Psychology of Climate Change: Harder to Change a Planet’s Climate or Change a Person’s Mind?

Armageddon, Ragnarök, Doomsday, Pralaya, the Apocalypse. Cultures have been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years, warning humanity that their actions will bring about the destruction of the world. With “The Ministry for the Future” Kim Stanley Robinson throws his own warning into the mix. As any faith leader will attest, warnings often go ignored, and perhaps Robinson has given us just another doomsday prediction that will fall on unbelieving ears.

“The Ministry for the Future” is a hard book to classify as shown by a testimonial on the cover of the book that says, “The best science fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” This melding of fiction and nonfiction is one thing that makes the book compelling. While the events are not real, they could become real at any time.

Robinson’s book centers on the Director of the “Ministry for the Future”, or a “Subsidiary body…charged with defending all living creatures present and future.” This Ministry takes the main role in fighting climate change for the world. The book presents a myriad of potential solutions to climate change; however, the real problem isn’t how to prevent calamity, but how to convince humanity to do something about it. Science has shown us the steps we need to take, but humanity doesn’t seem willing to act or even accept that it is a problem. Here we will look at different barriers in Robinson’s book to changing people’s minds about climate change, such as apathy, selfishness, disbelief, and more, and what it means for us in our very real, non-fiction world.

Apathy

One reason why people don’t change is apathy. This is demonstrated numerous times in Robinson’s book. For example, at one point it says, “people had a very hard time imagining that catastrophe could happen to them, until it did. So, until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen.” (Robinson, 2020) This apathy is readily seen in our real world. One study showed that while 72% of people believe in climate change, and 59% believe it is already harming people in the US, only 47% believed it would ever actually impact them personally (Marlon, et al., 2021).

It is hard for humans to focus on abstract futures when instant gratification is available. It is difficult to see how one’s use of fossil fuels in their daily commute contributes to the heating of the Earth (Marshall, 2015). It is hard to care about inconveniencing oneself when there is no visible pressing need to do so.

How then do we help people care about climate change? In a study on turning apathy into action for social change researchers looked at different ways to motivate and found that the most effective emotion in getting people to act was “outrage” (Thomas, McGarty, & Mavor, 2009). The use of outrage was seen in Robinson’s book as well when, after a heat wave that kills millions in India, the Indian people become furious. Angry that they had to suffer when the entire world was at fault. In this outrage, India begins taking drastic measures to prevent climate change. In the end, they are a model for the rest of the world to eventually follow.

With this outrage, a group called Children of Kali formed. Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction, time, and change. This fictional group is an Indian terrorist organization that decides the value of a few humans isn’t worth the value of the world. Through fear and terrorist actions they convince humanity to change. For example, the world changes to greener methods of transportation when drones from the Children of Kali shoot down planes and sink large freight ships. Much of humanity becomes vegetarian after the Children of Kali infect beef with a new strain of mad cow disease. Fear motivates. Sadly, in Robinson’s fictional story, a large portion of the success in combating climate change comes from the Children of Kali.

However, in the real world, terrorism isn’t the answer to our problems. Certainly, there are there more benign and realistic ways to make people care without resorting to terrorism and black ops groups. Some researchers have sought a way by narratives to enact a paradigm shift (Polletta & Redman, 2020). Sadly, the research shows that while stories can create change, they often fail due to people’s pre-existing viewpoints and beliefs tinting how they interpret a narrative.

This is reflected in Robinson’s book with the World Economic Forum held yearly in Davos, Switzerland, where hundreds of the powerful elite gather. However, all of those in attendance find themselves hostages to an unknown group. Instead of a week of parties and policy discussion, they are shown propaganda to indoctrinate to do more for the good of all humanity. At the end of the week the guards leave, and the hostages are free. The hostages found it to be a silly week of “glamping”. “None of us had died, nor even been hurt much, except in our feelings…back home we found ourselves minor celebrities…So, effect of this event on the real world: zero!” (Robinson, 2020). There was no real danger or fear, just propaganda and stories, in the end, it did nothing.

“The Ministry for the Future” and current research show that it is difficult to make someone care about something. Terrorism and fear are effective but immoral. Stories and propaganda don’t reliably produce change. Outrage can work but may birth malignant behaviors. The best way comes down to three things. First, people need to see how climate change impacts them now. Second, they need to care about it enough to delay gratification, for example one experiment on delayed gratification saw “that engaging in prospective imagery led the participants to focus on delayed utility over immediate utility” (Cheng, Shein, & Chiou, 2011). Then once people see how they are being affected and can envision a brighter future, they thirdly need to become outraged enough to defend that future; this is the best way to combat apathy towards climate change.

