Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life

3 “People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit”: The Why of Denial

3 “People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit”: The Why of Denial There is concern that public ignorance and illiteracy about global environmental issues is leading to misinformed views, apathy, ill-considered calls for government action, and little change in personal behavior. This view of the relations between public knowledge, values and actions accords with what has been described as an information deficit model: Ignorance about climate change is preventing appropriate public action. —Harriet Bulkeley, Common Knowledge? I am far from the first person to be puzzled by public silence in the face of climate change. On the contrary, environmental sociologists (e.g., Ungar 1992; Kempton, Boster, and Hartley 1996; Dunlap 1998; Rosa 2001; Brechin 2003, 2008), social psychologists (Halford and Sheehan 1991; Stoll-Kleeman, O’Riordan, and Jaeger 2001; Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002; Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole, and Whitmarsh 2007; Frantz and Mayer 2009), and public-opinion researchers (Saad 2002; Brewer 2005; Nisbet and Myers 2007) have alike for some time identified such public “apathy” as a significant concern. Possible explanations abound. I begin this chapter by examining existing explanations for why people have failed to respond to climate change from environmental sociology, psychology, and the field-of-risk perception points of view. I use the voices of community members to talk back to these dominant explanations for public silence. Although lack of information and lack of concern have been described as reasons why people do not respond to global warming, reasons for silence also come from people who are both informed and concerned about it. Here I explicitly shift from an information deficit model to a focus on the importance of emotion, social context, political economy, and social interaction in shaping how people relate to global warming. 64 Chapter 3 “If People Only Knew” For nearly twenty years, the majority of research on climate change from these disciplines presumed information was the limiting factor in public nonresponse. The thinking was that “if people only knew the facts,” they would act differently. These studies emphasized either the complexity of climate science or political economic corruption as reasons people do not adequately understand what is at stake. Not surprisingly, given the extensive survey data on the public’s lack of knowledge regarding climate change, the dominant theme of research from fields as widespread as science and risk communication, environmental sociology, and psychology has been the public’s lack of information and knowledge as a barrier to social action. Systematic reviews of surveys and polling data by Thomas Brewer (2005) and Matthew Nisbet and Teresa Myers (2007) describe widespread misunderstanding regarding climate science extending back into the 1980s. Ann Bostrom and her coauthors write that “to a significant degree the effectiveness with which society responds to this possibility [of climate change] depends on how well it is understood by individual citizens. As voters, citizens must decide which policies and politicians to support. As consumers, they must decide whether and how to consider environmental effects when making choices such as whether our resources are most efficiently deployed by using paper or polystyrene foam cups” (1994, 959). John Sterman and Linda Sweeney (2007) similarly point to the complexity of atmospheric models as a limitation for both public understanding of climate change (even among highly educated people) and policy development. Noting “widespread misunderstanding” of how climate models work, the authors then link this conceptual failure to the lack of climate policy. This assumption that “if people only knew,” they would act differently —that is, drive less, use less electricity, or “rise up” and put pressure on the government—is widespread in popular discourse and environmental literature and underlies work from psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Psychologists and social psychologists have described flawed cognitive and mental models that limit people’s ability to grasp what is going on, and sociologists have documented the manipulation of climate science (especially in the United States) and the media’s role in misinforming the public by magnifying the perception of uncertainty. Sociologists have also conducted opinion polls highlighting the lack of public understanding of climate science and espousing the need for greater awareness. “People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit” 65 The “conceptual challenges” surrounding global warming have been understood primarily in terms of the limitations of individual psychology (i.e., mental models, confirmation bias) or of media framing (see e.g., Ungar 1992; Bell 1994; Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; Armitage 2005; Dunwoody 2007; Boykoff 2008a...