Commentary: A Behavioral Perspective on Climate Inaction

T he biggest obstacle to serious climate mitigation efforts is no longer denialism. The recent frequency and intensity of floods, droughts, wildfires, and heat emergencies have persuaded most people that the climate crisis is both real and immediate. Yet inaction persists. Psychologists say it stems partly from a perception that the battle is hopeless (Lertzman 2015), a view with at least three roots: one, a belief that existing policy tools can’t induce the necessary changes in behavior; another, that even if sufficiently powerful tools existed, they would be politically impossible to implement; and a third, that the battle already appears lost—that even if we could eliminate all emissions immediately, existing greenhouse gas concentrations could eventually make the planet unlivable. Here I will survey behavioral evidence that discredits these beliefs—evidence that if more widely disseminated would spur more vigorous mitigation measures. Consider first how peer influences enhance the strength of traditional policy tools. Taxation of cigarettes is a case in point. Because nicotine is highly addictive, critics argued that high cigarette taxes would have little impact on smoking rates. That prediction proved correct in the early going. Most smokers simply paid the taxes. We now see similar skepticism about the efficacy of carbon taxes. But the long-run response to cigarette taxes supports a different projection. Although conventional economic models emphasize the importance of incomes and prices in someone’s decision to smoke, a far stronger influence is the proportion of her close peers who smoke (Mir and Dwyer 2009); the role of social