Why Aren't We Saving the Planet?: A Psychologist's Perspective

by Geoffrey Beattie

Global warming. Many of us believe that it is somebody else’s problem, that it will affect other people and that other people will come up with the solution. This is not true. "Global" warming is a global problem: it will affect every single one of us and will only be stopped by a huge shift in our individual attitudes and behaviour. Each time one of us switches on a light, reaches for something in a supermarket, gets into a car or bus, or even chooses what clothes to buy, we are making a choice that can affect the environment. We already know that we need to start making better choices for the sake of our natural world, now. So why aren’t we already saving the planet? This book follows one psychologist’s mission to find some answers to this question. Challenged by a student to use psychology to find the root of the problem, Geoffrey Beattie (an environmental "unbeliever") begins a personal and life-changing journey of discovery. The reader is invited to accompany him as he uses psychological methods to examine people’s attitudes to global warming. Along the way we find the author’s own attitudes being challenged, as well as our own. This ground-breaking book reflects new and innovative research being carried out into how to change attitudes to the environment and how to encourage sustainable behaviour. It is eminently readable and interesting and, as such, should be read by anyone who is concerned about the future of our planet. In fact, you should also read it if you’re not concerned about our planet.

Genres: Science, Psychology, Nonfiction, Popular Science

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 2 out of 5]

So it's probably no mystery what this book is about, or the slant the author takes upon the issue. Before I delve into my personal response to the book, it may be useful to point out that with my own psychology background, and asking a questions that I too ponder and feel frustration over I thought there could not be a better match between book and boy.

I was wrong.

First let me reassure that this was not a case of high expectations: I genuinely believe this book is an objective let-down. I will use the rest of this review to explain:

The awkward intro:
Beattie introduces his piece with a personal introduction that couldn't be less clear. He describes himself in an office, judging a nearby student/hobo sorting the recycling while Beattie the academic in every-way sits in an office lit by a dozen high-energy lamps. His student walks in and he starts critiquing a paper she places on his desk.

If you didn't pick-up on the point from that summary, its because neither did I. Is Beattie trying to cast himself as someone who doesn't care for climate worries? Is he trying to relate to deniers? Whats with the student, is the book based on her work, inspired perhaps (she doesn't seem to appear on the credits.)

In short WAWSTP comes off to a bad start - the beginning chapters almost promise to resume take-off, and then somehow stall and fail. 50% of the first 100 pages (that's ~50 pages by the way) are devoted entire to the 'psychology' part of the perspective explaining to the reader just what attitudes are, eventually getting to the key point :sometimes we act in ways different to our overtly expressed attitude.

Obviously this has some relevance to the question Why aren't we saving the planet? However as Beattie goes on he seems to focus myopically on the concept of Carbon labeling in supermarkets coming to the not amazing epiphany that people don't like to spend much time choosing items at the supermarket.

He suggests using red to label high carbon cost food.

In the remaining pages of the book the concept of body language revealing implicit attitudes is discussed. Much in the same vein as the first 100 pages, a large swath of pages is devoted to the pure psychology, then some page-time to given to the actual topic of 'saving the planet'

Throughout the book Beattie also injects his own personal experience, a move which he at least acknowledges as not very academic, but fails to help shape the book into something other than a twist on his current area of research interest. Maybe I did have high expectations, but I did think he would at least delve into how people handle global issues, the politics of the problem, and so forth. I give some credit for a conclusion heavy with suggestions for change, but backed by a boring book mostly about psychology, not much about saving the planet, the question really should be: Why aren't you reading a better book?

