Grist says pushing people into climate change actions can backfire — so what next?

Here's the big takeaway, in a piece it wrote about a paper to that end in Nature Sustainability:

It found that climate policies aimed at forcing lifestyle changes — such as bans on driving in urban centers — can backfire by weakening people’s existing pro-environmental values and triggering political backlash, even among those who already care about climate change. The findings suggest that how climate policy is designed may matter as much as how aggressive it is.

So, what next? 

First, note that "can" is not "will." I'm not saying ignore the study's findings and damn the torpedoes. I am saying that mandates can be framed in certain ways.

First, there can a be a push-pull setup, kind of like the "nudge" so beloved of neoliberal behavioral economists. (The last one-third of the piece discusses that.)

Second, there can be non-financial "pulls," like appeals to patriotism or whatever.

That said — and the research in "law-abiding" Germany, not the US — the problem is worse than with COVID lockdowns:

While researchers found a backlash effect, or “cost of control,” in both instances, it was 52 percent greater for climate than COVID policies.

INteresting. 

The last one-third also discusses financial "pushes." Make keeping a climate-unfriendly older heater, or some similar situation, for people who can afford to change on their own, especially, so expensive that, unless they're millionaires determined to cut off their noses to spite the government's face, they'll change.

And, per Grist, the study's authors acknowledge that even in "law-abiding"™ Germany, this isn't 1960:

The authors also emphasize that they aren’t claiming mandates or bans never work — seatbelt laws and smoking restrictions have become commonplace, for instance. But those were enacted in a different era and there was little public dissent about their benefits to personal health.

Times have indeed changed.

To me, the study, or at least how Grist extracts it, misses a possible, though not guaranteed, elephant in the room.

What if a lot of people who say they care about the climate are actually virtue signaling more than anything else, especially when the need for stronger and stronger action becomes more and more urgent? 

This is an idea that's not brand new to my mind by any means. That said, Peter Brannen's new book, "The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything," which I read last month and which discusses just how dire the situation is and just how urgent the need is for serious, global action, has reinforced that.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Greta Thunberg, or the guy out west who basically won't do anything in life. (I exaggerate.) I currently drive a gasoline-only vehicle (but it was cheap and doesn't need to go to the dump), fly the occasional airplane (noting that that flight is a sunk carbon cost), eats some meat (but in the bottom 15th percentile, if not even lower, of Americans) and other things. On the other hand, I've called for carbon taxes for years, even though not that high on the American economic pedestal.