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Earth Science

Human 'Behavioral Crisis' At Root of Climate Breakdown, Say Scientists (theguardian.com) 300

In a new paper published in the journal Science Progress, author Joseph Merz argues that climate issues are symptoms of ecological overshoot, driven by exploited human behaviors such as overconsumption, waste, and population growth. The paper emphasizes the need to change societal norms and behaviors through various means, including using marketing and media strategies to promote sustainable living, rather than solely focusing on technological or policy solutions. The Guardian reports: Merz and colleagues believe that most climate "solutions" proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three "levers" of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. "We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot," says Merz. "The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades -- they're not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand."

"Overshoot" refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain -- or grow -- itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet's biocapacity can regenerate. Where discussion of climate often centers on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth's biosphere. "Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behavior," says Merz. "For decades we've been telling people to change their behavior without saying: 'Change your behavior.' We've been saying 'be more green' or 'fly less', but meanwhile all of the things that drive behavior have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction -- and we've been wondering why nothing's changing."

The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signaling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviors which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one's status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behaviors incompatible with a sustainable world. "People are the victims -- we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction," says the evolutionary behavioral ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. "Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?" Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms.
"We're talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they're trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint -- our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season's trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint -- or even better, have an ecologically positive one."
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Human 'Behavioral Crisis' At Root of Climate Breakdown, Say Scientists

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  • Well, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @02:17AM (#64166023)

    "changing perceptions" through marketing? that sounds like an arms race with the other side. Long time ago we thought the right way to change perceptions was through good education and development of critical thinking skills.

    Where did it all go wrong :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      Where did it all go wrong :)

      Hope that good education and development of critical thinking skills will "fix things" is futile, this is what went wrong.

      • Hope that good education and development of critical thinking skills will "fix things" is futile, this is what went wrong.

        To often, a "Good" education no longer means The Three R's, and "critical" thinking is to be interpreted as to criticize everything everywhere everywhen.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Re: Well, (Score:5, Insightful)

          by blue trane ( 110704 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @07:03AM (#64166467) Homepage Journal

          What if I tell a more compelling story where Reagan and "greed is good" enclosed everything (in blatant violation of the Lockean Proviso, thus reducing all claims of a moral foundation for capitalism to simply "might makes right") and took the outdoors out of America and neoliberalized us to death so suicides and overdoses and mass shootings are the only way out for so many?

    • At human laziness. Believing someone is far more convenient and less of an effort than learning and understanding requires.

    • Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)

      by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @03:26AM (#64166149)
      Where did it all go wrong? Worshipping industrialists & corporations that measure their success by how fast they can dig stuff up out of the ground & turn it into pollution.

      This paper isn't saying anything that hasn't been said before but they've added neuro-psychobabble to try to make it sound more convincing.

      The essential message is that we need to consume less. Leaving it to the markets, i.e. asking the people who profit from consumerism to save us, doesn't work for obvious reasons. How about asking tax-payers to subsidise consumerism less? Closing a few tax loopholes & shutting down the offshore banking system would be a start. Make the corporations pay the taxes they owe us, you know, for things like education, a fairer judicial system, more efficient infrastructure; the kinds of things that consume less natural resources & benefit the majority of people instead of everyone endlessly buying stuff that'll become landfill in a few months, weeks, days, or hours.
      • Re:Well, (Score:4, Interesting)

        by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @12:22PM (#64167437) Journal

        To me the real question is a relatively pedestrian one of the Tragedy of the Commons: capturing externalities.

        Capitalism CAN solve these problems as long as those externalities are accounted-for and not just tossed into the midden of 'everyone just has to live with it'.

        If a fast food restaurant offers its food in disposable packaging, what is the actual cost for the waste? How about if we include the realistic supposition that at least some of it is just going to end up as litter?

        If a fossil fuel power plant provides power to 10,000 homes, who is paying for the particulate and emissions harm down the line?

        On the flip side, the entire structure of direct and hidden subsidies in our legal and tax codes (ie tax breaks) needs to be 1) gone through with a fine tooth comb to purge them, 2) restructured so that incentives and subsidies (which there's a good reason to occasionally offer) ALWAYS have a expiry date, 3) always consider even second-order externalities.