[Todd Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why Aren't We Saving the Planet? is a bit of a twist on the issue of global warming. The idea that Beattie tries to investigate from a psychological perspective is the following: if consumer choice is key to addressing climate, and consumers are being given the information necessary to make informed choices, then why aren’t they using their purchasing power more effectively to benefit the environment? The book is basically a summary of experiments that Beattie and his colleagues performed to answer this question. It takes the form of a summary of a psychological principle that plays a role in our attitude followed by a description of the experimental methodology he uses to investigate the issue, and finally a summary of the results of the experiments performed. In the end the experimental results are a mixed bag, but Beattie concludes that although consumers want to benefit the environment, product labels are only partially effective in affecting consumer choice. It should be noted that the studies were conducted in Europe where labeling is more prevalent and the citizenry more environmentally conscious (or at the very least are unlikely to confuse ‘pollution’ with ‘liberty’ as some in the US are apt to do).

Although the idea behind the book isn’t a bad one, I have to say that I’m not particularly impressed with either the book, Beattie’s research or writing. First of all, his premise isn’t a terribly good one. Consumer choice may play a role in the rate at which climate change occurs, but like all voluntary measures its effect will be small. Governmental policy and the regulations that follow have the potential for exponentially greater impact. I don’t know of any reputable climate scientist who is espousing consumer choice as the sole means combating global warming.

In the first section of the book Beattie investigates product labeling and finds, to no surprise, that it isn’t the silver bullet for consumer choice. People buy products based on a number of factors including price, personal preference, and brand loyalty. The carbon footprint of a product may be a factor in the decision, but it will only be one of many. I don’t think it’s possible to draw any strong conclusions from Beattie’s research. He basically shows that:
1. People associate environmental stewardship with positive emotions.
2. When scanning product packaging they don’t always spend much time looking at environmental labels.
But he doesn’t show how labels effect the consumer’s purchasing decision. At best, his experiments might inform the way labels are presented on a package to better catch the buyer’s eye. In reading this section it quickly becomes apparent that Beattie’s writing style is absurdly uneven. It varies wildly between chatty personal narratives and descriptions of experimental methodology and statistical analysis one would expect in a peer reviewed journal. Either Beattie just cuts and pastes from his papers to produce his books or he simply has no clue as to who is audience is.

In the next section of the book Beattie investigates hand gestures as a means to determine whether people’s underlying beliefs are consistent with their reported views. This type of nonsense reminds me of nothing more than the inane, so-called “body readers” who attempt to interpret deep meaning of a politician’s statements based on the number of eye blinks or some such twaddle.

Next, he evaluates whether Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” does an effective job communicating the dangers of global warming and discovers that people feel sad when confronted with the idea that polar bears will drown if arctic sea ice melts. Chock one up for the psychologists for this brilliant analysis. Of course the bigger issue is the question of scientific communication and how to best raise the awareness of the general public to this pressing issue. And while Beattie discusses this particular topic, his conclusions are nothing new.

Finally, he wraps the thing up with some conclusions that bear little resemblance to the rest of the book.

Beattie would have been better served by investigating the issue from a deeper perspective – specifically, how human psychology prepares us (or not) to evaluate and respond to threats. Because of the selective pressures of evolution, our brains are hard wired to respond to certain types of risk. Specifically, we are far better at responding to immediate threats than those that take months, years or decades to develop. This makes perfect sense psychologically. For our nomadic, hunter/gatherer ancestors there was little reason to worry about a possible drought next year when faced with the immediacy of being stalked by a tiger today.

The longer the timeframe, the less psychologically prepared we appear to be to respond to risk. Our fight or flight response responds nearly instantaneously and in a dramatic fashion to the sound of a loud gunshot or sight of an oncoming vehicle swerving into our lane yet fails to react at all to the news of a thinning arctic ice sheet. This explains why most people don’t save enough for retirement (particularly when young) and also why humans have done so little to get global CO2 emissions under control. Unfortunately, as fascinating and relevant as this subject is, Beattie ignores it completely.

