While the two perspectives are in principle complementary, attention is a limited resource. If you get people to focus on individual behavior, that changes their demand for policies and the causes they are willing to support. We have a working paper on this, with a much expanded version to come later this year: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/z2vwb
I think this is a little counterintuitive because a lot of the research in this area is correlational. Sure, people who don't eat meat for environmental reasons are also more likely to vote for the green party or support a carbon tax. But that doesn't tell you that getting people to eat less meat would also make them support green policies. The experimental evidence pretty consistently goes in the opposite direction, with people thinking that the easy thing is "enough," completely disregarding effect sizes. (See also this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3316, and this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0474-0)
Of course, individual behavior is still key: people driving to work cause emissions, not the gas station that lets people refuel or the oil company that refines the gas. I agree that demonizing companies doesn't really serve any purpose. But the way you effectively get people to drive less (or buy more fuel efficient/EV cars) is via economic incentives -- not by encouraging responsible behavior. "Flight shaming" and student strikes for the climate might have gotten a lot of news coverage, but Ryanair still set a new passenger record just this summer.
Early adopters also influence their friends and neighbours. Once I know two people who run electric cars is when I really start believing they're an acceptable alternative. And when my neighbour can recommend their competent heat pump installer.
Early adopters tend to cluster together. I just counted and I can think of six friends / good acquaintances who have electric cars. All are very happy with them. Early adopters in "EV deserts" are vital.
People change when people change ... not if it's cheaper, better, faster, or easier. Our desire to 'keep up with the Joneses' trumps all other motivations.
What I think is overlooked here is the low level of knowledge about climate change amongst the population. Eg no one I know understands why meat consumption is bad for the planet. Biodiversity is a term that is a complete mystery. The CCC have often asked the government to have an information programme but this has never happened. The chances of people changing behaviour without the knowledge of why this is necessary are small. There has to be a public information programme , a citizen’s assembly on climate issues and improved education in s hooks for starters
To be fair, it's hard for seasoned researchers to fully understand the effects of meat consumption on the environment. There are many variables at play and so estimates of the impact of meat on climate vary wildly.
I agree with your point. While carbon footprint data for food is publicly available, this is typically by ingredient: It's easy to find the carbon footprint of beef vs. tomatoes. However, nobody decides if they want to eat beef *or* tomatoes tonight - they make dishes like lasagna that include beef *and* tomatoes, so the basic transparency of ingredients is not sufficient to help people understand. (This is why I started a food blog with estimated carbon footprints for full recipes based on their ingredients and the cooking method. Ranking the 50+ recipes and drawing comparisons makes it more tangible. Of course, the goal is to have a much bigger database of recipes than the approx. 50 recipes that I have so far.)
Individual behavior is important if you are an "early adopter". If you are an early customer for something, you help the provider improve their product, you get them some revenue they can use to work on the next version, you make the whole system work better. The people buying the Tesla Roadster back when it was an overpriced sports car, those people really helped make electric vehicles practical. Without them, Tesla might never have succeeded.
But individual behavior doesn't help if you are supporting something that isn't part of the eventual solution. If you avoid taking plane flights, and the rest of the world keeps taking plane flights, and it stays that way forever, then what did you really accomplish? The world does not need some small amount of people reducing some small amount of carbon in ways that are never going to scale up.
Yup. Hannah's words as ever are beautifully balanced and Mihir I like your contribution. If we as individuals care, then we do best by influencing the corportations with our wallets, not by grumbling from the sidelines. That way we are pulling together. Actions speak louder than words.
Thanks Hannah for writing this. I've been frustrated for years by the regularity with which this conversation comes up and how unproductive it often is. You've done a great job describing the role of individual action in economic feedback loops, and I'd add that the same is true in political, corporate and other organisational systems. As long as these systems are still made up of humans, any systemic change is going to result from a myriad of individual changes and decisions adding up to something collective and then systemic. If we think that individual action doesn't do anything then it can make us blind to the opportunities that each of us have as individuals to influence all of the various systems that we're part of.
Copenhagen started their transportation mode shift in 1965, even aided by the oil crisis in the 1970s, it took decades of policy and behavioral changes to see mode shift — including a >100% tax on car ownership.
The idea that Scotland could see shifts in behavior with a small train fare reduction over a short period of time without even an increase in car operating costs (not to mention infrastructure changes to allow safe walking a biking to transit) is as naive as it is ridiculous.
Firms are instrumental, they serve the consumer in a competitive environment. I model them as mostly devoid of agency beyond being law abiding. Individual consumption decisions are entirely irrelevant. As general rule, my view is “economic agents are too determined and un coordinated to be reponsible”.
