Little wonder. A toxic combination of how our brains deal with big crises, an overload of contradictory — sometimes misleading — information, and mental shortcuts to simplify complexity can sometimes leave us in a state of paralysis.
The reality is when faced with a threat, our brains crave a simple solution. But the climate crisis is a complex, multi-variable calculation as illustrated by the chart below from researchers at Oxford University. It details the environmental footprint of our food choices across seven stages of the farm-to-fork food chain. The chart reveals the complexity of the science behind the climate consequences of what we put on our plates. But it also reveals a guiding principle for our choices. Contrary to all the “food miles, 100-mile diet and eat local” arguments, the research shows that transportation is a small part of the carbon footprint of our food. What you eat matters more than where it comes from.
The thing is our reactions are typically binary and we are hardwired to take mental shortcuts: good/bad, black/white, either/or. This built-in short circuiting of our critical thinking has been exploited by those pushing huge amounts of information either as click bait to generate revenue or by vested interests seeking to sow confusion to advance a particular agenda. The sophisticated campaign by the fossil fuel industry to create doubt about the science of climate change is a case in point. Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes is an expert on these disinformation campaigns. See Why Trust Science?
These waves of disinformation, especially on social media, follow the “Russian firehose” strategy — to flood the environment with so much false information that it becomes very difficult to discern fact from fiction and fabrication.
No one solution or silver bullet is going to solve the climate crisis but our brains want one. As a result, when searching for solutions, we are prone to fall into certain traps including the lure of oversimplification, false equivalence and falling prey to simple, but misguided, answers.
For example, some commentary has suggested that the environmental consequences of the dairy industry are similar to plant-based milks because some of them rely on monoculture crops. This is a false equivalence trap if there is no explanation of the relative merits — the environmental footprint of dairy is significantly more damaging than any of the plant-based milks. As a result, consumers may throw up their hands not knowing which to choose. But the key is that it’s not as simple as good or bad but rather which choice has the least negative impact on the environment i.e., the lesser evil becomes the good choice.
Air travel offsets are another false equivalence trap. Paying someone to plant trees does not negate the emissions from our plane trip or give us a free pass to keep flying guilt-free in a “business as usual” world. If we are truly serious about addressing the climate crisis, we need to fly less or not at all. It’s not about “balancing out” but lowering emissions overall.
Another trap is a tactic straight out of the climate denier’s toolkit. Finding one drawback or selective inconsistency in an argument and then throwing out the whole concept. We can see this in criticism from the meat industry that plant-based burgers are not a health food. But they are not meant to be, they are designed to offer meat eaters tasty alternatives as well as a product with a lower carbon footprint, no cholesterol, antibiotics, or animal suffering.
We can fight back and avoid these traps by validating the sources of the information we consume and recognizing the tricks that our brains or others play that can confuse us and delay action. To fight the climate crisis, we need to make informed choices with the lowest impacts on the environment and our collective future.