 I suppose I started thinking about this issue probably 8 or 10 years ago when I would get a call from somebody in the media and they would say, well, why is it then if everybody, almost everybody is in favor of the environment that a lot of people just aren't doing anything? There seems to be a gap here. And to be honest, I had to prepare sound bites for the media. And gradually I gathered together these sound bites and put them into one package, which I'll deliver to you. And they seem to have resonated with a fair number of people as a collection of those things. I wanted to make a token effort to connect myself with Dublin since I haven't been here before. And so I wandered into a bookstore called The Secret Bookstore and opened a book of poetry by John Montague. And the first few lines I opened up to amazingly connected me and Dublin and John Montague. Just read you a few lines and it's related to the talk. All legendary obstacles lay between us. The long imaginary plain, the monstrous ruck of mountains. And swinging across the night, flooding the Sacramento, San Joaquin, the hissing drift of winter rain. I like to write poetry myself and I admire poets who can do better than me like Mr. Montague. The connection there is that I was born in Sacramento even though I've spent most of my life in Canada. And Montague is obviously an Irish poet. Okay, dragons, mules and honeybees. Why we do less than we should and how we can overcome. Most of the talk is devoted to why we do less than we should. And I see that as the equivalent of a physician diagnosing a problem. And if you don't have a good sense of the symptoms of a disease, the reasons for a problem, then there's not much you can do to solve it. And so I see my efforts to understand why people don't do what they ought to do as the physician's equivalent in terms of diagnosing the problem. So I also, I hope I don't insult anyone's intelligence, I'm always worried about this, but I always like to set myself in a context as an environmental psychologist who are interested in place and et cetera. So let's have a little. This is Vancouver. This is Vancouver Island, which is, I was going to look it up to see how it compared to Ireland as in size, but it's roughly similar in size. But most of it's full of cougars and bears. And then down at the very bottom here, sticking below the 49th parallel, here's Seattle is Victoria, which is the capital of the province of British Columbia, which I feel honor bound to say instituted the first carbon tax in North America. The province is enormous, province it goes up here somewhere like that. And Victoria is the provincial capital, and that's where my university is located. So the problem is, as I think everybody's aware, that environmental damage is inarguably caused by us, at least in part, or a significant amount. I don't think I'll find too much disagreement with that in terms of pollution, which was the cause, as I told some people in the room earlier, of our premier, conservative premier, instituting carbon tax, perhaps mistakenly, but doing the right thing for the wrong reason. This is Northern British Columbia, where there are a lot of pine forests, and I'm not sure if, you know, I'm far away from that, whether you're aware or not. But pine beetle usually are killed in winter, in cold winters and in last decades or so, as things got warm, they weren't killed. So because they weren't killed, they began to eat pine trees and kill them. And all this red that you see here in Northern, oops, ah, all the red that you see here is dead pine beetle forest in Northern BC. People in Northern BC have seen climate change out their back window, more or less, because of that. And of course, overfishing, which I'm sure you're aware of. And you know, I was just in Mexico City, which is threatened by volcanoes, earthquakes, and big storms, both coasts of Mexico or storms. So obviously, not all environmental damage is caused by us. Some of it is natural, of course, but we can only work on what we cause, I think. So since it's obvious to everybody that at least from time to time, we get hit by different things and slowly we're being hit, if that's the right word, by climate change. Why do we, why don't we do anything? Well, I'm a psychologist and I push the idea that each of us as individuals cumulatively, the seven and a half billion of us are causing the problem. I'm quite happy, more than happy, to acknowledge the other kinds of influences that are in action. And certainly some of them are geophysical. It's kind of hard in Singapore to go without air conditioning, it's pretty hard to go in Canada in parts of Ireland without heating the house at all. We have what some people call grower-dye capitalism. We have to make more stuff for people to buy and give away. We have these wonderful machines that drive us around and entertain us while we're going. Much more fun than riding a bicycle, much better than riding a subway. It's like a little living room. Why would I give that up for a subway or bus when there's people coughing and sitting next to me and whatever? And then we have also infrastructure problems, bike paths. My mentor actually is the godfather of bike paths in the world, starting in the 50s and 60s. And now