We are responsible as citizens. This is a collective action problem, and responsibility belongs to the part of the social system in charge of collective action: the government and the citizens. Be egoistic as consumer or firm stakeholder, but vote for carbon taxes, and once approved pay them.
Friedman was right in defending profit maximization under law, as long as the political system does its part in approving and enforcing the law.
I expect a strong majority of people would claim to be against stealing but we don't leave it up to individual choice, we have laws and try to enforce them.
I'm unashamedly in the systemic camp on this and inclined to argue the case that serious failures of governance and law allowed the climate problem to be passed to public opinion - where lies can have the same weight as truth - instead of it being a matter of duties of care of Office holders to take the science based advice seriously, pass on that sense of seriousness to the public and enact policy in keeping with it. Beginning back when "humans can't change the climate" was the default and economic fear of lost prosperity by facing up to it looked real rather than unduly alarmist.
With environmentalists - fringe politics - the loudest voices and them calling for people to go without stuff, which I think only works at all if everyone is informed and acts sensibly (which shouldn't have needed Dan Kahnemann to tell us won't) mainstream politics seemed pleased to hand the issue off to them and reinforce the "green-leftist" framing - "you care so much you fix it" - setting up climate activism as central, and setting it up to fail. That people apart from activists - scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs - made RE work cost effectively was a credit to them but it was not expected to work; without RE we'd be in a much worse situation. And when our primary energy is zero emissions everything, even wasteful extravagance, which I don't see how we can prevent, will be low emissions.
Our institutions are our means for addressing the big issues, but their enduring corruptibility has been the means for corporate responsibility and accountability to be evaded. The natural urge to evade being held personally accountable for something we haven't chosen so much as grown up with has been mobilized into popular support for evading accountability at the institutional level.
To a first approximation, winning elections (at least in the US) is all the matters. TFG will undo everything Biden/Harris has accomplished. Imagine what the world would be like if "Green" Nader hadn't push Bush in the White House over Gore.
I've been thinking about this system/agency binarisation? binarying? in other areas.
The binary framing of [systemic/individual] explanations is primarily a conservative approach in any credit/blame status game, its analogous to the "privatise the profits (because 'we' take risks) and socialise the losses (because 'we' are too big to fail)", where 'they' take credit for success but not the blame for failure (this is a narcissistic impulse BTW).
It's conservative not because of its politics but because it maintains a position's conservation of momentum. If you say we need to change the system 'they' will decry the reduction in individual liberty, if you say we each need to take up individual responsibility, 'they' will bemoan the lack of respect for authority. It is a type of cherry-picking the best defensive contingent fruit that helps deflect attention and distract discussion away from good worlding, which is a type of selfing.
In either case things will stay as they are. Job done.
We have a great deal of difficulty talking about this directly because it is so often layered with more derivative features (religion/tribe/clan/pigmentation) and we will talk instead (of the world) of our tribe, or sport, or nation as the world (e.g. Русский мир) (Yes Putin is a low affect psychopath).
I have a long time friend who blamed her depression on the systemic capitalistic world she lives in. Perhaps she is right about the cause of her depression, but she says this and thus maintains the momentum of her life as being depressed, i.e. her agency is depressed by a regime she gives her agency to. I.E. she says she cannot be cured because|system. She chooses/decides/notices this fact of her life thus confirming it as true, and thus she is not wrong. (Please don't mention medication and proper help as this is an anecdote.)(She is fine now).
Blaming the system, as indeed the binarisation itself, can be a type of 'systemic depression' leading to less fruitful outcomes in the world.
A current systemic example of "blame" is Russia. (Cultic paranoia often feeds on this system-blaming (also known as conspiracy theorying) that the good gnostic knows about and thus can save themselves... at the cost of damning the world.)
If we use a frame of worlding rather than these credit/blame systems of causal status we can effect better worlding, i.e better lives.
I.E. we need to move away from narcissistic framings (and police narcissists on 'our' side).
N.B. non-individual framings do not necessary mean collective framings. Collective framing merely treat an aggregate as an individual, this is not what the world is. The binary of individual/collective is another example of this conservative approach to cultural discussions.
The world is a non-individual extension of the selfing we live, as we live among others. The individual-system binary eats into this and is unhealthy because it is our meetings which make us human and these binarisation mean we cannot meet with each other and negotiate the morrow in good cheer.
I may sound like a kook but at least I am not depressed anymore, and yes I have an electric car.
