Dealing with Climate Change - Towards a New Paradigm

Interview with Bob Doppelt/22.12.2010 Eugene

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UfU: You said „the most important thing to tackle climate change is to „help people to think differently“. How would you describe the attitude in the US concerning climate change?

Bob Doppelt: There is greater awareness among some members of the public and among some decision makers that climate change is a real serious problem, that there are benefits of increased energy efficiency and the adoption of renewable energy technology. At the same time my assessment is that there is a very low level of true understanding yet of the risk of climate change and even less of an understanding of the true causal factors. Therefore we are making very modest adjustments to the business as usual system with the hope that this will solve the problem - and it clearly will not. So I don’t think we’ve made much of a leap yet to understanding that a new paradigm is needed. It starts with how we think and how we behave and moves all the way up to a whole different kind of technology, a whole different level of consumption, a whole different way in which the economy functions and that of course being triggered and reinforced by different kinds of policies. Instead we are getting more of the same, which is common in early stages of change, when people think quick fixes and tweaking the existing systems is what we need and even when it did not work last time, they don’t remember that.

UfU: You describe the climate change problem as the result of a wrong cultural development in western society in general. What makes you sure, that we are able to correct this wrong way?

 B.D.: I am not so sure we can correct it, but I’m optimistic that we will. Generally, with any kind of large either personal change in thinking or behaviour and certainly a system, institutional or cultural change – real change happens very late in the game. The early adopters start working on it. But it requires a significant shock to the system to really achieve fundamental change. Change will happen only after some significant harm has occurred, in a time when we won’t able to prevent a good deal of additional harm. I mean, temperatures are going to rise, no matter what we do now. Probably close to  the 2C and the question is, can we keep it from bumping beyond 2C and I think that the jury is out. But even if we are successful, rising close to the 2C is going to cause some significant impact.

The question is, will some big things happen either politically, economically, socially or just some extreme weather conditions or whatever early enough to trigger some major response or will we wait till it is really very late in the game.

All my career now is focused on making change happen earlier, and a whole bunch of other people’s and you started working on it, too. But I’m not sure that change is going to happen early enough.

UfU: For foreigners, it is often difficult to understand why U.S. citizens are so ambiguous about climate change and the necessity to change their way of life…

B.D.: You have to look at the climate issue in this country as part of a broader dynamic. I look all the way back to the World War II: The U.S. came out of the WWII as the only economy really left standing in the world and so we had tremendous economic advantage over everyone else. And we had a big share in winning the war. So we felt sort of superior and we had the belief, that our economy will always be the top dog.

That started to end in the nineteen seventies: Japan, Germany and many other countries had recovered by then and became powerhouses. Yet our culture really never adapted to that.

So we’ve been in that that sort of wishfulness for the past not coming to grips with the reality of the world and that is underneath anything that’s going on. That’s also created the big schism between what appeared right or left: whether it was liberal big government spending that caused us to go on this demise or the right wing kind of free market capitalism.

The second dynamic is that the U.S has always had this heavy kind of religious theme behind it. It’s very confusing to the most people, because very few people we all know are really religious. But we’ve always had this sort of moralistic backdrop to much of what we do. We always justified exploiting other countries under some sort of religious theme, which is sort of weird. I think that is on the bottom line of what’s going now with climate change, when you look at many people who oppose as climate scientists: It’s the older generation, but not exclusively. The issue of climate change challenges the world view of both the older generation and of those very focused on free markets, laissez-faire capitalism. They are now looking back and going: We might have made serious, serious errors that put everything at risk. People don’t want to come to that conclusion very easily. It suggests that it possibly destroyed the planet - all of the things they’ve done in their lives are suddenly in fact now looked at as harmful. So they have to discredit the whole underlying assumption underneath climate change. That’s what I mean by a real cultural issue

UfU: What reasons make you optimistic that the U.S. can be a leader in the worldwide process to tackle climate change?

B.D.: I’m not so sure if the U.S. can be the leader. But unless we act, not much is going to happen. A number of other countries are going to do their own thing. But it’s a global problem, we need a global agreement.

What many Americans don’t really get is that so much of the emissions being produced in China are for goods and services we are buying from them – We basically exported our emissions over there. So people sit around here and say:  when China does not reduce its emissions why should we? China’s emissions are ours and so if we reduce our consumption or demand low carbon products, then we reduce our emission and their emission.