they've spread all around the world and they're pretty good. But I've broken my arm twice. We've had a couple of ministers who were seriously injured or killed riding their bike in my town. There's probably been similar things around here. And as you get older, you bike. And you have political constraints. In my human dimensions of climate change class, I learned more by inviting people to the class than I probably learned since I was an undergraduate. And one of the things I learned from the policy people and lawmaking people is how difficult it is to pass legislation, at least in Canada. Not because of the left-right split, just the mechanics of legislation passing can be very, very trying sometimes. And that was news to me. So you've got geophysical factors, economic factors, technical factors, infrastructure problems. All these are reasons why people don't do things as well as the ones that I'm going to talk about. But what I prefer to talk about are the personal and interpersonal factors. That is we have barriers or obstacles that are related to people's values, to their attitudes, their level of skill, not knowing how to change behavior, having a variety of different aspirations besides saving the environment. And just plain lack of knowledge. And you have problems related to how we relate to other people in the household or at work or even in distant places. We compare ourselves to, oh, but what are the Chinese doing? Or what are the Indonesians doing, et cetera. And we have decision making. And I guess if you wanted to take home one or two messages from this talk that I would like you to take home, it would be that every one of us is making decisions almost every day. Whether we're just a house, a mere, mere householder. Or whether we're the chairman of some board. CEO is still an individual person working with the board and making decisions that affect the climate. So it's all about, I know I exaggerate, but it's all about psychology. Because whatever factors come to bear upon an individual, it's finally an individual who makes a decision to do this or that. So putting all that together, I have this sort of simple thing that guides my own research and has guided some policy makers in Canada. That essentially a lot of us are stuck with this dilemma where we know what we should do and a lot of times we don't do what we ought to do. So you go upwards and causally from that. What are the motivations and thoughts about that? What is the interpersonal context? What is the pricing and regulation, regulatory context? What is the geophysical context? What's the technological? When you put all these together and then the person says, well, I'm going to drive my car today anyway or I'm going to buy a bike. That's it or I'm going to ditch my car entirely. And so that's a decision made by an individual or a household. And so there are different kinds of strategies. And of course those strategies have outcomes for resources and sustainability. They also have outcomes for that person and that householder. I need to say to your partner, I'm selling the car and riding my bike. Partner says, hey, don't sell the car. I drive that thing too and I prefer the car or many other similar sorts of things. So this is how I see the whole picture, more or less. And this is, I'm certainly not going to bore you with this, but just to say that it's not just something I made up, all these little boxes. It's the same model, but every one of those fine prints that you can't read represents a study that shows that one of these arrows actually does cause another one of those boxes. And the part that is not in the other one also is the feedback aspect to it. Those kind of consequences I mentioned at the bottom then do get fed back into governance regulation pricing. And sometimes, of course, to geophysical changes, that's the C level rise and whatever that we see. And so then it all goes around and around in a dynamic complex picture. So this is the full version of the model. So given all that, what do we do? Well, at least where I come from, well, we're here too. This is Al Gore's statement now getting rather dated about the 10 things that we can do. If you look around on the web, you can find 50 things that you can do to make things better. If you look further on the web, you can find 51 things you can do. But unfortunately, my brother is an expert on Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writer. And I'm not a science fiction fan myself, but he told me about this quote, man is not a rational animal, he's a rationalizing animal. And Heinlein wrote that in 1953, and I have to confess to you that psychologists didn't pick up on this till 1954 in the theory of cognitive dissonance. So science fiction sometimes anticipates something more formal understanding. But the main message here is that as much as classical economics, not modern economics, but classical economics views us as sort of rational animals, we really aren't, unfortunately perhaps. So we rationalize, and rationalization is at the heart of my talk. So the gap is that many or even most people are in favor of helping the environment, but we don't. Here is where I criticize some of my peers and their approaches. If you read French, here's road to hell