All this is to say that the book represents a missed opportunity.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why Aren't We Saving the Planet? (2010) by Geoffrey Beattie focuses mostly on human-caused global warming, and why the vast majority of people continue to accelerate it. The title of the book is slightly misleading, given that "the Planet" is really a metonym for Earth's biosphere, or more specifically for the kind of hospitable climate that 8 billion people and counting require for their comfort, prosperity, and even survival.

Beattie begins the book by recognizing that global warming is a problem, and wondering what the psychology profession might contribute to solving it. I didn't need any convincing on this point, but for those who need more than Beattie provides, I recommend:

* Gifford, Robert (2008). "Psychology’s essential role in alleviating the impacts of climate change" (PDF). Canadian Psychology 49 (4): 273-280. doi:10.1037/a0013234

In particular, Gifford points out that the individual is the unit of climate change causation. Every individual, from the poorest villager to the oil company CEO, makes some contribution to global warming (expressed as the individual's carbon footprint). Lots of people, for various reasons, want to obscure this fact, so they prefer to talk about the carbon footprints of large aggregations of individuals, such as nations. Naturally the people with the highest individual carbon footprints will have the strongest personal incentive to do this - to hide their planet-raping behind something else, such as a government. Unfortunately, it turns out that the most influential people tend to have some of the highest carbon footprints, so the vast majority of climate change messaging falsely teaches or implies that the individual does not matter.

But despite all the misdirection and self-serving propaganda from the carbon-spewing cultural elites, the only way to solve global warming is to reduce everybody's carbon footprint. So you can get a feel for the effectiveness of any sort of "green new deal" or "climate policy" etc. by measuring its impact on your carbon footprint.

But even for those who like to pretend individual behavior does not matter, it still matters for securing individual buy-in for top-down climate policy. Voting in elections is a behavior. For any government to cut the carbon footprint of its nation, it has to cut the individual carbon footprints of its citizens, and this will almost certainly require citizens to vote for, accept, adopt, and support whatever changes are imposed them. Beattie, however, doesn't say much if anything about the psychological aspects of political support for collective action on climate change. That's OK, because the psychology of climate change is, or needs to become, a truly sprawling field. One can easily justify multiple books about each tiny detail, such as why people might buy low-energy light bulbs. After all, the human brain is the most complex object known.

***

Global warming isn't the only threat to "the Planet", but it's a big one, and perhaps the one we're working hardest to inflict on ourselves predictably and rather rapidly. However, the book's focus is even narrower than that, as Beattie measures the response of experimental subjects to the carbon footprint labels on some products from the supermarket chain Tesco. He also reports on the responses of his subjects to viewing excerpts from the film An Inconvenient Truth.

The responses that Beattie measures seem limited to Likert scale questionnaires, the Implicit-association test, and gestures that subjects make with their hands while they speak. That is, Beattie tries to measure conscious and unconscious attitudes, and not - rather bafflingly - behavior. We don't warm the planet by what we think, but by what we do, or more specifically by what we consume.

By analogy, imagine a psychologist investigating people's attitudes to other harmful behaviors, such as cigarette smoking, but never thinking to count the number of cigarettes that people actually smoke! It might be interesting to study people's explicit and implicit attitudes to smoking, but the bottom line is whether people smoke and how much.

