Even MORE Barriers to Stopping Climate Change

In his piece "Why is it so hard to stop climate change?" for the Guardian, Damian Carrington sees a lack of unified global leadership, the refusal to subsidize more efficient, renewable sources of energy and our reliance on fossil fuels for energy as the three big things standing in the way of stopping climate change. To echo many of my classmates, Carrington fails to recognize that people also factor into the equation. And with people come the cultural norms driving our decision-making that Carrington also fails to mention.

While climate change skeptics may not exist in such great numbers in the UK, in the United States the issue of climate change, as we've discussed in class many a time, is a highly politicized and partisan issue. And when the very issue of whether climate change exists is contested, I would argue that is a pretty big barrier to overcome in stopping it. And even among people who believe that climate change exists, motivating those people to actually do something about it and moreover create the pressure on our political systems necessary to create more large-scale changes does not look promising.  According to a 2011 Gallup poll using data from 2010, only 42% of people polled worldwide view climate change as a significant threat to their well-being and that of their families. In the United States, while in 2008 63% of people viewed climate change as a threat this number dwindled to 53% in 2010. In Western Europe, the percentage is around 56% down 10% from the 2008 numbers.

Not only are people not threatened by climate change and indifferent to the effect it will have on future generations (not to mention the arguably irreversible damage we have already done), our cultural norms (as Assadourian and Wapner would argue) do not favor the actions necessary to stop climate change. The globalization of American and European culture to every corner of the globe means that fewer and fewer people on our planet will want to live the kind of lifestyle that is favorable to ending climate change. Our materialistic consumer culture is arguably the biggest hindrance to solving climate change and continually exporting said culture, which is the primary driver of the use of the fossil fuels and inefficient energies that Carrington mentions, will only drive up the demand for those energy sources.