Human Brains Aren't Wired to Fight Climate Change - Bloomberg
Human Brains Aren't Wired to Fight Climate Change - Bloomberg
Human Brains Aren't Wired to Fight Climate Change
Society knows it’s doing things that will do immense harm to the environment for many generations to come. So why can’t it change? We like donuts too much.
Donuts help explain why humans aren’t doing more to combat climate change.Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Humans are very likely the only species that can imagine very distant futures. Unfortunately, our brains aren’t wired to behave in a way that optimizes those futures. After all, most of us don’t even save enough for retirement. If we have a choice between eating a donut right now and being marginally more healthy later, the donut almost always wins.
Individual choices can have broad social implications. If we’re broke in retirement, we’ll rely on public assistance. If we make ourselves sick from eating too many donuts, we’ll be less productive and a drain on health-care resources. But society as a whole is also prone to toxic short-termism. Take climate change. Burning fossil fuels, clear-cutting forests and mass-producing cows serve our immediate needs for lights, farmland and cheeseburgers, but at the cost of ruining the climate for many future generations.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.