"We are hurtling toward the day when climate
change could be irreversible." "Rising sea levels already altering this nation’s
coast." "China’s capital is choking in its worst
pollution of the year." "5% of species will become extinct." "Sea levels rising, glaciers melting." Okay. Enough. I get it. It’s not like I don’t care about polar
bears and melting ice caps. I’m a conservation scientist, so of course
I care. I’ve dedicated my entire career to this. But over the years, one thing has become clear
to me: We need to change the way we talk about climate change. This doom-and-gloom messaging just isn’t
working; we seem to want to tune it out. And this fear, this guilt, we know from psychology
is not conducive to engagement. It's rather the opposite. It makes people passive, because when I feel
fearful or guilt-full, I will withdraw from the issue and try to think about something
else that makes me feel better. And with a problem this overwhelming, it’s
pretty easy to just turn away and kick the can down the road. Somebody else can deal with it. So it’s no wonder that scientists and policymakers
have been struggling with this issue too. So I like to say that climate change is the
policy problem from hell. You almost couldn't design a worse problem
as a fit with our underlying psychology or the way our institutions make decisions. Many Americans continue to think of climate
change as a distant problem: distant in time, that the impacts won't be felt for a generation
or more; and distant in space, that this is about polar bears or maybe some developing
countries. Again, it’s not like we don’t care about
these things — it’s just such a complicated problem. But the thing is, we’ve faced enormous,
scary climate issues before. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? As insurmountable as that seemed in the 1970s
and ’80s, we were able to wrap our heads around that and take action. People got this very simple, easy to understand,
concrete image of this protective layer around the Earth, kind of like a roof, protecting
us, in this case, from ultraviolet light, which by the way has the direct health consequence
of potentially giving you skin cancer. Okay, so now you've got my attention. And so then they came up with this fabulous
term, the “ozone hole.” Terrible problem, great term. People also got a concrete image of how we
even ended up with this problem. For decades, chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs,
were the main ingredient in a lot of products, like aerosol spray cans. Then scientists discovered that CFCs were
actually destroying the atmospheric ozone. People could look at their own hairspray and
say, “Do I want to destroy the planet because of my hairspray? I mean, god no.” And so what's interesting is that sales of
hairspray and those kinds of products and underarm aerosols started dropping quite dramatically. People listened to scientists and took action. Now scientists predict that the hole in the
ozone layer will be healed around 2050. That’s actually pretty amazing. And while stopping the use of one product
is actually pretty easy, climate change caused by greenhouse gases … that’s much trickier. Because the sources are more complicated,
and for the most part, they’re totally invisible. Right now, there is CO2 pouring out of tailpipes,
there is CO2 pouring out of buildings, there is CO2 pouring out of smokestacks, but
you can't see it. The fundamental cause of this problem is largely
invisible to most of us. I mean, if CO2 was black, we would have dealt
with this issue a long time ago. So CO2 touches every part of our lives — our
cars, the places we work, the food we eat. For now, let’s just focus on one thing:
our energy use. How do we make that visible? That was the initial goal of UCLA’s Engage
project, one of the nation’s largest behavioral experiments in energy conservation. What we're trying to do is to figure out how
to frame information about electricity usage so that people save energy and conserve electricity. The idea is that electricity is relatively
invisible to people. The research team outfitted part of a student
housing complex with meters that tracked real-time usage of appliances and then sent them weekly
reports. So you can see how much energy the stove used
versus the dishwasher or the fridge. We realized, because of this project, the
fridge was like the monster. So lucky for them, their landlord upgraded
their fridge to an energy-efficient one. They also learned other energy-saving tips,
like unplugging their dishwasher when not in use and air-drying their clothes during
the summer months. And researchers, in turn, discovered where
people were willing to cut back. The Engage project wanted to know what types
of messaging could motivate people to change their behavior. We wanted to see over time over a year and
with repeated messages, how do people, behave? How does that impact the consumer behavior? And what we found is that it's very different. Some households were sent personalized emails