        I'd further state that any such legislation should be single issue; but then again I think our government would be much better served GENERALLY by single-issue bills instead of 30,000-issue omnibus monstrosities within which lobbyists and corrupt politicos can bury friendly advantages.

        Not that the implementation is simple, but I think the principles behind it can be.

      • by kackle ( 910159 )
        Flat tax: There would be no more loopholes. Eliminate all deductions. Corporations would be forced to pay fairly/play fairly. Everyone would be in the same voting block (voting for lower taxes); there would be much less class warfare nonsense.
    • Well, the other side is clearly better at it. Time to learn from them... :-/

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Actually it requires getting rational leadership and then there is no "other side" anymore. Sounds to me quite infeasible given how incapable of understanding even basic facts the average person is.

    • There are two ways to change minds: the carrot or the stick. Governments prefer the stick and always will because you can't trust the proles.
    • Manipulating people is easier than educating them and expecting critical thinking to kick in. Ergo, marketing might be more efficient indeed
  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @02:31AM (#64166043)
    But I know from experience how much that can change.

    When I was a kid, it was common to just throw trash out of your window on the highway. It's not that people were dumb or lazy, we just didn't think about the fact that the trash stayed there unless someone picked it up. But then folks got tired of the highways being lined with trash, made some littering laws and education campaigns, and now people are aware of why that's not a good thing.

    The same thing will apply in this instance. People of the future won't just burn stuff "because". If they do it, they'll think about it.
  • ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies

    Yeah, that's not it. Death cults are usually short-lived, pun intended, and "reduce" ideologies are no different. Those "ancient drives" are the result of a simple relation: Attracting a mate is literally what perpetuates your way of living. Having children, and more than other people, is what makes your values and your way of life more likely to succeed over others. The people who outfuck others succeed because they outfuck others. It's a numbers game. The laws of nature don't need help from "marketing str

    • The thing is, birth rates among those 25% of people who do all the polluting are declining & those populations are shrinking. Their logic doesn't seem to add up.
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        You are stupidly trying a qualitative argument to counter a quantitative fact. That cannot work.

    • ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies

      Yeah, that's not it. Death cults are usually short-lived, pun intended, and "reduce" ideologies are no different. Those "ancient drives" are the result of a simple relation: Attracting a mate is literally what perpetuates your way of living. Having children, and more than other people, is what makes your values and your way of life more likely to succeed over others. The people who outfuck others succeed because they outfuck others. It's a numbers game. The laws of nature don't need help from "marketing strategies" to do their thing.

      This "it's a numbers game" thing is the natural process. But there is fuck-all to do with the natural order among most first-world folks these days. The well-educated, hard-working types tend to not have so many kids. The less-educated, hard-working or not, tend to have far more kids. Which is all well and good for the manipulative sector of the economic community to take advantage of, but is pretty much a doomsday scenario for the species as a whole. Unless the manipulative sector decides to pour their res

  • can we at least wait for a decent McDonalds ice cream machine to be designed.
    https://mcbroken.com/ [mcbroken.com]

  • Yes, movies, TV, games, music etc are very important for a true systemic change. We need to make things like repair, recycling cooler & promote sustainable habits.
    • That's great. Just when the entertainment industry finally seems to be waking up to the fact that using movies and TV series as a vehicle to preach to the public doesn't make for good entertainment...
      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        As if morality messages in movies is some sort of new phenomena that doesnt massively predate the recent down turn in movie attendance.

  • by Bongo ( 13261 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @04:52AM (#64166271)

    We have been hearing about overpopulation and especially the term "overshoot" since the Club of Rome report in 1970, which presumably follows on from earlier. Governments and industrialists were worried about rising population. Now either this is a real, actual problem, Or it's not. I don't really see how you can go from a population of say 500 million on through industrialization to a population of over 8 billion, heading for possibly 9 or 10 billion, and not know whether this is okay or not. Either overpopulation, i.e. there being 20 times more people on the planet than the planet can support is a real thing or it's not.

