giving up on fixing the planet one panic at a time

People want to save the planet, but only if they feel like they can.

Hardly a day goes by that we don't hear another dire warning about global warming and climate change, and these increasingly exasperated alerts aren't wrong. Our cities are just not built for the kind of climate we're dealing with, so when we get battered by heat waves, our infrastructures can't keep up, often with deadly results. Meanwhile, storms are getting more frequent and more expensive to clean up, potentially dangerous ancient viruses may be coming back to life, and a fungal pandemic could soon ravage Earth.

This sounds absolutely horrifying, doesn't it? And you're probably thinking about this and talking about this, but with so little being done to actually fix things for the long term, and the sheer scale of the problem, what... uh... exactly are you going to do? Hell, what can you do? The whole world is dying and you're just one person, with a job, bills, and morning meetings. And does it even matter if you do anything at all because if everyone else is also too overwhelmed, what's the point?

Those are the findings of a massive study from 2024 which tried to figure out what climate messaging is truly effective in 63 countries with the help of almost 60,000 participants. As per the hypothesis, overwhelming people with a highlight reel of headlines that looked like it was plucked right out of a disaster movie and boiled down to "the Earth is on fire and we're all doomed!" didn't exactly motivate them to do anything more than share the news of the impending apocalypse. The scope of the problem seemed too great and their effect felt too little to matter.

On the other hand, messages that told them what they could do to avoid the worst of climate change actually inspired them to take more concrete steps since they felt like there was a plan, they had a role to play in it, and their actions mattered. The whole exercise seemed like the environmental version of the bystander effect. In a crisis, people yelling and screaming "somebody help and do something!" just adds to the adrenaline and confusion. Telling someone to call an ambulance, someone else to call the police, and finding out who can do CPR or administer first aid, then assigning them to the task immediately, gets shit done.

So, while it's very understandable that environmentalists worried about the long term efforts of global warming, and scientists who study it, are frustrated beyond belief and want to scream that the world is ending while we sit on our asses like nothing matters. But they may be doing far more harm than good because now, when the situation is objectively dire, blaring klaxons about how we're all screwed are just seen as something to cope with, not a call to action.

Fossil fuel politicians actively killing popular green projects can now say "whelp, it's too late now anyway, why even keep those eyesore windmills and ugly solar panels up?" and continue making everything worse. More globally and sustainability minded opposition now has to convince demotivated voters who've internalized being goners that their ballots won't be cast in vain, a last meaningless gesture on a doomed world. And people who didn't know much, but now worry, feel like it's too late for them to even try to help.

We created a vicious cycle by which breathless warnings ensure that less and less gets done, the metrics get worse, and more and more breathless warnings will be issued next year. Instead, what we need to be doing is focusing our message on what we can do to meaningfully help the planet and ourselves, to show people that there are plans in place, ideas that will work, and hope on horizon.

If there's one thing this study very clearly shows is that people love to fight an enemy threatening their livelihoods and survival, but they need to know they actually have a chance to beat said enemy and aren't simply going to be used as cannon fodder for a suicide mission. Even the most over the top disaster movies still carry the message that trying despite all odds means you can still make it out alive and use what time you have left to make full use of that second chance. Our climate messaging should really try some optimism as well.

See: Vlasceanu M. et al. (2024) Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries. Science Advances 10(6), eadj5778 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj5778