is paved with good intentions. So by some accounts, by the more apocalyptic accounts, we're on the road to hell full of good intentions. So this main, one of the main theories in environmental psychology is called the VBN model or values beliefs norms model. And I'm a friend of the person who made up this theory, but we can have debates as well. And he says, this is kind of how it works. You start with these values on the end here. And then you, that leads to, if you have these values, then you have these kind of beliefs. And then that causes you to have certain kinds of norms that it's the right thing to do, and then that leads to certain kinds of behaviors. And I think on first seeing it you would say, yeah, that sounds okay. That sounds about right. But I don't agree completely with Paul Stern's theory as you'll see a little bit later. Basic short version of why I don't agree is you don't have to go through all those steps. We'll talk about that later. So why don't we do everything that we ought to? Me too, I'm feeling slightly guilty about flying here from Victoria. I thought about proposing a video conference. Technology's getting pretty good. In my university we have this giant screen where I've given talks in Mississippi from Victoria. And the screen is so big and it's so good both ways that you say, maybe we should do a little less flying and a little more video conferencing than we do. On the other hand, how would I get to shake your hand and talk to you? And that's how we rationalize it in academia is, oh, the networking's what's really important. It's not the talk, it's the networking that's important. Rationalizing again, or maybe not. That's, anyway, that's another issue. So now, it took me a long, long time to find a dragon to tape him. But I finally managed to do it, it was really hard. So we don't do these things because of what I call the seven dragons of non-sustainability. And this is them. You don't really probably have to write them down now if you're a no-taking kind of person because I'll go through each one of them. But basically, it's about limited cognition, having certain ideologies, the influence of other people, something I learned from the economists, sunk costs. Psychologists don't know much about sunk costs, but I'm still learning at my stage of the career, discredence, perceived risk, and limited behavior. But I'll be going through each one of those. So each one of those seven dragons has kind of a whole set of sub-dragons. Sub-dragon, is that a word? Or is that a concept? I don't know. Little children. Let's think of them as tribes or families or something. And so one of them is the ancient brain. I learned from my anthropological friends that we have a brain that hasn't physically evolved for like 30,000 years. And what were we doing 30,000 years ago? We were wandering around supposedly on the savanna, hunting, gathering. Did we care about what was happening 100 kilometers away? No. Did we care what was going to happen in 2050? No. We only cared about kind of the here and now, getting some food, making babies, making sure the other tribe didn't get our stuff. We were very here and now oriented. So clearly, none of us would be here if we weren't capable of thinking about the future and faraway places. But the kind of natural tendency is to stick in the here and now. And that's one of the problems. Ignorance is obviously, I don't mean in a pejorative way, but information does need to be out there. We were talking earlier about information deficit model and how it's flawed. But we do need information first. And then we need more than information alone. It doesn't do it. Environmental numbness is something I wrote about decades ago. That is just hearing a message too often. When you hear any message from a company too many times, it just starts to lose. It's been there to a certain extent. The average person has maybe sometimes heard the same message about the environment enough time so that it doesn't really hit anymore. It's just part of the wallpaper. Uncertainty, again, we are talking in lunch about this. The more that things are uncertain, the more that people tend to interpret that uncertainty in their self-interest, which is to say, it's not as bad as those scientists are saying. And we have experimental evidence about that. But it's not just a speculation on my part that when we have a, I forget now if I put my fishery program in here, but if you tell people, for example, that the salmon stocks, as best we can estimate, run from 50 tons to 100 tons. Well, fishermen assume there's 100 tons, not 50 tons. And so interpretation tends to be in my self-interest. So as long as there's a big confidence interval, I will tend to interpret that whichever way suits my self-interest or the tendency for that. Discounting is in time and in space. We have studies showing people discount things that occur far away. And they discount things that are happening here in favor of thinking that other places are worse. One classic study was done in England with two villages 20 kilometers away, apart from each other. And they were each same sort of village. How are things over there worse than here? How are things over there worse than here? So two villages are almost