our survey respondents, is reducing waste and increasing recycling. Now there's nothing
wrong with those two activities, they are indeed very important aspects of modern life,
but they're already happening aren't they, and generally speaking they're pretty well
organized and entrenched in our everyday lives. So continuing to reduce waste and improve recycling
amounts to pretty much a zero-effort lifestyle tweak for the vast majority of people in the
rich western nations. The next four priorities are also all perfectly laudable aspirations,
especially stopping deforestation and building energy efficient buildings. But if you think about
it none of them can be controlled or achieved by an individual taking personal responsibility
for their own actions can they? They're all things that other people need to do inside some faceless
corporation or administration somewhere else. Somewhere that we don't have to get involved with.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy comes in at priority number six, and that is
certainly something that many people could do in their own homes, but again most folks answering
this question are really only referring to actions required by centralized energy providers
rather than by individuals. In fact all the really significant changes that would make a genuinely
positive impact on climate mitigation but which would require significant changes to people's
lifestyles all tumble towards the bottom half of the priority list. Only a quarter of respondents
think we should favour public transport over cars. Even fewer people think that air travel should be
reduced. Just 22 percent think that banning fossil fuel vehicles is an important step,
and of course the real elephant in the room is good old meat consumption, with fewer than
a fifth of respondents accepting that they need to prioritize a reduction in the amount
of meat they eat each week. So the survey delved a little further to ask directly how respondents
felt about taking personal actions to preserve the environment and planet. Only about half said they
would definitely make tangible changes in their lifestyle about a third of people said they felt
torn stating that there are reasons why I should, but also reasons why I shouldn't. And 14% said
that they wouldn't be taking any actions at all. And here's where we humans are absolute masters
of finding all sorts of reasons to justify our own actions, or in this case inactions. The survey
found that 69% felt they needed more resources and equipment to act. 60% say they can't afford
to make any changes. 55% suggested they were missing information and clear guidance and 39%
don't believe that individual effort can really have an impact. To compound all those misgivings,
79% of responders think there is no agreement among experts on what the best solutions are,
despite the fact that the scientific evidence is extremely robust indeed. The result of all
that seems to be that many people have adopted a wait and see kind of attitude,
and that's completely in keeping with the classic normal distribution curve or bell curve that our
friends in marketing adopted more than half a century ago to predict how consumers would adopt
new products. Over here you've got the laggards who are extremely reluctant to change at all. Over
on the other side you've got the early adopters who dive into a new technology or product or
in this case lifestyle pretty much as soon as it's available. And then there's the huge bump in the
middle which represents the vast majority of us all, of whom are kind of neither here nor there,
just sort of watching each other and waiting for someone else to take a lead so that they
can decide whether it's safe to follow. That's human nature in a nutshell really. It's one of the
reasons why in the latter half of the 20th century it wasn't difficult for the tobacco industry to
sow tiny seeds of doubt in people's minds about whether smoking was really unhealthy or not.
And those seeds of doubt were just enough to slow down changes in people's behaviour. That's
why it took decades for governments to achieve reductions in the number of people who smoke. It
was the same story with road safety and things like dangerous pesticides and chemical waste,
and of course it's precisely the same situation with the fossil fuel industry. The trouble is,
as the Kantar report points out, the experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
or IPCC, have warned us in no uncertain terms that we don't have decades at our disposal to keep the
consequences of global warming within manageable limits. So if you haven't got around to making
your New Year's resolutions yet it might be worth having to think about what you can really achieve
in your own lifestyle once you've swept away all the dubious reasons for inactivity and stopped
watching what other people are doing. Because if every one of us did that then things would change
very quickly indeed. Thanks for watching, Happy New Year, and I'll see you next week