Beattie is silent on the following:
1. Determining what anybody's actual carbon footprint is. Paying attention to carbon footprint labels on Tesco products will factor into this, but the products considered in the book represent only a tiny fraction of most people's spending and therefore of their overall carbon footprints.
2. Whether any psychological intervention strategy had any effect on anybody's actual carbon footprint.
3. Whether there is any connection between the explicit and implicit attitudes toward global warming that Beattie measured, and a person's carbon footprint.
4. Any analysis of the well-known wide variation in individual carbon footprints (some people cause a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than other people) and what might account for this variation. We already know that monetary wealth (or income) is the primary determiner - the more money people have, the more goods and services they tend to consume, and thus the higher their carbon footprints tend to be. Consumption is the primary driver of global warming. However, if you compare people at the same income level you still find a wide variation in carbon footprints. Rich people on average destroy more planet than poor people, on a per-person basis, but some rich people destroy more planet than other equally rich people. Note that redistributing wealth, while perhaps desirable for other reasons, does nothing to help with global warming, since giving more money to poor people just raises their carbon footprints. In fact it might raise the overall carbon footprint even more, since poor people tend to spend a higher percentage of the money they have on immediate consumption.
5. Behavioral genetics. To be fair the book came out when GWAS was still rather new. Now the field cries out for studies to identify the genetic variants that associate with low-carbon behaviors. See the book Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are to see what I'm on about here, although (of course) that book like so many others ignores climate change. If it turns out that genetic differences explain some of the differences in individual carbon footprints, then it might be necessary to use gene editing to produce a variety of humans that can live sustainably. As outrageous as that may sound, it's less outrageous than business as usual which amounts to a mass suicide pact.
6. Reading habits. Learning to live low-carbon is a complex skill, requiring the individual to acquire lots of knowledge. The most efficient way to do this is by reading books. It seems obvious to me that psychologists should study the reading habits of their subjects, and see whether l0w-carbon behaviors have any connection with the number and types of books that the subjects read. Judging from my own life, it seems impossible to make any real headway on climate change unless books about climate change become more popular than Harry Potter. There is a giant wall of ignorance keeping humans locked into our climate suicide pact. But Beattie doesn't mention the role of book-reading at all, other than to point out that his interest in applying psychology to the problem of global warming developed from his own reading of books about global warming! Might the same principle apply to other people?

***

Even when it comes to specific products like low-energy light bulbs, Beattie doesn't seem to have a concept of quantity. Just as the area of a rectangle is the product of its height and width, the portion of an individual's carbon footprint from lighting is the product of what kind of bulbs the individual buys, and how many of them the individual keeps on and for how long. Buying low-energy light bulbs is great, but not if you plug in a thousand of them and leave them on around the clock when you're not at home. Some people feel the need to consume more artificial light than other people. Why people differ in this way is something that psychologists ought to study.

This article shows the sort of household carbon footprint analysis and graphs that are absent in this book:
* Sanders, Robert (April 13, 2011). "When it comes to carbon footprints, location and lifestyle matter".
This kind of research is necessarily intrusive. It requires tracking everything that people buy and consume, or consume without buying directly (such as running the hot water in public bathroom). But without it, you're flying blind. To understand what people really think and do about climate change, you have to observe them like Jane Goodall did with her chimpanzees.

To his credit, Beattie admits that the particular Tesco products his studies consider might account for only a tiny fraction of an individual's carbon footprint:

"One statistic that jumped off one of his original reports was that it would take thirty-two years of a family drinking low-carbon-footprint orange juice to equal the same family of four flying to Malaga once for their holidays."

Beattie also acknowledges the staggering incongruity of platoons of academics flying on carbon-spewing jet aircraft to Mauritius for an environmntal conference. Kevin Anderson seems to have thought that one through a bit farther; see his article Hypocrites in the air: should climate change academics lead by example?.

***

Despite the book's flaws, I give it five stars because Beattie at least understands what the priority is. Shelves groan under the weight of psychology books that ignore climate change, i.e. books that rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic:

(idiomatic) To do something pointless or insignificant that will soon be overtaken by events, or that contributes nothing to the solution of a current problem.

So even if Beattie isn't putting out the metaphorical house fire very well, he's miles ahead of all his psychological peers who carry on as if the house is not burning.

And I caution my fellow readers not to down-vote books such as this. Giving a book a low rating makes it less likely be recommended. And that plays into the agenda of Donald Trump, Big Oil, and Vladimir Putin who want to keep everyone dumb and ignorant and hooked on fossil fuels.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A social-psychology approach to the difference between expressed commitment to the environment and the underlying attitude. Quite interesting debate about what factors are predictive of environmentally friendly activities.