identical. Optimism bias is sort of illustrated by this fellow here in the picture. Optimism is a good thing or we wouldn't get anywhere in terms of advancing anything. Too much optimism when it becomes what we might call irrational becomes a reason for not doing anything. Oh, well, it'll work out. Well, not in the case of climate change, it's not gonna work out by itself. But optimism that I can develop some implementation or program that will make things better for climate change, that's okay. So optimism bias, for example, there's lots of studies in psychology showing that people of a given age think that they're less likely to have a heart attack than other people of their own age. Something like 85% of people think they're more intelligent than average. About 75% of people think they're better looking than average. So this is optimism bias when it really isn't rational. And lack of perceived control, which is probably one of the chief dragons of inaction. Who am I, what can I do? So that's all forms of limited cognition. And of course you have ideological problems in some quarters, political worldviews, political umbrellas that include a lot of issues, but one of those issues has to do with the environment. So not necessarily an anti-environmental bias itself, but part of a broad ideological perspective that would be consistent with not taking action. System justification is a relatively recent discovery. Is people who are comfortable wanna stay comfortable? Sometimes action in terms of climate change isn't always something that makes me more comfortable. So there's people who will say, well, I would do something, but I don't really wanna make any sacrifices. I don't wanna be putting on a sweater instead of turning my heat down or whatever. So system justification is a tendency among people who are comfortable to wanna stay comfortable, even if it's at the cost of the climate. I don't think the next one is all that common, but there's two forms of it. There's the religious form where people assume some sort of deity is in control of things, so therefore I don't have to do anything because the deity's in control. But the secular form you do hear more often, nature's in control. Nature is another kind of super human power and oh well, it's all natural stuff, right? And so if it's all natural stuff, well then again, I don't really have to do anything. And if there's any engineers in the room, I don't mean to insult them, but there are people who think that the engineers can solve everything. I have a son-in-law who's an engineer, at least he's willing to say, no, we can't solve everything ourselves either. We can help, we are helping. We're making nice wind turbines, we're making LED lights that don't affect your eyes as much as the old ones did. We're doing lots of things. But even the engineers come to me and say, we still have to get our message out, we still have to market these things and that's where psychology comes into account or can help. So ideologies, again, each of these four kinds can contribute to in action. Then there's other people. Much as we like to think we're independent, we're always frequently comparing ourselves to others in terms of our lifestyle, our accomplishments, our houses, our clothing, et cetera, and it's embarrassing to say it, but it's true. And if our people around me are climate inactivists, if you want to use that phrase, I just made it up right now, climate inactivists, then I'm likely to say, well, why should I? If they aren't, if she isn't, if they aren't. And at the national level, those of you who are in diplomatic circles must be especially aware of that kind of problem with, well, if that country's not, why should we do it? We're only a little country. We say that to Canada, even though it's a large geographic country, we say, if they're not doing it down there on the south side of us, that big elephant that we're the flea on, then why should we do it? Social norms, is it normal for a person to ride a bike if he's a CEO to take a train? Would Obama be seen riding a bike? But there are, I forget now which prime minister in one of the EU countries is seen riding the train to work. I know there's security issues, la, la, la, la. But, you know, or even a dean or can a professor be seen riding a bike? Well, yes, I guess so. But it's sort of the whole idea of what's normal in my circumstances. And if what's normal is to keep the heat on most of the time, keep the lights on most of the time, and I try to go against it, I'll get the usual kinds of flak that people usually hand out when people don't follow the norms. And related to that, of course, is the issue of perceived inequity. That is, why should I be doing it if they're not doing it? So it's related, these three are kind of related to each other. If it seems unfair, why should Ireland be doing this if country X is not doing it? It doesn't seem fair. Fairness is a very important value. Fairness is, you know, there are lists of values that you can take if you want. It's a kind of psychological test. And one of the most common is, has 20 values in it. And fairness and justice for some people is right at the top of the list. And for other people it's not so high, but it's often one of the most important values. And