Why did you have to say „ it doesn’t have to be vegan“ under „Diet? Animal agriculture is the single biggest avoidable climate crisis driver. Dumping animal products doesn’t even need new infrastructure. Meat n dairy are worse than flying and driving whilst occupying 80% of agricultural land, causing local environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and most importantly relies entirely upon abuse.
A great article from Hannah as always! This is a great topic for discussion. I am dealing with trying to get students and teachers to embrace more EE (Enviromental Education) from the perspective of taking on a simple project that leads to circular outcomes whether it be food waste to compost to soil or recycling and reusing something.
The individual VS systememic behavior change is a great way to frame a problem that you are working on. Particulary for a younger audience. The article is getting me to think about presenting the problem ( creating food waste and sending to landfills) and first framming it as a system and why that system in the US alone is responsible for us wasting 38% of our food is our supply chain.
By understanding the system that produces (farms), transports (trucks + ships) , strores, sells (retail stores) and eats (households ) the food, we get a sense of the system. We can then work with and support individual students who as a collective are able to get the rest of the school through best practices to reduce, share and divert their food waste from landfills.
Its a simple concept but gets kids to realize that small changes in the system as individuals can lead to larger outcomes that benefit the school and community. Donna Meadows, who was an expert in the field of systems thinking talked about the "the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — aris" is this greatest place to intervene and make a change in a system. I tell students that getting the whole school to practice food waste reduction + diversion in akin to making that paradigm shift.
It would be really really helpful if the politicians would do the “unthinkable” and at least just stop subsidizing oil and gas, increase the royalties the companies must pay to access the resource, and increase the clean-up fund fees (as if some places even have any, haha, they don’t).
Hannah at its core climate change is a data problem. The price signals that feed from the consumption of fossil fuels don't account for the social and environmental costs.
Garbage data is being fed into the problem solving machine that is the global economy and we are getting garbage outputs.
The only way to address this problem is to correct this pricing data as best we can with a carbon tax. That will properly align government, business, and households for collective action.
While the two perspectives are in principle complementary, attention is a limited resource. If you get people to focus on individual behavior, that changes their demand for policies and the causes they are willing to support. We have a working paper on this, with a much expanded version to come later this year: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/z2vwb
I think this is a little counterintuitive because a lot of the research in this area is correlational. Sure, people who don't eat meat for environmental reasons are also more likely to vote for the green party or support a carbon tax. But that doesn't tell you that getting people to eat less meat would also make them support green policies. The experimental evidence pretty consistently goes in the opposite direction, with people thinking that the easy thing is "enough," completely disregarding effect sizes. (See also this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3316, and this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0474-0)
Of course, individual behavior is still key: people driving to work cause emissions, not the gas station that lets people refuel or the oil company that refines the gas. I agree that demonizing companies doesn't really serve any purpose. But the way you effectively get people to drive less (or buy more fuel efficient/EV cars) is via economic incentives -- not by encouraging responsible behavior. "Flight shaming" and student strikes for the climate might have gotten a lot of news coverage, but Ryanair still set a new passenger record just this summer.
Early adopters also influence their friends and neighbours. Once I know two people who run electric cars is when I really start believing they're an acceptable alternative. And when my neighbour can recommend their competent heat pump installer.
Early adopters tend to cluster together. I just counted and I can think of six friends / good acquaintances who have electric cars. All are very happy with them. Early adopters in "EV deserts" are vital.
Yes and early adopters help jumpstart experience curve effects, driving down the cost of goods.
Yes, people want what other people want.
Social influence well used 💯
People change when people change ... not if it's cheaper, better, faster, or easier. Our desire to 'keep up with the Joneses' trumps all other motivations.
What I think is overlooked here is the low level of knowledge about climate change amongst the population. Eg no one I know understands why meat consumption is bad for the planet. Biodiversity is a term that is a complete mystery. The CCC have often asked the government to have an information programme but this has never happened. The chances of people changing behaviour without the knowledge of why this is necessary are small. There has to be a public information programme , a citizen’s assembly on climate issues and improved education in s hooks for starters
To be fair, it's hard for seasoned researchers to fully understand the effects of meat consumption on the environment. There are many variables at play and so estimates of the impact of meat on climate vary wildly.
I agree with your point. While carbon footprint data for food is publicly available, this is typically by ingredient: It's easy to find the carbon footprint of beef vs. tomatoes. However, nobody decides if they want to eat beef *or* tomatoes tonight - they make dishes like lasagna that include beef *and* tomatoes, so the basic transparency of ingredients is not sufficient to help people understand. (This is why I started a food blog with estimated carbon footprints for full recipes based on their ingredients and the cooking method. Ranking the 50+ recipes and drawing comparisons makes it more tangible. Of course, the goal is to have a much bigger database of recipes than the approx. 50 recipes that I have so far.)
