The Climate Fight Is Now The Idiocracy Fight – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

We’re not supposed to say it. We’re supposed to have nuanced, sophisticated views that respect everyone as intelligent, brilliant human beings — some of whom just need a little bit of support. But the fact is: humans are by and large stupid. We are a species full of misinformation, challenged at logical thinking, extremely biased, and unbelievably arrogant about things we know we know that it ends up we are incorrect about.

In economics courses at higher institutions, you spend a lot of time on theories and models that assume people are rational actors. Then you get to the point where you have to acknowledge how absurdly irrational humans tend to be.

Then we have sports. We know we’re absolutely biased, tribal, and ridiculous in our support of sports teams, but that doesn’t hold us back from becoming highly emotional, believing our biases, jumping into conspiracy theories (while knowing that supporters of every other team think there are conspiracies against their teams), and even thinking tiny small things we do as fans are somehow going to impact the games (superstition, the-world-revolves-around me fallacies, etc.). This is all about what we know are simple games designed for having a bit of fun.

There’s also the growing obsession with gambling. Whether on aforementioned sports, stocks, crypto, lotto tickets, or old-school casinos, gambling is a core part of many people’s lives as well. We know “the house always wins” (unless you’re a really, really bad casino owner who somehow finds yourself going bankrupt), but we think we are special and will beat the house, sometimes with “this one simple trick.”

There are so many irrational things we do routinely that, really, we all know it’s true: humans are often stupid.

The big problem right now is we are stupiding ourselves into an extremely risky place when it comes to the climate. Big, expensive buildings are sinking in Florida (and faster than expected), yet Floridians have long elected people who deny human-caused climate change and try to block solutions to it. Floridians are also hit by bigger and more frequent hurricanes, are losing insurance coverage and paying more for it, and, again, are voting people into office who are intent on making that worse. On a personal/household level, we’re also not doing an amazing job cutting our own emissions.

We’re irrationally concerned about wind turbine risks but not air pollution risks, EV battery fires but not gas tank fires, loss of free speech in an era of the most abundant and open speech in history but not con men demolishing the pillars of democracy. We could go on and on — unfortunately.

The question is what to do about this. I’ve never watched the film Idiocracy, but it increasingly seems like an important piece of media or societal analysis to consume. Maybe it will provide some clues.

It seems we have to play at cultural games, meme messaging, and psychological WWE in a way that we somehow break through on the most important narratives surrounding climate change and its solutions. By many accounts, we’re losing, somehow thinking that logic, science & math, and rational behavior will be enough to wake people up and stimulate mass change. We need to win culture wars, not science & math debates. And to do that, we need to recognize the playing field and come up with a better strategy than the one we’ve been using. Feel free to chime in down below with some ideas.