The Masque of Red Death and Götterdämmerung Syndromes

Robinson’s story also explores two “syndromes” as he calls them, that cause people to ignore climate change (Robinson, 2020). The first is “The Masque of Red Death Syndrome” named after a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Essentially, when faced with the inevitable end there is nothing left to do but eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. An “enjoy it while you still can” mindset.

The second “syndrome” Robinson illustrates is Götterdämmerung Syndrome which comes from the German word meaning “Twilight of the Gods”. This theoretical syndrome boils down to the thought that the ship is going down and I’m going to take it down with me. A kind of petulant child who breaks his toys instead of sharing with the logic “if I can’t have it then no one can.”

These syndromes seem to be Robinson’s commentary on real aspects of Cluster B personality disorders, mainly Narcissistic and Antisocial personality disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). In these, there is a lack of remorse for behavior and a disregard for the safety or welfare of others. Other people are seen as inferior to themselves. These attitudes certainly make it difficult to convince one to care about the world and its demise.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to be done to change the minds of those who want to burn down the ship as it is sinking. Psychotherapy and drugs may help change behaviors but there isn’t a cure for personality disorders (Bateman, Gunderson, & Mulder, 2015). Changing the mind of one extremist person on how they view other people isn’t as effective as changing many people’s thinking about climate change. Thankfully if Robinson’s “syndromes” exist they will be rare in the general population (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The best thing to do would be to mitigate the damage of such individuals while helping others change their minds about the dangers of climate change.

Selfishness and Greed

A common idiom is to “vote with your wallet”. In another book by Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, he says “Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.” (Robinson, Red Mars, 1993) This is evident both in real life and in The Ministry for the Future.

Sociologist Dr. Charles Derber writes in his book “Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy” that capitalism drives climate change (Derber, 2021). Derber suggests that we cannot overcome global warming without social and political changes which include curbing humanity’s greed and changing our consumerism lifestyles. Robinson agrees with Derber but has a bleaker outlook when he says it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” (Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, 2020)

Robinson finds change by having characters plead, not to world leaders, but to leaders of the world’s banks, “because money ruled the world, these people ruled the world. They were the world’s rulers, in some very real sense. Bankers. Non-democratic, answerable to no one. The technocratic elite at its most elite: financiers” (Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, 2020). They are convinced to back a “carbon coin” which is a sort of cryptocurrency given to persons when they remove carbon from the atmosphere.

However, Robinson and Derber could both be wrong that capitalism needs to be thrown. True, our culture of consumerism could be curbed, but if the demand for greener tech grows it will help drive the market away from things that are destroying the Earth. For example, one study showed that the demand for solar energy in Saudi Arabia is rising. It predicts that it will be cheaper to use solar panels for energy than oil, even though Saudi Arabia is a big producer of oil (Almasoud & Gandayh, 2015). If we can make it more profitable to use green energy and convince those sitting on stores of oil to simply leave it in the ground, we can help slow climate change. As more money is shifted towards greener tech, then new solar panels, windmills, and other yet-to-be-invented technology will become cheaper to make.

Graphene is a perfect example of technology that can have a large impact on preventing climate change. Graphene is pure carbon, a superconductor, stronger than steel yet thinner than paper, a single layer of it is only one atom thick. It is a miracle substance with infinite uses and a possible sink for excess carbon. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make. Thankfully, there have been recent breakthroughs in its synthesis and scientists are predicting enhanced and cheaper methods of creation (Luong, et al., 2020).

Graphene, solar energy, and other technologies are potential solutions to climate change. They just need to become incentivized and developed into greater use. Thus, we must vote with our wallets. Pay for the tech we want to support. Incentivize carbon capture and leave huge carbon stores, like forests and oil deposits, alone.

Politics and Disbelief

In Ministry for the Future, it is very clear that climate change is real and killing people, nobody doubts it. However, disbelief in climate change is a very real issue in the real world. A Yale study of Americans’ opinions on climate change estimate that as much as 14% of adults don’t think global warming is happening (Marlon, et al., 2021). One of the main predictors of one’s opinion of climate change is political. For example, only 39% of Republicans felt the government wasn’t doing enough to reduce climate change vs 90% of Democrats (Funk & Hefferon, 2019).

The Republican party is the one that drags its feet in making efforts to reduce climate change. This is further evidenced when the United States’ last Republican president, Donald Trump, withdrew the USA from the Paris Climate Agreement (McGrath, 2020). The Paris Agreement is an international treaty signed in 2015 where a collection of nations agreed to take steps to reduce climate change. On the very first day of President Biden’s service, he signed papers bringing the USA back into the Paris Agreement (Blinken, 2021).

