Climate Change Action Circle

Values to Action Climate Change Action Circle

Disseminating Advocacy Effort Measuring and Intervening Upon GHG Emissions

The recent IPCC report concerning the physical science of climate change makes one thing perfectly clear: the climate catastrophe is upon us. If we’re to escape the worst that a warming climate has to offer and provide future generations with the opportunity to thrive, we must find ways to eliminate GHG emissions.

Our recent paper, which has been accepted in the journal Perspective on Behavior Science, describes two key findings. First, the federal government is betting heavily that technological innovations can solve the climate crisis. Second, next to nothing is being invested in behavioral science research to reduce emissions.

The Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation are investing huge amounts of money in new ways to produce, transport, and store energy, to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and to redesign the built environment (and the production of resource intensive commodities) in the name of reduced emissions. But almost no attention is being allocated to the consumption of fossil fuel at the level of communities or industries. This represents a massive oversight, experts are increasingly recognizing that technological innovation is not a silver bullet to solve this problem, and that the human science must be permitted to contribute.

A prior Action Circle built a system for advocating for additional funding from the federal government for behavioral science research to experiment with large scale strategies to reduce emissions. We’re inviting you to join a new Action Circle to carry their work forward by (1) helping to disseminate our system for advocacy so it reaches thousands on thousands of climate activists and behavioral scientists, (2) develop a proposal for measuring GHG emissions in a local community and conducting a multisectoral community intervention to reduce those emissions.

President Roosevelt, for all his rhetorical skill, was unable to mobilize the US to join the second world war, until that is the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The events of this past summer combined with the recent IPCC report represents our climate Pearl Harbor.