Motif Money is the New Approach to Climate Action in the US : Taxpayers can save a lot of money through the Inflation Reduction Act
The carrot is the new approach to climate action in the US. Taxpayers will be rewarded for making greener choices with the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a different proposal than the one that taxed carbon emissions. It allocates nearly $400 billion in rebates and tax breaks for people to buy electric vehicles and solar panels, or outfit their homes with heat pumps or better insulation. If you change your life, you can save money on your energy bills. “That’s really the promise here, to get people onto clean, efficient, and affordable electric machines.”
Updating insulation requires plugging leaks that let in outdoor air, spraying either expanding foam or newspaper on walls and attic surfaces, if you are not sure what this entails. A heat pump acts like an air conditioner in the summertime when it warms the home from the outside. The appliance runs on electricity, not gas, so it can be powered with renewable energy like rooftop solar. They are so efficient that even if you had to run them on energy generated with fossil fuels, you’d still be way better off emissions-wise than with a traditional furnace.)
The Present Is Not the Problem of the Future: Why Climate Change is the Policy Problem from Hell for Individuals and Organizations, says Yale Professor Anthony Leiserowitz
Most people are focused on the present: today, tomorrow, maybe next year. If you have a flat tire, fixing it is more important than figuring out if you should use an electric car. Living by the beach is a lot more fun than figuring out when your house will be underwater because of sea level rise.
“I consider climate change the policy problem from hell because you almost couldn’t design a worse fit for our underlying psychology, or our institutions of decision-making,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
The institutions that have power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be more focused on the present than individuals are.
For example, says Leiserowitz, many companies are focused on quarterly earnings and growth. That makes climate change worse by helping drive short-term behavior such as leasing land to drill for fossil fuels.
Political leaders are given incentives to think short-term. Every four years the President is re-elected. Members of the Senate get elected every six years. And members of the House get elected every two years,” Leiserowitz points out, “so they tend to operate on a much shorter time cycle than this problem, climate change, which is unfolding over decades.”
Fortunately, our collective focus on the present also offers hints, psychologists say, about how to harness that hyperfocus on the present to inspire action.
There are ways to highlight the quick payoff for addressing climate change. That might mean that an elected official gets more votes if they support policies to reduce emissions. The goal of protecting future generations may be more important than the promise of benefit in the next election if the latter has more moral weight.
In some ways, our focus on the present is less and less of a problem as climate change makes itself more and more obvious today — in our daily lives. It’s happening on datememe datememe, as a result of a hotter planet. That makes the problem of the present not the problem of the future.
That immediacy is already showing up in how Americans view climate change, according to Leiserowitz, who has been leading an annual poll on the topic for more than 15 years. As extreme weather is becoming more common, he says support for climate policies is also growing, especially at the local level.
For example, the vast majority of respondents in a September 2021 poll said they support local governments providing money to help make homes more energy efficient, to increase public transportation and to install bike lanes. The majority of respondents supported investments in renewable energy.
“We have big societal choices to make,” says Leiserowitz, and those changes need to happen now. In the present. “Demanding action from their leaders is going to be the most important part of the group.”