What is it you fail to understand? A climate report from the Swedish election.

Explaining how the climate issue got lost in the national election, and debunking some politic quotes.

Welcome! It’s been a minute! Summer came up, we needed to go sailing, hang out in the woods, and quite honestly just take some time off to breathe. Working with the climate crisis is a marathon, and we try to live by our own teachings, which entails allowing ourselves to rest and recharge so that we can keep running and working sustainably for a sustainable world. 

This is Climate Psyched, a newsletter where we (four Swedish climate psychologists) write about all things related to the climate crisis and its psychological, behavioral and emotional aspects. If you want to know more about us, scroll down to the bottom. 

For this edition, we’ll jump straight into a current event: There’s a general election coming up in Sweden next Sunday, and well - as far as the climate goes - it truly has been a disheartening suffrage. And while feeling disappointed, frustrated and quite a few other tangled emotions, let’s try and channel those emotions into a psychological understanding of what the f*** is going on. 

You are not alone. 

Last week, almost 2000 Swedish scientists and university employees joined forces in an op-ed, basically asking our politicians “What are you failing to understand?”. A legitimate question indeed, seeming as one third of Pakistan currently is under water, a large part of Europe has experienced severe heat waves, droughts and fires this summers, and millions of people in Africa are starving due to consequences of the climate crisis. 

It’s far from a unique situation, globally, having politicians not taking action, or even raising the climate issue. So - are they oblivious to the ongoing crisis, or are they just, well, dumb? 

As usual when it comes to how people (and yes, even politicians are people) are acting in the climate crisis there’s no one simple answer that explains it all. But we wanted to shed light on a psychological mechanism that can bring one piece to the puzzle that we can call  political inaction in the climate crisis. 

SITUATION: We’re in an acute climate crisis, climate scientists agree that we need quick large scale change to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, parallel to adapting to the consequences of the climate crisis. There’s a national election coming up in one of the richest and most progressive countries on Earth. Yet the climate issue is almost removed from the suffrage.

EXPLANATION: First, we need to remember that we humans are so-called contextual beings, which means that we are very much influenced by what we have around us. This applies to both the physical, knowledge and social environment we have around us. If everyone we surround ourselves with lives in a large house and earn above average, our frames of reference will be shaped based on that. If the information we are fed says that the most important issue is law and order, we will be influenced by that.

One way this affects us is through the cognitive bias "Availability bias", which causes us to interpret the things we see and hear often as more important and more urgent than anything else. Somewhat generalized, it works like this: If the politicians talk a lot about an issue, the media will report more on that issue and then it will be perceived as more important by the voters. If it is perceived as more important by voters, politicians will talk about it even more and trigger our availability bias even more.

Let’s look at this from a historical angle - a fairly recent time when the climate issue was higher up on the agenda. In our book Climate Psychology (Klimatpsykologi) we take a small dive into this: 

At the end of the 1980s, environmental issues were high on the agenda in Sweden. The Green Party made it into parliament, the nuclear issue was hotly debated, and public interest in the environment was growing. The SOM Institute's annual surveys of people's interests and attitudes show that interest in the environment gradually waned and remained relatively stable from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. Then, in 2004, public opinion begins to turn upwards, only to take a sharp turn at the end of 2006.Why?

In 2006, several things happened; Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth was released and the Stern Review, which calculated the costs of not taking strong action on climate change, was published. This seemed to lead to a surge in media coverage of the environmental issue. In a few months in the latter half of 2006, the number of articles on climate change quadrupled! Thus, as journalists paid attention to the issue, it seemed that the public also began to view the environment as more important than earlier in the year. The well-known interplay between media reporting and public opinion were thus also evident on the climate issue - as on many other issues. This was also evident in 2018, when the number of articles published on the climate increased by a percentage of 38 compared to 2017. More than doubling in five years.

It is not (always) about a lack of knowledge, but about certain questions out-competing others. There is a limited space in the newspaper columns, a limited space in the public debate and a limited space in people's attention. Whoever wants to win votes often tries to capture the issue that seems to have people's attention at the moment. And in that battle, facts weigh lighter than feelings. 

ACTION: The 2000 researchers are absolutely right in their debate article, and are wise to join together to give weight to their message. But in this situation, when many issues are fighting for our limited attention, a diversity of methods, and highly active commitment is needed to redirect and keep attention on the climate issue. 

Debunking politician quotes: 

“My goal is not that people will need to change how they live”
“We should be able to live as we like and do the things we want to do, just with zero emissions”

These quotes come from the party leader of the Moderates (right wing) party leader, and the minister of enterprise (Social Democrat) respectively. Both stating that behavioral change shouldn’t be needed in the climate transition - as long as we reduce the emissions. But is this compatible with meeting the targets of the Paris agreement, which Sweden, along with 194 other countries, has signed?  

Leaving the question of whether this will attract voters or not, let’s look at what the science has to say about whether people will be needing to change their lives or not in order to meet the climate targets. 

To make things short and clear: 

• The IPCC WIII report, chapter 5, states that the indicative potential of demand-side strategies (e.g. behavioral change) across all sectors to reduce emissions is 40-70% by 2050, and suggests a strategy of Avoid-Shift-Improve. That’s a large potential! 

• According to the report, the greatest Avoid potential comes from reducing long-haul aviation and providing short-distance low-carbon urban infrastructures. The greatest Shift potential would come from switching to plant-based diets, and the greatest Improve potential comes from within the building sector, and in particular increased use of energy efficient end-use technologies and passive housing.

• Behavioral change is an essential factor in making the transition to a fossil free, sustainable world - but it’s also essential to changing the culture, infrastructure and system we live in.

It seems that politicians fear that promoting behavioral changes for climate will lead to a degradation of people’s lives. But, does living sustainably equal a sad and boring life? Not according to the science: 

• The IPCC WIII report continues on to say that wealthy individuals (hey, that’s many of us up here in Scandinavia!) contribute disproportionately to higher emissions and have a high potential for emissions reductions while maintaining decent living standards and well-being. 

• This fits well with other psychological research on what makes people happy, for example the study commonly known as “The world’s longest study on happiness”, which concluded that having close, meaningful relationships is a key factor for happiness and health.

• More research that has looked into what makes us happy has seen that people who exhibit high levels of happiness seem to spend a lot of time with family and friends, nurturing and valuing their relationships. They also feel grateful for what they have, help others in need, exercise every week and live in the moment. And last but not least, they are deeply committed to certain lifelong goals. 

• We’ll come back to the topic of what motivates people to start making changes - but for now, to calm weary politicians down, let’s remind them of the research that has shown that when you pair climate policy with co-benefits (e.g. creating more jobs) people become more willing to address the climate issue, and that self-interest is far from the only thing that people care about when it comes to supporting climate policy: if policies are perceived as efficient and just people tend to be more supportive of it. 

Not only do we need rapid change - including individual and collective action - our lives would significantly improve with that change.