Climate Change – Experts in Excess

“If information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” – Derek Sivers (#128 The Tim Ferriss Show)

Climate Change, Global Warming, and the Greenhouse Effect

Do you remember the first time you heard about the greenhouse effect? How about global warming or climate change? The greenhouse effect was first described in 1824, but it always existed. We had our first solid evidence of human-caused global warming in the 1950s. What was your “aha” moment? When was the first time that you internalized this information?

We have more information on climate change than we ever had and the mountain of evidence grows daily. Does all of this information change anything?

My Meandering Path Towards Sustainability

I was born in 1983. Just one month after my fourth birthday, the Brundtland Commission released Our Common Future. It offered up the first, clunky definition of sustainability: “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

In 1995, Vice President Al Gore launched the GLOBE Program, which showed up in classes and curriculum that I don’t honestly recall. It took watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 documentary Before the Flood with a flashback to Romeo + Juliet aged Leo talking about global warming next to (an almost lithe) Al Gore to realize that in +16-years of formal education, four majoring in science and two specializing in sustainability, thousands of hours of multimedia consumption, I had probably been hit over the head hundreds of times on the topic of climate change. Some of the best marketers in the world had taken a crack at me. It took until 2006 for me to “get” climate change.

I feel like I was put on this earth to work on climate change, and it took me 23-years to “get” it! It wasn’t the evidence, or graphics, or colors, or fonts, or even images. It was my emotional connection to food. Emotion leads intellect, every time.

My major required that I attend five guest lectures. One of the lectures was a paleobotanist presenting the future of food. She used the fossil and geologic records to look at the effects of regional climate shifts on the plants and animals that lived there. More fundamentally, she looked at millions of years of history to identify the coming problems and opportunities of global climate change. It blew my mind and connected a bunch of dots. Climate change was coming after my food!

I couldn’t replicate my “aha” moment if I tried, more importantly, I don’t have to.

Talking/Not Talking about Climate Change

As of this writing, climate change has been paying my bills for nearly a decade. I don’t engage in believer vs. denier conversations, and it’s not for lack of opportunity. I do hear people sheepishly ask if climate change is real, and I always say, “Yes. What were you thinking about?” My biggest hurdle is always other sustainability professionals. Nearly every campaign, no matter what project, program, or product we’re pushing, comes back to: “How do we talk about climate change?” Dollars to doughnuts, you’ve either heard or uttered this very statement.

There is a lot to unpack here. Here are a few digressions:

Waste of time… Sustainability and climate change professionals spend far too much time figuring out how to talk about climate change. Searching for that magical arrangement of words that will turn the masses and motivate lasting change. We’ve engaged think tanks, universities, foundations, famous ad agencies, filmmakers, pro-athletes, committees, etcetera, etcetera… Chasing this incantation is as close as you can come to investing in alchemy.
This is nothing new to science… It took the world a long time to hear Galileo (1564-1642) and Newton (1642-1727), and there are still people fighting the laws of gravity every day! People still challenge Darwin’s work on evolution (1809-1882) +130-years after it was first published.
Climate change is a scientific fact… It has been and will be a fact my entire life. My belief in it is irrelevant. With or without my vote, climate change is happening. Just like evolution. Just like gravity.
It’s all procrastination… It’s procrastination with some occasionally great byproducts, but procrastination all the same. We’re talking about, talking about the problem. We’re avoiding the real work.

But what it comes down to is Marketing 101. You need to communicate benefits ahead of features. Someone is lending you their precious attention. How does the program, project, or product benefit their life? Does it save them time, money, or energy? Does it help them make money or energy? Does it improve their health? Does it connect them with their neighbors? Does it improve or cement their self-image? Does it remove a daily frustration? Does it improve their quality of life? All of these are a better place to start!

Pretend we weren’t talking about climate change for a second. Can you imagine if Apple marketed its next product to you, starting with the engineering, computer science, and materials that went into its next iPhone? How about Google talking about their algorithms, origins of language, and data aggregation before letting you use their search function? As interesting as these stories might be, it isn’t why you’re buying an iPhone or using Google search. Origin stories reinforce pre-existing emotions. If there isn’t any emotion, any benefit, you’ve already lost.