with their energy bill about how they could save money; others learned how their energy
usage impacted the environment and children’s health. Those who received messages about saving money
did nothing. It was totally ineffective because electricity
is relatively cheap. But emails sent that linked the amount of
pollutants produced to rates of childhood asthma and cancer — well, those led to an
8% drop in energy use, and 19% in households with kids. Now, in a separate study, researchers brought
social competition into the mix. First, they hung posters around a dorm building
to publicly showcase how students were really doing: red dots for energy wasters, green
for those doing a good job, and a shiny gold star for those going above and beyond. This social pressure approach led to a 20%
reduction in energy use. This strategy was also used at Paulina’s
complex, and it definitely brought out her competitive streak. For me, the competition was what motivated
me, because seeing your apartment number and telling you that you are doing at the average,
but you are not the best, was like, Why? I’m doing everything you are telling me
to do. I always wanted the gold star, because it
was like, “Oh, my god, I want to be like the less consumption of energy in the whole
building.” And psychology studies have proved this. We are social creatures, and as individualistic
as we can be, turns out we do care about how we compare to others. And yes, we do like to be the best. Some people don’t want to say, Oh, I'm like
the average. No, my usage is different and I want to be
able to act on it. And people can act on it because with these
meters, they can now see their exact impact. A company called Opower is playing with this
idea of social competition. They work with over 100 utility companies
to provide personalized energy reports to millions of customers around the world. Now consumers can not only see their energy
use but how it compares to their neighbors’. Like the UCLA study found, this subtle social
pressure encourages consumers to save energy. It’s been so effective that in 2016, Opower
was able to generate the equivalent of two terawatt-hours of electricity savings. That’s enough to power every home in Miami
for more than a year. And they’re not alone. Even large companies are tapping into behavioral
science to move the dial. Virgin Atlantic Airways gave a select group
of pilots feedback on their fuel use. Over the course of a year, they collectively
saved over 6,800 tons of fuel by making some simple changes:
Adjusting their altitudes, routes, and speed reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by
over 21,000 tons. These behavioral “nudges” do seem to be
advancing how we as a society deal with some pretty complicated climate change issues,
but it turns out we’re just getting started. There is no “quick fix.” We need people changing their companies, changing
their business models, changing the products and services they provide. This is about broader-scale change. And part of this change includes embracing
what makes us human. That it can’t just be a guilt trip about
dying polar bears or driving around in gas guzzlers. We need to talk about our wins, as well — like
how we’re making progress, really being aware of our energy use, and taking advantage
of that competitive spirit we all have in order to really move us from a state of apathy
to action. Global warming is by far the biggest issue
of our time. Climate Lab is a new series from Vox and the
University of California, and we’ll be exploring some surprising ways we can tackle this problem. If you want to learn more, head to climate.universityofcalifornia.edu.
I agreed with most of the messages portrayed on the video, but I still can't understand why videos like these focus on normal civilians saving energy.
The consumption of energy from households is somewhere around 10% (source below) of the total energy usage, and even if these videos miraculously convince all the civilians to use 25% less energy, that's only 2.5% of the total energy being used.
I'm not saying 2.5% is not much, but it seems like a waste spending all these fundings and man-hours trying to convince normal civilians who, at the end of the day, aren't gonna have much of an impact on energy consumption at all.
source:https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/primary_energy.pdf
The comparison between CFCs and CO2 was a bit nonsensical. The source of CFCs was a very small slice of our lives; aerosols, refrigeration, etc. Whereas CO2 is produced by everything we do. It doesn't require a small change in a minor part of our lives, but a complete overhaul of the basis of our society. Whether CO2 is "visible" or not has nothing to do with it.
At 7:42. Seriously, they are working with folks in Nunavut?
That seems like a pretty poor choice of words.
I have that EXACT same thermostat in my house. Weird.
Poor choice of title. I had expected a video more similar to It's Okay To Be Smart's, not such an incoherent and Vox-atypical one.