if it doesn't, something doesn't seem fair, well then I'm not gonna do it because it's not fair. Some costs, for those who are not economists or don't know about it, essentially means that you're invested in something already. And so when we're invested in something, there's a tendency to not want to change. And so when you think of investments, probably many of you are, first of all, thinking of financial investments, and that is one important thing. I have a colleague who's now retired. He and I have been friends for 40 years, about. And he's a complete denier. Another psychology professor in same kind of educational, social background, et cetera. And then as you dig a little bit deeper, you find out, oh, that actually he owns a whole lot of oil stocks. So suddenly there's a sunk cost problem here in financial terms, you can't do that. So we have, maybe there's some movements in Ireland, but in Canada, among academics, whatever there are divestment campaigns to try to get universities and other people to remove this particular sunk cost. Behavioral momentum is just fancy jargon for habit, which is boring topic, but very, very important. We really tend to do today what we did yesterday. It's hard to get people off the track to change their habits. And a really important problem is the conflicting goals and aspirations. That is, everybody wants to get ahead. I ask people who are in their earlier middle career, are you hoping to have a higher salary later? Yeah. You want a bigger residence, bigger fancier apartment house? Well, yeah. Do you want to have children? Yeah. So do you want to be in good health? Yeah, yeah. So a lot of, do you want to save the environment? Yes. Sometimes these things conflict. And which one wins out? Is the one that's, which one trumps another one? Is which one is higher on the choice list? And so often the environment loses out to other goals. Perceived risks I won't spend a lot of time on, but their psychologists talk about six kinds of risks that you can take. Social risk that you look bad to somebody else. Kind of anxiety or depression. Spending money on an electric car and finding out that battery might not work or that you install solar panels on your residence, but then you move the next year and had time to have them repaid. A functional problem that is the car doesn't work. Physical problems, temporal problems, I won't go into details there, but people generally speaking, this is one thing that psychologists have offered to the world over the last 20 years since Dan Kahneman won a Nobel Prize, about one of the few psychologists to win a Nobel Prize, is that people are essentially risk averse. If you're asking me to take a risk, I'm going to try not to do that unless somehow I'm nudged into it. So some of these things, some climate positive behaviors are mild or moderate risks. And the last of the seven dragons is limited behavior. That is, well, I recycle. What else do you want me to do? That's, I'm done now. And of course we know recycling is a good thing, but we also know that it doesn't really make a big dent in climate change that, not that we want people to stop recycling, but recycling is certainly not enough. And the rebound effect, sometimes called the Jevons Paradox, which actually is a UK invented concept that says essentially, if I take a small step in the right direction, there's a strong tendency for me to take a retrograde step that's even bigger in the wrong direction. So the way that I like to concretize the rebound effect is in Canada anyway. Let's see, I have to translate here to the local context. Honey, I bought a Prius, let's fly to India as a reward to ourselves. The way I put it in Canada is I bought a Prius in Victoria, let's drive to Newfoundland, you know. And believe it or not, there's actual evidence for that. A colleague studied the number of kilometers driven by Japanese buyers of new cars who bought the more energy efficient the car purchased, the more that they drove the next year. So it's sort of, and you know, so this is the rebound effect. I have to, you know, we learn this as a child, you do the right thing, your parents give you something. So I bought a Prius, so now, or Nissan Leaf or something. Anyway, so it's a problem that people actually can go backwards with a positive intent. Why is discredence here? I thought it was finished. Okay, discredence is a word I found buried in the Roseis de Soros. Can't find, I didn't even find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, believe it or not. But you can sort of see the root here. It's essentially, I don't believe you. And it means I don't believe that this program you're offering is worth it. You want to offer me 50 pounds to insulate my house, forget that. It's not good enough, I'm not gonna do it. Scientists, well they're all out just out for fame and making money off their grants. So no, we can't really trust them either. Reactance is a psychological concept that every two year old knows, that is, you can't make me do it. I'm not gonna do it. You're gonna have to punish me, I'm not gonna do it. And denial, we're all familiar with denial that for whatever reason I just don't think the whole thing is a big plot. I've even heard the word used. It's a plot, a