This push and shove between political ideologies weaponizing climate change actions against each other are hugely detrimental to the adoption of action to reduce environmental disasters. The argument of right-wing politicians that climate change is another way for democrats to try and control Americans prevents their constituents from accepting the imminent dangers.

Anyone who has ever attended a family Thanksgiving dinner certainly knows how difficult it is to change someone else’s political beliefs. There is one argument used in The Ministry for the Future that was compelling, it is the rights of future generations of humans.

Recent events surrounding Roe vs Wade and abortion rights have been evidence enough to show that Republicans allege to be very passionate about the sanctity of human life and the importance of protecting the future unborn (Gerstein & Ward, 2022). The Ministry for the Future is set up to protect future generations of humans. A character in the book tries to show the value of future humans saying, “if you rate all future humans as having equal value to us alive now, they become a kind of infinity, whereas we’re a finite. If we don’t go extinct, there will eventually have been quite a lot of humans — I’ve read eight hundred billion or even several quadrillion — it depends on how long you think we’ll go on before going extinct or evolving into something else. Whether we can outlast the death of the sun and so on. Even if you take a lower estimate, working for them as well as ourselves, then really, we should be doing everything for them. Every good project we can think of would be rated as infinitely good…and every bad thing we do to them is infinitely bad and to be avoided.” (Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, 2020)

We are living at the potential beginning or end of human history. There is potential for us to save countless billions of future lives or to prematurely murder them all. If one truly believes in the sanctity of life, then they must realize the responsibility we shoulder to help make sure the billions upon trillions of future humans will be born.

Hopelessness

Studies have shown that, especially among young people (Ojala, 2012), there is a pervasive pessimism regarding global warming. Bo Burnham, a comedian, very poetically expresses the hopelessness of the youth in his Grammy-winning song, “All Eyes on Me” (Burnham, 2020):

“You say the ocean’s rising like I give a s — t
You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did
You’re not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside”

In psychology, there is a term called “learned helplessness” which is defined as “a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors results in individuals failing to use any control options that may later become available. Essentially, individuals are said to learn that they lack behavioral control over environmental events, which, in turn, undermines the motivation to make changes or attempt to alter situations.” (American Psychological Association, 2022) Researchers took dogs and shocked them in a situation where escape was impossible. The dogs learned that they could not avoid these shocks. When the dogs were placed in a situation where they could escape the shocks, they didn’t take any action to do so, but instead passively lay down and endured the shocks they thought to be unavoidable (Seligman, 1972).

It can be said that the same has happened to humanity with climate change. News and science have often told us the problems and things are getting worse. With this kind of repeated exposure, it is easy to have learned helplessness concerning climate change. It may seem like there is no way out, and as we have seen with learned helplessness, even if a way to escape becomes available one may just lay down and suffer instead of making use of that. It is a very pessimistic and hopeless outlook.

Research has looked at pessimism regarding climate change in the youth of Sweden. It found that hope can help motivate youth to take action to help prevent climate change (Ojala, 2012). However, this hope cannot be “hope based on denial” or denying any problems exist or that something else will fix the problem for them. It was shown that constructive hope or hope that things are improving or can improve with effort, was able to motivate the youth towards action.

Robinson also believed in the power of the youth to enact change. Perhaps in their shorter lives, they are not as set in their learned helplessness and can be taught constructive hope. Robinson says in one fictitious example of the youth enacting change that “Often we let the young people do it, the idealism of youth is very good at persisting in such things, young people want something to believe in, of course! Everyone does, but the young aren’t yet used to not getting it, so they persist.” (Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, 2020) So, in the young, we need to avoid them learning helplessness and instead foster constructive hope.

It is a delicate balance between highlighting the seriousness of the problems that need fixing and showing that concrete actionable solutions are possible. To change their minds hope, not helplessness, must be nourished.

Conclusion

There are many barriers to preventing climate change. However, the answer is becoming less what do we do, but convincing ourselves to do it. The book “Sleeper’s Wake” talks about prominent environmentalist Gus Speth and says “that he used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change and that 30 years of good science could fix it. He now says he was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy” (Nicholas, 2022). Apathy, narcissism, greed, politics, and hopelessness all play a role. However, there are ways they can be overcome, and overcome them we must. This is our one world, and countless billions of humans are depending on us to be good stewards of it. We know what we need to do. The only thing holding us back is ourselves.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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