Governments all over the world have been trying their best to protect the environment by implementing different means to lessen pollution and improve human health. Unfortunately, many regulatory efforts proved to be wasteful and costly, and some of them even made matters worse. In recent years, governments have shifted their focus to global environmental problems, including the sorry state of the ozone layer. Through international agreements, ozone-depleting chemicals have been banned. However, effective international controls have yet to be implemented to mitigate climate change, an issue that concerns people around the world.

 

Can improved choice architecture and nudges help reduce greenhouse gases? It definitely can. How- ever, governments have gone beyond nudging in their attempt to protect the environment and their constituents, as regulators preferred command-and-control regulation over designing an effective choice architecture.

 

Rather than nudging people to do what is right to protect themselves and the environment (which seems ineffective), governments have decided to impose rules and regulations.

 

Better Incentives To help the environment, two broad approaches have been proposed:

1) penalize or tax on polluters, and

2) implement a cap-and-trade system where polluters are allowed to pollute in exchange for a certain amount. Most specialists believe that these incentivized approaches are more effective and efficient than command-and-control regulations.

Offering incentives, such as the ones presented earlier, do not restrict the freedom of the choosers and gives them the confidence to decide what is best.

 

Due to some economic constraints, most choosers would likely decide not to further pollute the world. The choices also allow people to think about what is best for themselves and the environment. Designing effective choice architecture may require careful planning to create choices that people cannot resist choosing while at the same time making them abandon the idea of polluting the environment.

” Global Warming is a gift b/c all systems have a feedback loop. Thus we the feedback n opportunity to do something “

 

“Right now, the attitude is that climate change is happening to us…instead of the idea that actually climate change is instead happening for us,”

Throughout the talk, Hawken noted the confusion of terms that swirls around the topic of climate: decarbonization, negative emissions, climate change, global warming. There’s a need for an accessible, simple vocabulary, Hawken said, and also a need to move away from the typically violent rhetoric that surrounds the topic: the war on carbon, slashing emissions, combating global warming.

“Any time you have a military metaphor, you’re saying there’s an enemy or other,” Hawken said. “That’s dualistic thinking; that got us exactly where we are.”

Plus, Hawken noted, you can’t “battle” climate change. The climate is always changing in response to chemistry on earth and always has. When we refer to “climate change” as the problem, we are talking about its dramatic changes on a planet warmed by excessive greenhouse gas emissions in a very short period of geologic time.

In summary: We want to reverse global warming to reduce the effects of drastic climate change. (Final answer.)

“What if global warming is not an obstacle but an opportunity to innovate and reimagine everything we make and do?”

There’s one more language issue: the generally guilt-inducing and apocalyptic tone that much climate writing assumes. Often, popular articles present global warming as an evil force we are unwittingly causing every day just by existing in the systems of our society, or is something happening to us that we are powerless to affect.

This strips people of both agency and responsibility, unintentionally forcing readers into a victim role, simply through language.

“When you put gloom and doom together with guilt, you get apathy,” Hawken noted. “Which precludes seeing global warming as an opportunity.”

What if global warming is not an obstacle but an opportunity to innovate and reimagine everything we make and do? This was a thought Hawken voiced near the conclusion of his speech. What if we viewed our circumstances not as daunting, but as a worldwide cue that it’s time for something different?

“Climate change isn’t a curse,” Hawken said. “It’s feedback

“If you’re going the wrong way, you need to stop and turn around. Slowing down just means you’re going the wrong way more slowly.”

When he said this, audience members laughed, and Hawken smiled, but he was serious. He was talking about the need to not only arrest greenhouse gas emissions but the equally important goal of pulling them out of the atmosphere. This is what the term “drawdown” refers to — the point where atmospheric greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline year-by-year as more carbon is sequestered back into the earth.