I went to most of the COPs and I came to the conclusion that the whole process has been flawed. Maybe groups of countries should develop agreements, especially major trading partners. China could draft an agreement with the US and maybe Europe. That means, the US does not have to be the world leader per se. We only need to agree with our key trading partners. I think if you talked to some of the Obama administration officials, they would support that approach. It would allow them to claim they are boxed in by their trading partners so they could come back to the American public saying: we do not have a choice, either we agree or we would be out of the game.

At the same time the American public is filled with creative people - we’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. It is being stifled by those folks that can’t get over the cultural questions that climate change poses. And certainly by the strength of the fossil fuel industry here, which realises, that it has a lot to lose and not much to gain and they are going to squeeze out the last dollar of profit they can. I don’t think the fossil fuel industries are completely blind – I have worked with a couple of fossil fuel-based companies, that are not blind at all to the risk but they are trying to position themselves to capitalise from the shift to renewables. But, they are going to oppose action to reduce emission until they are positioned to capture competitive advantage. The same thing actually happened to the Montreal protocol. Companies opposed, opposed, opposed while they were working on alternatives behind the scenes. Once they had the alternatives, they went: Okay, we agree. In this sense I’m optimistic, but again it will take a big catastrophe, or some kind of big shake-up to really produce the affects you want to see.

UfU: What is for you the best and the worst experience concerning climate change in the last five years?

B.D.: There is too many… The litany of natural disasters we’ve seen in 2010: floods, draughts, heat waves. My niece in Los Angeles called me up when they had 113 degrees down there and said “Uncle Bob, is this, what you’re talking about?” More people are starting to feel the tension. And the best things, they are mostly small: the biggest U.S. climate policy ever adopted occurred this year: Obamas administration’s decision to increase vehicle emission standards. People did not realise it but it’s a positive step forward and it will add up to get the kind of emission reduction we need in the US and globally.

UfU: Where are Americans regarding to change?

All peoples, organisations and institutions go through a series of stages whenever they make a fundamental change in thinking and behaviour. You can measure those changes pretty easily. George Mason University and Yale University put out studies like the ”Six Americas[1]” They show that about 6-8% of Americans are in the later stages of change, they’ve moved to the point where they are acting on climate change. Another 6-8% are at the earliest stages of change. They oppose, deny, ignore. The vast majority of the public in the United States is at the stages in between, with 50-60 % in the stage of deliberation. They think about it – but they are not ready to act. What we need to do is not to get people to immediately act from disinterest or deliberation, they are not ready to act and will not. In fact, trying to push them to act quickly only forces them to put their heels in the sand even more. (Instead) We want them to move to the next stage of change. And that’s what we are not doing in terms of interventions, in terms of communication, in terms of education…

UfU: What are the key factors to bring about change?

B.D.: There are three keys for motivating change. One is you have to have sufficient dissonance or tension. People have to want to achieve some kind of conditions different from what they are today. I think the dissonance or tension about global warming is only moderate. There is little understanding of the impacts or that we are going to lose out economically and other ways.

 But dissonance or tension alone is not enough. People also need to feel sufficient efficacy. They need to feel that they have the skills and the capacity to reduce the dissonance or tension they feel and that the actions and policies they are asked to support will do the job and solve the problem.

Efficacy in the US is almost rock-bottom. People don’t believe that change in their light bulbs is going to solve a global problem. And the majority of the people do not believe that carbon trade –cap and trade--would solve the problem. Most people think it was just another set-up from Wall Street: a way for a bunch of people to make money with no real emission reduction.

The third factor is benefits. To make a fundamental change in thinking and behaviour, any person and any organisation has to see at least two benefits for every downside of making the change. If the downsides are roughly equal to the benefits – why would you do it?

In the U.S., understanding of the benefits of making the shift and efficacy are at rock bottom. People don’t see the benefit but only see the downside. So we have moderate dissonance or tension, low efficacy and low sense of benefits. No wonder we are not making progress. We ought to focus much more on the efficacy and the benefits of addressing climate change while we also boost tension and increase dissonance- if we just focus on the horror-stories and on how bad climate change is going to be, all what people will do is dig their heads in the sand even more. I think that’s the challenge ahead of us here as in many places in Europe and other countries also: tension, efficacy and benefit and we are at low levels in all three of these keys to change.

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