socialist plot. So anyway. So this is a lot of dragon. So we did a big study where we just tried to find the main themes in all this. And one way to look at it is that all these things fall into sort of three categories if you want the highly simplified version. Either it's something about the resource that is, well, if we use fisheries as an example. Well, I just didn't, I just don't think that it's a problem to take fish. Or I just don't think it's really a big problem to heat my house to 25 degrees. Or I just don't really think my car is gonna use up all the gasoline in the world. Or it's about self-interest. Considering my situation, I really don't think I need to make any changes because profit's a good thing and I wanna get ahead. And it's only natural to wanna get ahead. And what's your problem with me getting ahead in the world anyway? Or it's some form of interpersonal problem. That is, I would get in trouble with my partner if I became a vegetarian. Or I would be ridiculed if I rode my bike to the office because it's not my place to ride a bike or some other sort of interpersonal comparison. So something about the resource itself, something about my justified, my rational, my deserved self-interest, or something about other people. So given all that, that's the professor's diagnosis of all the problems, what can we do? Well, I'm gonna offer you some generic solutions. If you're hoping that I can give you some magic bullet, silver bullet, I cannot, but I can point in directions, I think that's about it. One of the things we've learned is that there are different, these dragons vary by the population, by the demographics. So old people, young people, educated, uneducated, rural people, urban people. People are not just people, they vary obviously in all kinds of ways. So which barriers are the strongest for which kinds of people, which groups? Which barriers or dragons are the easiest and the cheapest which is the low-hanging fruit to use the cliche? And which just aren't gonna, it's not gonna happen. So there's no sense of wasting resources when it's just not gonna happen. And which ones are the easiest and the cheapest to overcome? So I talk generally about five ways of slaying dragons and I'll go through them fairly quickly, I'm happy to answer questions after or whatever. But one is, what is it exactly that people do right now? And I've discovered that policy makers understandably because you've got different kinds of goals and daily tasks, there isn't always an understanding of just who in a population is doing exactly what. And of course that's important to know what exactly are people doing and what are they not doing? Which of those are the most impactful acts? And that's if you're not aware of a book by a UK author called How Bad Is a Banana, has anybody heard of that book? Written by somebody not too far away from here. Michael Burner's Lee, one of the most fascinating books I've read lately, he goes through sort of everything that you do in your whole life and has a carbon footprint for each thing from eating a banana to having a volcano go off and having a war in Iraq. Great bathroom book. But anyway, a fun book to read. But which are, why spend a lot of effort trying to change behavior when it's something that probably doesn't have a very big impact? And yes, we should be putting a lot of effort into things that have a big impact, especially those that are easier to change. Assess the variations in the rates of those actions and discover what causes those actions. This is sort of the province I'd like to think anyway of psychology, looking at individuals' behaviors. What do they really do? What's causing them to do it, et cetera. Second way is to develop and evaluate interventions which won't be of any kind of news to most of you in the room, but it is sometimes to psychology audiences or social science audiences. What is the best intervention? But not only what is the best one, can we evaluate it in a proper way? We had a big campaign in Canada called the one ton challenge. Huge campaign by the federal government, by all accounts, pretty much a complete failure. So there was an attempt there to make a good attempt to have a national attempt and I could go into all the reasons why it failed. The main point was good efforts don't always work out. They need to be evaluated, refined, et cetera. And so exploring the most effective forms of communication, my own research right now is highly based on communication strategy and I'll tell you more about it if we have time or questions or whatever. And the next one is making the environment, making the right thing easy to do. So the classic example of course which I suppose is here is when we stopped having to take our recycling across town and had a blue box program, you only have to take it to your curb or in offices that the recycling was put under your desk instead of having to walk somewhere. It's a very simple example, but the idea is it increased the rate of recycling enormously because you make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do. And that can be done with technology too or practically any climate positive kind of action. How can we make this so convenient that it takes no extra effort? We're not asking