We all have to do many things.
Douglas Adams, in his fictional “trilogy” in four (or more) parts—”The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”—wrote of a device created by an interstellar, advanced civilisation that generated a “Somebody Else’s Problem” field. This remarkable device generates a perception that a condition or problem doesn’t directly affect the viewer, or at least makes the problem appear presently insignificant to the viewer, and so the problem belongs to someone else. If memory serves, the device is used to land a spacecraft on a cricket pitch, or hide mountains of rubbish throughout a city, though I may be mistaken.
These elements aren’t far from our reality—these days it’s not uncommon for reality to appear like fiction.
Take, for instance the work of Elke Weber, a research psychologist at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s (now at Princeton), who, in considering farming communities and climate change, surmised that when people are faced with a new threat, they’re motivated to do whatever they can to make their anxiety disappear—even if the first thing they think of isn’t particularly effective. So people seek their own “Somebody Else’s Problem” solution; Prof. Weber called her finding “single action bias”—and we may see much of this in discourse around us, sometimes to very humorous reflection.
I recently came across a clip of a video from a particular North American commentator noting that it wasn’t that important to worry about global sea rise, or probably any other floods for that matter, as even if this happened, this isn’t a problem as people would simply sell their homes and move elsewhere. So that’s the simple solution, and we don’t really have a problem about floods or sea level rise. Done. One small chink in the proposed solution (rather pointedly raised in the clip https://youtu.be/0-w-pdqwiBw) is that you may find a very limited number of buyers to your property. So although the proposed “solution” may address your immediate anxiety, it does nothing to address the issue of impacts and risks, or the cause of the problem. It’s a poor band-aid sold to appease anxiety and reassure that we can just carry on, as the problem isn’t that significant. Douglas Adams couldn’t have written it better, and it’s the same anxiety-reduction mechanism that Prof. Weber described, leading to action that reduces anxiety, but isn’t particularly effective.
As we’ve come to know, climate change isn’t a single-dimension issue—it’s not just about floods—and it doesn’t have singular, predictable effects. It could be that the place you move to—far from the coast—is fraught with wildfires or droughts. Or it could be that many, many people are moving there along with you, so that water, agricultural and energy resources are extraordinarily stressed. “Moving away” isn’t really a solution or approach that will improve our experience in a world with more frequent climate impacts than we have known in recorded history—we really have nowhere to move to.
Yet there’s perhaps a further extension, or perhaps a corollary, to the “single action bias” that we can consider.
The issue is that there’s not a single action that will move us to addressing our climate change predicament. It’s not about picking the easiest thing, or the least costly thing that we can do. Unfortunately, as we’re at a late stage, we all have to do many things.
LbD realises this challenge directly—that we won’t address climate change if we simply buy an EV but keep on driving a two ton car three kilometers (to find parking), to pick up 400 grammes of out-of-season fruit shipped from the other side of the world. Just buying the EV car isn’t going to change everything. We have to consider our habits, we have to consider how we live—home and building insulation, how water and manufactured goods are re-used, how we understand consumption, practices in agriculture, commerce, and entertainment. Unfortunately it’s not just a single action that will magically change emissions trajectories, though it may be more comfortable to think so.
LbD approaches this not with a laser focus on emissions. Instead, LbD seeks these multiple actions, but always with the aim of delivering a “good life” with them, and not just “lower emissions”; in this way, LbD seeks to move away from the trap of “single action bias” and to create demand for sustained, multiple avenues of action, all phased over time, towards an understood future goal. In this way, coordination of action can be sustained, and a consultative fairness is embedded in the process—changes aren’t “imposed” for the sake of “efficiency” or “ambition” (though efficiency and ambition are important to achieve LbD’s goals), but work through an iterative process to discover pathways to a “good life” for actors in a society—all within the Paris Agreement and impact preparedness for a world 1.5-2˚ warmer.
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Gilberto Arias