Free Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall

what we do with climate change, both personally and culturally. The theories, graphs, projects, and data speak almost entirely to the rational brain. That helps us to evaluate the evidence and, for most people, to recognize that there is a major problem. But it does not spur us to action. The divide between the rational brain and the emotional brain is embedded in the historical boundaries between science, the arts, and religion, and it is a particular risk for an issue that originates strongly in just one cultural domain—as climate change does with science—that finds it hard to engage our entire cognition. The view held by every specialist I spoke to is that we have still not found a way to effectively engage our emotional brains in climate change. Even if the rider is fascinated by the article in Scientific American , the elephant has wandered off looking for a banana.
    So, advocates for action on climate change have to do everything they can to speak to both. They need to maintain enough of the data and evidence to satisfy the rational brain that they are a credible source. They need to translate that data into a form that will engage and motivate the emotional brain using the tools of immediacy, proximity, social meaning, stories, and metaphors that draw on experience. Every piece of climate change communication from the National Academy of Sciences to a direct-action protest outside a power station is an experiment in the alchemy of turning base data into emotional gold.
    Those opposing action are playing the same game but working backward. They begin with the arguments that can appeal to the emotional brain based around the values, concerns, and emotional triggers of their audiences. They then seek the data and evidence to support these arguments, because, like the advocates, they need to satisfy both the emotional and the rational brains of the people they want to convince. Of course, they don’t see it like this. They are convinced that they have built their emotional argument on the back of a rational evaluation of the data. And so it seems to them.
    The people in between are not passive in this process either. They, too, are deliberately making a calculation about how they wish to interpret these arguments, knowing very well that if their emotional brain becomes too involved, they are likely to feel anxious and worried. As I argue later, they tend to adopt a position of wait and see: Their rational brain is sufficiently aware that they know there is a problem; their emotional brain is sufficiently engaged that it is looking out for social cues about how they should respond. And both of their brains are sufficiently detached that they do not have to deal with the problem unless actively compelled to do so.

11
    Familiar Yet Unimaginable
     
    Why Climate Change Does Not Feel Dangerous
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Five years ago, when I was living in Oxford, England, a cell phone company applied for planning permission to install a cell phone tower on the side of the local pub. The area was full of liberal professionals of the kind that congregate in university cities. When prompted, they would agree unanimously that climate change was a serious problem that someone really should do something about . . . sometime. Otherwise they really didn’t think about it.
    And yet the threat of the cell phone tower galvanized them into immediate personal action. Within a week of the application, two hundred people gathered in the local school hall to express their resistance to the tower, which, they said, was going to spread microwave radiation across the school playground. Some were determined to lay their bodies down in front of the installation van, if necessary.
    There are some interesting similarities between the issues of climate change and cell phone towers. Both threaten uncertain impacts that are drawn out long into the future. And in both cases we contribute, through our consumption choices, to the problem we decry. My