people to sacrifice to do it, it's just easy to do. Third way is to work with other disciplines. When I'm talking to psychologists, I'm saying get out of your silos and start working with the policy people. Get out of your silo and work with the engineers. And several of my grad students are working with engineers right now on cars, on wind power, and on other things. And I wanna say two things about that. A, it's really hard because people have different territorial interests among different disciplines because the jargon is different in different disciplines because some disciplines think they're cooler than others and just because different backgrounds. But B is it's enormously fulfilling to work with another discipline. If you can get past some of these barriers and of course we're never gonna get any, no one discipline is gonna solve everything. Sorry, economists, it's not gonna do it. I'm sorry, engineers, it's not gonna do it. Policy makers, psychologists, and physical scientists. Everybody has to make a contribution if it's not obvious. So urban planners, I don't have any urban planners here but we need to change our cities around a lot and urban planners are ready to help out with that. But sometimes they need help from the other disciplines as well. Fourth way is to make the environment now. And there's plenty of evidence that says once you get people to realize that things are happening here, right here in Dublin, or right here in Ireland at least, or right here in Victoria, then people say, oh, okay, I thought it was just the polar bears. I thought, I'm really down on polar bears. I like polar bears, but polar bears as an example of, or a metaphor for what we should be doing is a bad idea. One of the cool ideas that we came up with in one workshop was to, again, sort of to make it easy for people. You have gardeners, birdwatchers, fishers, it's hunters and can we get people who have some sort of informal interest in the environment to extend that to become involved in documenting the change. So give you one more example from my own experience. I was at the Inner Harbor, Victoria's on a harbor. And a couple of months ago, I saw a brown pelican there. Now the last time I saw a brown pelican was in Mazatlán in Mexico. And I was absolutely floored to see this pelican, pelicans don't come to Victoria. They probably don't come to Dublin either. But once you see a plant and animal, something that never was here before, it's very, very impressive, at least it is for me, but for a butterfly collector to see one that never was here, to see some sort of mammal that hasn't been here before, to see a fish that's supposed to be in Costa Rica somewhere, it makes people really wake up. And develop social networks, I won't go on. Fifth way, again I'm sorry I'm preaching to the converted here, but I'm not always preaching to the converted, but you really have to get to the table. What I tell psychologists who don't normally go to the table is, you can rant all you want, you can do all the research that you want, but if you're not at the table, you won't be in the policy. And it's absolutely the case. And I tell them I'm not gonna tell you that because you already know that, but what's your comfort level? Is it just within your organization? That's okay. Is it at the municipal or the neighborhood level? And we discovered that different people have different kind of personalities at a sort of a comfort level of where to be active. I, for example, would be really uncomfortable trying to be active on the national level, I'm just not a politician at all. But within my organization, yeah I feel comfortable, I can suggest changes and push for changes. But other people, fortunately, are most comfortable at the national or even the global level. Here's where I go back to the Paul Stearns theory and talk about a couple of other new additions to my menagerie besides the dragons. Mules, which are the people who are already doing absolutely everything that they can. I mean, there's just no way to do much more. And we have to find ways to reward these people to give them something, tax breaks, give them recognition wherever we can. And so I think that they then serve as models for other people. The other new organism in the menagerie is honeybees. Honeybees are people, this is an English study actually that got me inspired here. What are honeybees doing when they go around pollinating their trying to get honey to feed the hive? Are they trying to help us by producing fruits and vegetables? Not really, no. So the honeybees come out of a study where somebody asked people who are riding into London within the levy now to drive a car in, stopped 100 bicyclists riding into London and said, excuse me, why are you riding your bike into London? In the back of her head it was, I'm gonna help the environment. About 30 out of the 100 said I'm doing this for the environment. What did the other 70 say? I'm saving money, I'm doing it for my health, I'm trying to get fit. Oh, LED light bulb goes off. LED light bulb goes off and says, guess what some people are doing the right thing but they don't care about the environment, not necessarily. It's a spin off kind of secondary effect, cool. What can we do? Let's say you've got