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One morning not too long ago, I sat down at my desk in my office and announced to everyone within earshot that I had done something unexpected and depressing.
My 19-year-old Toyota suddenly died, and I was in a hurry to replace it, so instead of the all-electric plug-in car that I had always thought my partner would buy next, I ended up buying another gasoline-electric hybrid car. Ta.
My partner was in the middle of a project that required her to make a 340-mile round trip to a remote location in Wales, and most of my colleagues listened politely when I mentioned that I needed another car right away. It was given to me.
They wax sympathetically about these trips and the unfortunate sight of their partners stranded in a Tesco car park on a Welsh winter night, staring at a pile of broken electric car chargers. I did.
They agreed that finding a working free charger can be difficult, even at home in London. In fact, most people agreed. One colleague was neither sympathetic nor understanding. He was clearly appalled.
He said what I did was incredible. There were now plenty of chargers on all the main roads. Anyone who said otherwise was wrong. For years he had been traversing half of Europe in an electric car without a hitch.
When I started babbling that cost was also a factor and that even the cheapest decent used EV was beyond my ideal budget, he jumped online and started looking at Auto Trader and told me that I had enough. It showed me that I hadn’t looked into it.
I prayed that he would find Tesla. Then I could loudly remind him that I had just written about Elon Musk’s antics that made me not buy his car. But work intervened and the conversation ended, which was a relief considering we were sitting just a few feet apart.
This incident stuck with me for several reasons, but primarily because of the opinion of my colleague, who is one of my favorite FT employees and an early adopter of exciting green technologies. I realized that this was almost certainly correct. Perhaps with more effort I could have found an EV I was satisfied with.
At the same time, being on the receiving end of an intense attack on climate change is a shocking reminder of how carefully peer pressure needs to be applied to encourage greener behavior at work and at home. It reminded me.
There is no doubt that the influence of others can be a powerful tool for climate policy. Research has long shown that one of the main reasons people install solar panels on their roofs is not because they’re wealthy or care about the environment. That’s because the neighbor did it first.
An analysis of Connecticut households shows that if you live within 500 meters of a visible rooftop solar system, you are more likely to install it yourself, increasing by 6.5 percent for each visible panel. has been.
Other solar adoption studies have found similar evidence of so-called social contagion effects that can sway businesses and farms.
Then there’s the classic green nudge case of Opower, a US home energy management software group. Its product allows utilities to provide people with personalized reports that show how their energy usage compares to that of their neighbors.
Early research shows that such reports reduce household energy usage by an average of 2%, thereby reducing customers’ bills by billions of dollars.
But there’s a catch, says climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe.
Long-term analyzes show that political conservatives who use more electricity than average and do not support environmental philanthropy actually increase their electricity use after receiving this type of information. It was done.
“When we think we’re being shamed for doing something, we end up feeling the exact opposite, and sometimes even doing the opposite,” Hayhoe said in her book on climate communication. “Saving Us,” he wrote in “Saving Us.”
She believes people are more easily persuaded if they are simply shown the benefits of environmentally friendly actions and products, such as taking a train instead of a plane or buying an electric car.
I’m sure she’s right, but I don’t blame anyone who suffers from the frustration my colleagues felt with my dismal EV efforts.
At a time when the growing threat of climate change is visibly worsening and concern about the issue is growing, there is no need to provoke, shame or put on a show. System-wide policies should make environmentally friendly behavior an obvious, easy, and economically desirable choice. Unfortunately, this is still the exception rather than the norm.
pilita.clark@ft.com