Monbiot has a good article on this point, and it seems so obvious when you see it in black and white. https://www.monbiot.com/2024/09/02/nationalise-us/
Individual behavior is important if you are an "early adopter". If you are an early customer for something, you help the provider improve their product, you get them some revenue they can use to work on the next version, you make the whole system work better. The people buying the Tesla Roadster back when it was an overpriced sports car, those people really helped make electric vehicles practical. Without them, Tesla might never have succeeded.
But individual behavior doesn't help if you are supporting something that isn't part of the eventual solution. If you avoid taking plane flights, and the rest of the world keeps taking plane flights, and it stays that way forever, then what did you really accomplish? The world does not need some small amount of people reducing some small amount of carbon in ways that are never going to scale up.
Nothing more impactful than signaling the market through your wallet and the steps towards sustainability should begin from signaling the market.
Yup. Hannah's words as ever are beautifully balanced and Mihir I like your contribution. If we as individuals care, then we do best by influencing the corportations with our wallets, not by grumbling from the sidelines. That way we are pulling together. Actions speak louder than words.
Thanks Hannah for writing this. I've been frustrated for years by the regularity with which this conversation comes up and how unproductive it often is. You've done a great job describing the role of individual action in economic feedback loops, and I'd add that the same is true in political, corporate and other organisational systems. As long as these systems are still made up of humans, any systemic change is going to result from a myriad of individual changes and decisions adding up to something collective and then systemic. If we think that individual action doesn't do anything then it can make us blind to the opportunities that each of us have as individuals to influence all of the various systems that we're part of.
Copenhagen started their transportation mode shift in 1965, even aided by the oil crisis in the 1970s, it took decades of policy and behavioral changes to see mode shift — including a >100% tax on car ownership.
The idea that Scotland could see shifts in behavior with a small train fare reduction over a short period of time without even an increase in car operating costs (not to mention infrastructure changes to allow safe walking a biking to transit) is as naive as it is ridiculous.
Firms are instrumental, they serve the consumer in a competitive environment. I model them as mostly devoid of agency beyond being law abiding. Individual consumption decisions are entirely irrelevant. As general rule, my view is “economic agents are too determined and un coordinated to be reponsible”.
We are responsible as citizens. This is a collective action problem, and responsibility belongs to the part of the social system in charge of collective action: the government and the citizens. Be egoistic as consumer or firm stakeholder, but vote for carbon taxes, and once approved pay them.
Friedman was right in defending profit maximization under law, as long as the political system does its part in approving and enforcing the law.
I expect a strong majority of people would claim to be against stealing but we don't leave it up to individual choice, we have laws and try to enforce them.
I'm unashamedly in the systemic camp on this and inclined to argue the case that serious failures of governance and law allowed the climate problem to be passed to public opinion - where lies can have the same weight as truth - instead of it being a matter of duties of care of Office holders to take the science based advice seriously, pass on that sense of seriousness to the public and enact policy in keeping with it. Beginning back when "humans can't change the climate" was the default and economic fear of lost prosperity by facing up to it looked real rather than unduly alarmist.
With environmentalists - fringe politics - the loudest voices and them calling for people to go without stuff, which I think only works at all if everyone is informed and acts sensibly (which shouldn't have needed Dan Kahnemann to tell us won't) mainstream politics seemed pleased to hand the issue off to them and reinforce the "green-leftist" framing - "you care so much you fix it" - setting up climate activism as central, and setting it up to fail. That people apart from activists - scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs - made RE work cost effectively was a credit to them but it was not expected to work; without RE we'd be in a much worse situation. And when our primary energy is zero emissions everything, even wasteful extravagance, which I don't see how we can prevent, will be low emissions.
Our institutions are our means for addressing the big issues, but their enduring corruptibility has been the means for corporate responsibility and accountability to be evaded. The natural urge to evade being held personally accountable for something we haven't chosen so much as grown up with has been mobilized into popular support for evading accountability at the institutional level.
To a first approximation, winning elections (at least in the US) is all the matters. TFG will undo everything Biden/Harris has accomplished. Imagine what the world would be like if "Green" Nader hadn't push Bush in the White House over Gore.
I've been thinking about this system/agency binarisation? binarying? in other areas.
