The Most Important Climate Challenge Is Our Thinking
By Bob Doppelt
Capital is now flowing into clean technology sectors, in part to reduce climate-damaging carbon emissions. However, as important as new technologies are, we won’t solve the climate crises until we overcome a much more fundamental problem: our maladaptive beliefs and practices.
A large body of research shows that we humans frequently make poor decisions, 
especially when confronted with novel problems. In general, humans are not skilled at assessing risk, especially when the threat is new. People frequently misjudge the future effects of their behavior and often underestimate the consequences of changes occurring in their environment.
Creating the Conditions We Abhor
Case in point is a pair of bills recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. One prohibits the U.S. Department of Agriculture from analyzing how climate change might affect its operations and the farmers its serves. The other prevents the Department of Homeland Security from examining how climate change might affect domestic security.
The representative who introduced the USDA bill said he did so to prevent the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The sponsor of the Homeland Security amendment claimed to be motivated by cutting costs. But the irony is that these bills might actually bring about the very conditions their proponents abhor. If we remain unprepared, climate change will compromise our food supply, reduce farmers’ ability to grow crops, open our nation to increased security threats, and restrict everyone’s freedom.
Many people in the U.S. and around the globe hold similar maladaptive views. I am merely using this example to illustrate that long-held beliefs and practices often prevent people, and even whole societies, from responding effectively to new circumstances.
Resistance to Change
“Bounded rationality” is partly to blame for this pattern. The human mind has a limited ability to receive, store, and process information. The information we obtain is often incomplete and skewed by the biases of those who gathered it.
But an even more important factor is that humans naturally tend to resist change. From slavery to tobacco smoking, beliefs and practices can exist for decades or centuries, even when they are clearly known to be detrimental.
Often, people strive to tweak and improve their existing systems. However, their beliefs and practices constrain these efforts to “first-order” change, which leaves the basic goals, structures, and outcomes of those systems intact. Modest improvement in the energy efficiency of goods is an example of first-order change. Increased efficiency does little to change consumption patterns. It can even cause people to purchase additional energy-consuming devices.
Only rarely do people strive for “second-order” change, which brings about a fundamental shift in beliefs, practices, goals, structures—and results. Cutting total energy use by 50 percent or more through dramatically reduced consumption and finding new ways to meet our needs and desires constitutes second-order change.
Three Key Factors
Second-order change is difficult because it requires three factors. People must feel significant dissonance between their current conditions and a desired new state. They must also experience a sufficient sense of efficacy or confidence in their ability to do what’s needed to eliminate the dissonance. And, just as important, they must believe that the benefits of making the change significantly outweigh the detriments. Without adequate sense of dissonance, efficacy, and benefits, people can remain stuck in less-than optimal or destructive patterns for long periods of time.
Climate change is the mother of all challenges facing humanity. To make intelligent decisions about how to respond, we must clearly identify the problems that need to be solved. The first and most important problem is our maladaptive beliefs and practices. The ability of change leaders to build sufficient dissonance, efficacy, and benefits will be essential to success.
Bob Doppelt is executive director of the Resource Innovation Group and teaches systems thinking and climate change at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Power of Sustainable Thinking (Earthscan, 2008), which was rated one of the top 10 books on climate change by Audubon Magazine and one of the top 40 books on sustainability by CPSL at Cambridge University.
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