HOW TO MAKE DENIERS CARE

Can We Make People Care About Climate Change?

Richard Schiffman, 20 August 2015 (Yale Environment 360 via TruthOut)

“…[Norwegian psychologist/economist Per Espen Stoknes’ What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming reports that] the five psychological barriers that have made it difficult to deal realistically with the climate crisis…[are] distance…[the distant nature of the problem (it's far off in time and often in other parts of the globe)]…the doom-and-gloom scenarios about the impacts of climate change, which make people feel powerless to do anything about it…[and] the psychological defenses [dissonance, denial, and identity]that people have to avoid feeling guilty about their own contributions to fossil fuel emissions…

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“If you give people a guilt or fear-inducing message and then ask them to solve a problem that requires creative thought, there is a statistically significant reduction in the amount of creativity that people come up with to formulate solutions… Those who reject climate change are getting back at those who criticize their lifestyles, and want to tell them how to live…[I]f you criticize people to try to make them change, it may only reinforce their resistance…We need to flip the barriers over so they become successful strategies. Rather than something distant, communicators need to make climate change feel like something that is near, personal, and urgent. Rather than doom, we need to emphasize the opportunities…for economic development - an entire energy system has to be redesigned from the wastefulness of the previous century to a much smarter mode of doing things…”click here for more

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