The binary framing of [systemic/individual] explanations is primarily a conservative approach in any credit/blame status game, its analogous to the "privatise the profits (because 'we' take risks) and socialise the losses (because 'we' are too big to fail)", where 'they' take credit for success but not the blame for failure (this is a narcissistic impulse BTW).
It's conservative not because of its politics but because it maintains a position's conservation of momentum. If you say we need to change the system 'they' will decry the reduction in individual liberty, if you say we each need to take up individual responsibility, 'they' will bemoan the lack of respect for authority. It is a type of cherry-picking the best defensive contingent fruit that helps deflect attention and distract discussion away from good worlding, which is a type of selfing.
In either case things will stay as they are. Job done.
We have a great deal of difficulty talking about this directly because it is so often layered with more derivative features (religion/tribe/clan/pigmentation) and we will talk instead (of the world) of our tribe, or sport, or nation as the world (e.g. Русский мир) (Yes Putin is a low affect psychopath).
I have a long time friend who blamed her depression on the systemic capitalistic world she lives in. Perhaps she is right about the cause of her depression, but she says this and thus maintains the momentum of her life as being depressed, i.e. her agency is depressed by a regime she gives her agency to. I.E. she says she cannot be cured because|system. She chooses/decides/notices this fact of her life thus confirming it as true, and thus she is not wrong. (Please don't mention medication and proper help as this is an anecdote.)(She is fine now).
Blaming the system, as indeed the binarisation itself, can be a type of 'systemic depression' leading to less fruitful outcomes in the world.
A current systemic example of "blame" is Russia. (Cultic paranoia often feeds on this system-blaming (also known as conspiracy theorying) that the good gnostic knows about and thus can save themselves... at the cost of damning the world.)
If we use a frame of worlding rather than these credit/blame systems of causal status we can effect better worlding, i.e better lives.
I.E. we need to move away from narcissistic framings (and police narcissists on 'our' side).
N.B. non-individual framings do not necessary mean collective framings. Collective framing merely treat an aggregate as an individual, this is not what the world is. The binary of individual/collective is another example of this conservative approach to cultural discussions.
The world is a non-individual extension of the selfing we live, as we live among others. The individual-system binary eats into this and is unhealthy because it is our meetings which make us human and these binarisation mean we cannot meet with each other and negotiate the morrow in good cheer.
I may sound like a kook but at least I am not depressed anymore, and yes I have an electric car.
Why did you have to say „ it doesn’t have to be vegan“ under „Diet? Animal agriculture is the single biggest avoidable climate crisis driver. Dumping animal products doesn’t even need new infrastructure. Meat n dairy are worse than flying and driving whilst occupying 80% of agricultural land, causing local environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and most importantly relies entirely upon abuse.
A great article from Hannah as always! This is a great topic for discussion. I am dealing with trying to get students and teachers to embrace more EE (Enviromental Education) from the perspective of taking on a simple project that leads to circular outcomes whether it be food waste to compost to soil or recycling and reusing something.
The individual VS systememic behavior change is a great way to frame a problem that you are working on. Particulary for a younger audience. The article is getting me to think about presenting the problem ( creating food waste and sending to landfills) and first framming it as a system and why that system in the US alone is responsible for us wasting 38% of our food is our supply chain.
By understanding the system that produces (farms), transports (trucks + ships) , strores, sells (retail stores) and eats (households ) the food, we get a sense of the system. We can then work with and support individual students who as a collective are able to get the rest of the school through best practices to reduce, share and divert their food waste from landfills.
Its a simple concept but gets kids to realize that small changes in the system as individuals can lead to larger outcomes that benefit the school and community. Donna Meadows, who was an expert in the field of systems thinking talked about the "the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — aris" is this greatest place to intervene and make a change in a system. I tell students that getting the whole school to practice food waste reduction + diversion in akin to making that paradigm shift.
Without individuals and environmental groups pressuring politicians to act, we will not get taxation of net CO2 emissions.
It would be really really helpful if the politicians would do the “unthinkable” and at least just stop subsidizing oil and gas, increase the royalties the companies must pay to access the resource, and increase the clean-up fund fees (as if some places even have any, haha, they don’t).
Great essay. Keep it up with the gentle rebuttals of overly simplistic attitudes!
Hannah at its core climate change is a data problem. The price signals that feed from the consumption of fossil fuels don't account for the social and environmental costs.
Garbage data is being fed into the problem solving machine that is the global economy and we are getting garbage outputs.
The only way to address this problem is to correct this pricing data as best we can with a carbon tax. That will properly align government, business, and households for collective action.