At SkipsForYou, and AcornWaste we are very keen to look beneath commonly held attitudes and preconceptions about responsiblity and provide clear guidance on what really helps. Research by psychologists is just as useful in helping with this as are the more commonly examined statistics on emissions for example.
Gerald Gardner and Paul Stern who wrote the article, think that while most US people do accept that human activity is responsible for climate change, and are interested and motivated to reduce their energy consumption, there is just to much conflicting and unclear information around for people to be able to make effective changes. Many people in fact engage in activities that while being visible and tangible are less effective than other actions they could be taking. For example, many people will happily turn off lights or turn down their thermostat, but are not really sure about how much good this is doing.
This is partly because many green campaigns are great at motivating people to do something, but there are so many of them, and the whole problem seems so complex that it becomes unclear how change can be effected. There are publications such as "The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook" which give us checklists of green things we can do, but without a clear understanding of the impact of these changes.
Gardner and Stern suggest that (as any behaviourist would say) telling people to stop doing stuff is not helping. Instead, it is far better to focus on positive steps that can be taken. This is like positive reinforcement - we don't want to hear that we have to make sacrifices to change, but that we can be agents of change; taking active steps to become more energy efficient will lead to much larger reductions in energy use.
"...efficiency-improving actions generally save more energy — and reduce carbon emissions more — than curtailing use of intrinsically inefficient equipment. For example, buying and maintaining a highly fuel-efficient vehicle saves more energy than carpooling to work with another person, lowering top highway speeds, consolidating shopping or errand trips, and altering driving habits in an existing gasoline-inefficient motor vehicle. This general finding challenges the belief that energy savings entail curtailment and sacrifice of amenities. Not only is efficiency generally more effective than curtailment, but it has the important psychological advantage of requiring only one or a few actions. Curtailment actions must be repeated continuously over time to achieve their optimal effect, whereas efficiency-boosting actions, taken infrequently or only once, have lasting effects with little need for continuing attention and effort."
This approach should certainly help us in the UK, with see-sawing fuel prices and and people needing to save money any way they can. However, in the UK, it is also worth remembering that ordinary households contribute far less to emissions than in the US, and to question whether the government is actually right to enforce energy saving policies such as the removal of old-style lightbulbs. By creating such a 'nanny-state' policy, this again leaves the ordinary householder feel powerless to make changes themselves, and reverses the psychological approach endorsed by Stern and Gardner.
For anyone who is interested they have also written a very interesting book called, 'Environmental Problems and Human Behaviour', which goes into some detail into issues such as 'the tragedy of the commons,' a phrase coined by Garrett Hardin,(1968) a biologist at the University of Santa Barbara.