    By all means, all these other initiatives and projects and memes around being green and being caring for the environment and reducing the amount of plastic bags you use, and increasing recycling, and cutting a bit here, and maybe flying a bit less, and maybe changing your car from a petrol one to an electric one, etc. Maybe all of that is all very well.

    But if the population is 20 times what it should be, and has already been 20 times what it should be, for decades, then we're well, well past the limits of growth. We're well, well past the overshoot.

    Either that's real or it's not. Either the overpopulation thing is real or it's not. It's that simple.

    • There are too many people to maintain the biosphere in the face of the environmental impact of our preferred standard of living with our existing technology.

      The people who really run things - i.e., those with power/money - like having a lot of people around to do stuff for them and don't care to give up either their power or the stuff we do for them, so population growth will continue. That means either a technological solution to limit the impact of so many people, or convincing us to be fulfilled living

    • The Club of Rome report (aka "The Limits to Growth" Donella + Dennis Meadows, and others) presented about 10 various scenarios, with the "Business as usual" showing problems cropping up between 2010-2050. Other scenarios had problems earlier, others later, one was stabilized.

      https://dash.harvard.edu/handl... [harvard.edu] Overlaid the scenarios with statistics.

      Other interesting approaches is the "Planetary boundaries" framework, and William E. Rees' "ecological footprint" concept.

      Whether or not overpopulation is a probl

    • The overshoot hasn't caused failure due to functional limits, yet.

      Water will fail first, it already is. Read up on aquafiers, at least snowfall can replenish annually (if it falls in the right places).

      https://www.wri.org/insights/n... [wri.org]

      Aqufiers will fail. Subsidence is when the land sinks from water (or oil) extracted from aqufiers. The California's Central Valley has sunk about 28 feet since the 1920s. I'm sure that's sustainable...
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      In other news, 2-3 billion people experi

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You are confused and try a simplistic view on a problem that is a bit more complex. There are short-term and longer-term limits of growth. Obviously, the short-term limits are far higher and are enabled by burning off stored resource pools that do not replenish or replenish far slower than burned off. So we can be massively over the longer term limits of population size and continue to grow for a while. Obviously doing something this abysmally stupid results in a big catastrophe at the end.

      So are we overpop

  • I have been saying that for a long time. Humanity has exceeded its ecological niche and kept going. Hence the natural regulation mechanisms are beginning to show effect. Unless we want a reduction in numbers by massive deadly force from natural mechanisms, we have to get the numbers and behavior down to sustainable levels quite fast ourselves.

    This is rather obvious. That most humans, and in particular the religious fuckups, believe growth is the thing to always do and are not smart enough to understand what

  • capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @06:36AM (#64166421)
    Isn't this just another way of saying that capitalism is killing us and destroying the planet? We need a system that rewards people for doing things that are good for us, capitalism is quite the opposite.
    • If you take everything from all the billionaires and divide if up equally between the world's population, what's everyone going to gain? A few hundred to a few thousand dollars? (Probably at the lower end, as it wouldn't be possible to liquidate all those assets all at once)

      Then what happens if you give everybody in an impoverished African villiage $1000, $10,000, or even $100,000 in cash, when there's little available to buy? It'll probably mostly disappear to inflation.

      And then you have to add up the
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Actually, no. Capitalism with some sane regulation mechanisms on greed can work. Capitalism does not actually need growth or unlimited personal wealth for a few. It only becomes unsustainable if you allow that.

  • This is not something we can expect the free market to solve, and not something that private corporations
    will want, indeed will be pressured against by the nature of free market capitalism. Corporations want profits
    in the short term, possibly in the long term, and all else is a side-effect of their chasing profit.
    By effectively prioritising consumer choice and private profit, as our current system does, we have
    tied behind the back the hands of anybody who wants to do something about the problem.

  • This paper is basically stating what folks have been saying all along about consumerist society - that our industrialized consumerism is a force multiplier that more than counters the demographic transition in population that kept the neo-malthusians at bay. The only difference is that they are calling out cultural drivers and speculating that there are primordial behaviors being exploited, and that no solution that does not address this will succeed in changing mass behavior.

