Chris Mooney writing for the Washington Post has an article on “The 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change”
He notes:
When a gigantic threat is staring you in the face, and you can’t act upon it, it’s safe to assume there’s some sort of mental blockage happening. So what’s the hangup? That’s what a new report from ecoAmerica and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute — entitled Connecting on Climate: A Guide to Effective Climate Change Communication — seeks to help us better understand.
The report is framed around communicating about climate change effectively — but read more closely and you’ll quickly see that the reason we need help here to begin with is that humans have some pesky attributes, ones that render us pretty poor at grappling with slow-moving, long-range, collective problems like climate change. So which traits are we talking about?