If you need/want engagement, sell the benefits! Don’t punish your audience with a dissertation on climate change. Leonardo DiCaprio told them about it years ago:)

We have the best tools and information we’ve ever had, ever. Better still, we have each other. So let’s get to work!

Behavior Change Programs

One of systems thinking principles is that humans are naturally talented at finding the leverage point in systems and then pushing the wrong direction. You, me, and every other person on the planet are guilty of doing this. One of the most frequent examples I see is behavior change programs. What is a behavior change program? It is a program that focuses on human behavior or habit change. In sustainability, we’re talking about programs like:

Light Switches
Recycling & Compost
Anti-idling
Double-sided printing
Reusable bags/containers
Ethical consumption (organic, GMO-free, etc.)
Many, many more…

What is the most consistent thing about each of these programs? If you’re relying on humans making the correct choice every day, you are failing. Or, at the very least, the effort isn’t worth the reward.

I am not against the intent of these programs. Each program is focusing on real and addressable problems. The methodology, a behavior change program, is wrong. The #1 symptom of a failure is something you will hear people say, an exasperated “Why won’t people do the right thing?“

Why People Won’t “Do the Right Thing”

While I like to think of myself as, what Kurt Vonnegut describes, a “bitter-coated sugar pill.” I honestly believe that people almost always want to “do the right thing.” As bad as our habits, planning, or thinking might be on a moment-by-moment basis, I think that every human wants to feel successful and good. Even the worst amongst us have it somewhere in their minds that they’re doing the “right thing.”

The limitation is that humans are cognitive misers. We evolved to save our mental energy, and there are only so many decisions we can effectively make in a day. It is a part of our biology and is supported by a substantial amount of research. We make thousands of decisions a day, and only so many of them can be categorized as “important.” President Obama famously reduced the number of minor decisions he had to make in a day to preserve capacity for all of the important decisions he had to make in his days as president (more at ‘Always Wear The Same Suit: Obama’s Presidential Productivity Secrets’). Ramit Sethi does a great job exploring this topic related to productivity in ‘How to apply the 80/20 rule to earn more, work less, and dominate.’

This is precisely where behavior change programs and “doing the right thing” falls apart… and why habit change is incredibly hard. Think of how hard it is to change your diet, or exercise more, or floss, or some other personal habit you’ve been trying to tackle. It can be a real struggle to establish a habit, and it is almost always something you care about and are personally invested in. Circling back to behavior change programs, I can almost guarantee that the habit you’re attempting to change isn’t a priority for the person you’re trying to change.

Design>Behavior Change: Design for the Behavior You Want

So is behavior change impossible? Absolutely not. We need to be smart about it and approach behavior change programs in sustainability the same way we’d approach them anywhere else. Design systems and environments that make the “right thing” easy and the “wrong thing” hard. If we are all cognitive misers, treat it like a feature instead of a bug and design for the behavior you want.

Looking back at our original list of programs, we can adjust our behavior change approach to design and drastically increase compliance (while reducing cognitive load). Here are a few common design solutions:

Light Switches
- Occupancy sensors
- Timers
Recycling & Compost
- Consistent bin layout
- Labeling
- Inconvenient waste bins (especially in areas where it is mostly recyclables, like copy rooms)
- Product control like 100% compostable products
Anti-idling
- Prioritize speed/access for active transportation (walkability, bikeability, etc.)
- Design for flow
  - Roundabouts
  - Adaptive congestion control
- Technology migration (electric cars and vehicles that automatically turn off)
- Public transit (fewer tailpipes)
Double-sided printing
- IT standardizes printer/copier settings
Reusable bags/containers
- This one is a tough one!
Ethical consumption (organic, GMO-free, etc.)
- Access
- Transparent labeling

As always, good design requires testing. Testing means taking things out of your head and into the real world, and you’ve got to eat your own dog food🙂 The good news is that there are examples of design, good and bad, everywhere.

Additional Resources:

If you’re interested in diving deep into habits, I highly Charles Duhigg‘s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business is great. I also love Atul Gawande‘s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

How to Talk About Climate Change