    Which means TL/DR we are doome

    • Praying for singularity is really the only thing you can do. Absent true AI the demographic collapse among the smart fractions is going to cause the mother of all overshoots, regardless of climate and resource depletion.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They are trying to get at least some benefit from the slow moving suicide the human race is doing, namely to get some insight in the mechanisms behind it.

      Obviously, it is far too late to stop a catastrophe that will kill most people and make life hell for the rest. The only question now is how large that "rest" will be (with zero a real possibility) and what amount of civilization will survive. With every day nothing decisive is done the outlook gets worse.

  • What a wildly irresponsible conclusion.

    To consume less, we first have to be able to stop buying shit we don't need and not have large sections of the population face destitution as a result.

    Coercion is propping up this casino system. The dollar and the stock market need to crash. All that fake wealth (claim to wealth) needs to be wiped out.

    And we can't do that as long as money is required to fulfill basic needs.
  • Imagine my shock /s (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @08:32AM (#64166609)

    I've been saying most of this stuff for a couple of decades now, and I'm not the only one here on Slashdot expressing similar thoughts.

    I had a quick look at the paper - I'll delve deeper when I have time - and was pleased to find this quote:

    "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of".
    – Edward Bernays, 'Propaganda', 1928

    It would be useful if the above could be translated into a bunch of different languages and disseminated in such a fashion that seeing or hearing it becomes a daily experience for the majority of this planet's inhabitants. Then maybe - just maybe - humanity would wake up to what we're doing to ourselves and each other.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Fat chance of that happening though. Too much short-term profit would be at risk and short-term greed is everything for the actual rulers.

  • This is what comes from treating capitalism as some kind of canon. From my understanding, socialism builds on the exact same principle, but tries to spread the wealth more evenly. We have elements of both. Some of the healthier societies have more of the latter than we do ( Nordic Model [wikipedia.org]). They are both only theories, and capitalism has known flaws, at least that's what I was taught in public high school. It listed 3 larger areas where there were issues. I don't remember all three, but one was "barriers to en

  • In my area, a lot of the choice real estate is purchased by speculators and unoccupied. Add to that wealthy families having multiple homes, for the rest of us, we have to commute longer, polluting the environment. This is not even factoring in their private jet usage or them having mansions with unused swimming pools and large estates. Ever see a rich person party? They easily spend in one night what my family of 4 spends in a year on food.

    The middle class are generally pretty reasonable in their cons
  • It's easy to take some really clear examples of people doing stupid stuff, but isn't a lot of the issue just being forced on the population by big players?

    Ideally what we buy is ecological and fair trade, and durable. Most of the crap offered is none of that, and is marketed as all three, and good luck figuring out which claims are true or not.

    Even huge companies struggle with supplychain management and making sure what they get is reliable.

    It's so easy to say it's a behavioral crisis, but when the entire w

  • ... we have been trained since at least the late 40's to consume. Products we don't need that don't perform what their advertising says they will are the most expensive and sought after products. For example, Nike sneakers are really not well made, nor are they good for your body (as your orthopedic surgeon), yet they command a premium and people line up to buy special editions of them.

    Breaking this training will be difficult, fortunately the current crop of USA'ians seems to be well on their way to break

  • by Clouseau2 ( 1215588 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @10:46AM (#64167089)

    Unlike the right wingers that attack it by claiming one prediction was oil would run out by the year 2000, I've actually read Limits to Growth and the revised edition.

    The book had a simple prediction: unless both projected population growth and projected industrial growth were reduced, in 1 century (by 2072) the system would collapse.

    We're halfway through the "experiment" and the state of the world closely mirrors the "standard run" / "business as usual" assumptions the Club of Rome made in 1972.

    Which means in the next few decades expect the wheels to start to come off the train.

    Just like if you manage a forest of 1,000,000 trees which grows 1,000 trees a year and you harvest 10,000, everything can look just fine for decades as you draw down natural resources beyond the replacement capacity.

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