my friend who has oil stocks and is against the environment. What do I tell him? Lauren, you should ride your bike. It's good for your health. Do I tell him you should ride your bike so you can save the environment? He laugh at me. Environment doesn't need saving but my health is important to me. Uh-huh, okay, opens a whole window of possibilities I think for moving people. So much pro-environmental behavior is not done to help the environment. It's done to save money for my health or for some other reason. Here are some other cases besides people riding into London. People who have voluntary simplicity lifestyle, monks or quasi-monks, nuns. The bottom billion who probably would burn as much carbon as they could but they can't because they can't afford it. People who choose not to have children. I hate to say this, I have three children myself but having a child is one of the worst things you can do for the environment. Cycling for health, insulating to save money and all that's cool except for the bottom billion which is not cool. So here's my talk in one slide. To maximize mitigation, policies and practices have to be designed and targeted to different groups of people. They can't be totally assumed to work one policy to work for everybody. It's almost like a Rubik's cube of understanding which people are we talking about? Which barrier is most important for them and which behavior of the sort of five main categories of climate relevant behaviors is the most important. And then we can begin to, this is probably an overcomplexification if you will of the problem but you get the idea that maybe this is the best combination for Dublin. Maybe this is for Victoria. Maybe this is for somebody in China. I'll close by talking about framing a little bit because that's what I'm doing right now. And the question is, well the main thing is words are important. Information doesn't do everything but framing types of messages do make a difference. It's the hottest topic in environmental psychology right now. What do we say to people? How do we say it? And there's a whole science of just of framing and I'm just gonna give you a feeling for some of the studies that have been done in this area. One that I've published myself and I think this is pretty well accepted or known now but we prove the obvious as psychologists sometimes do that giving people some sort of an empowering or motivational message is more effective in getting them to change their behavior than telling them they're gonna have to cut back. Don't tell people you got to cut back. Tell them that you're gonna be an eco-hero, that you're gonna save money, that you're gonna be a model that you'll be better off. Second, make sure that the message is, hits home literally. In your household, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, your family, you will be better off. Doesn't matter about the polar bears. It does but not for messaging. Make sure the message is as local as possible. We have to stay credible. We can't say things that aren't true but every place has its own climate relevant impacts. In British Columbia, we have a whole raft of physical scientists whose only job is to tell each of the five main biospheric regions of BC what is how climate change is gonna affect them because the people in the north of this very large province don't care at all about people down in Vancouver and Victoria at the bottom in terms of climate issues. They care about their own issues. So we have to find the messages and impacts that are the most important locally as possible. We have spatial and temporal discounting. That's another study that we did a couple of years ago. People tend to think that where they live, which goes against what I just, not against but highlights actually what I just said. People, there's a strong tendency for people to think that it's not so bad here, it's really bad over there somewhere. So that tends to lead to inaction because if it's not so bad here, I don't really have to do that much. And people tend to discount the future and live in the present as I said earlier when I was talking about the ancient brain. So we have to make things here and now. We have to make them personal. We have to make them about people's central concerns. Those central concerns vary by demographic segments and those are some of the messages. There's a whole lot of more framing research that's been going on. I was just on the plane here reviewing some of 20 or 30 studies showing that this message works better than this one. This one works better than that one. And not only that, this message works best with young people. This one, Mark, works better with conservatives. Don't ever say the word tax to a conservative. But you can say something to a conservative. You can talk about carbon offsets. Semantics, words matter a lot. So, summing it up. Climate action is about the mules and there are quite a few people doing everything they can. And the honeybees, who don't care that much about the environment, but they're helping out in different ways, minus the dragons. A very simple mathematical formula for solving all the climate problems. Mules plus honeybees minus dragons. Get on board locally, regionally or globally. Thank you very much. Thank you.