"Dumbo, caught obsessing about higher planetary CO2, did not leave any descendants" - (graphic too large to post).
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DISCOUNT RATE STUDIES
Some people balk at evolutionary psychology because they feel it is deterministic and doesnt apply in all situations. I agree. However it does give an accurate general template for how people interact with eachother and the world. If I say that 'men are taller than women', that doesnt mean that ALL men are taller than ALL women, just that on average this is the case. (not the case on TOD staff, fyi). I have shown that our evolutionary origins tilt us towards valuing the present more than the future. Not as much as lower animals, but much more than purely 'rational' beings. The table below shows some research results suggesting certain members of society have even steeper discount rates than others. Specifically, those who smoke, do heroine or cocaine, gamble, are mentally ill, consume alcohol, or are young. Of import is studies on cocaine addicts show that not only do they discount cocaine steeply versus the future - but they discount other things as well. In other words, if you have are addicted to something, you tend to value the present more than the future in other areas of life too.
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Increasing research in the side fields of economics is painting a clearer picture of our tendency to value the present. The above graph is suggestive of different sub-groups of society that exhibit higher discount rates than average. Anecdotally, I originally promised Professor Goose Id write this piece a month ago, but perhaps since Im single, male, drink wine and coffee, play poker on the internet, and have been called 'crazy' by some of my friends, I wrote the entire post in the last 24 hours. Its a good thing I dont smoke or do cocaine or it would never have gotten written. However, since I am aware of my own steep discount rates (also called procrastination in favor of other more fun and intersting things), I devised a solution. I decided to consciously email the entire TOD staff and alert them this post was in the queue this week. In effect I made a social contract and would have suffered embarrassment that I let the team down if I blew it off. More research in this area is necessary -social contracts may provide solutions for a society driving towards a cliff but addicted to driving.
THE FUTURE EATERS
Australian biologist Tim Flannery has called the human species "The Future Eaters". Indeed, paleo-anthropology suggests many historical societies collapsed due to resource depletion even though they must have been aware of it. The example made famous by Jared Diamond is 'what was that Easter Islander thinking that chopped down the last tree'? The best documented recent mass extinctions of flightless birds and other large mammals from New Zealand and Madagascar show that humans were to blame. Though Neandertals and early Homo Sapiens did hunt game without hunting it out, upper Paleolithic hunters were more numerous and better equipped for mass slaughter - 100,000 horses killed at one site, a thousand mammoths at another. Given the millions of years of shaping of our neural circuitry, it is hard to imagine that our mental structure has changed that much in the last few thousand years. Indeed, for those who are not high on the oil subsidy banquet and need food stamps to survive, scientists have shown a 10-15% decline in caloric intake during the month, implying a steep discount rate exists when food is the primary concern.(1)
WHAT THE HECK DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE AND PEAK OIL?
If you're still with me, Im impressed, as the above diagrams and verbage are quite disparate. Yet so is our situation. Environmental icon Gus Speth, in "Red Sky at Morning" laments that the single biggest failing of his generation of environmentalists was that they just 'talked'. We have tens of thousands of well intentioned environmentally minded scientists and activists in this country and others. I pose no answers in this post, because I dont have them. But I am certain that a fusion of the brain sciences and evolutionary biology into the environmental and energy discussions will be a large step forward.
Ultimately we are after impact. If we spend 99% of our efforts on educating people on the facts of peak oil, yet nothing happens, it would be better to spend 50% of our efforts on education and 50% by example. For example, researchers attempted to persuade young students not to litter either by teaching them about ecology and pollution or by telling them they were neat and tidy compared to other students -only the latter had a positive effect.(4) E.O Wilson suggests "A stiffer dose of biological realism is in order..The only way to make a conservation ethic work is to ground it in ultimately selfish reasoning. An essential component of this formula is the principle that people will conserve land and species fiercely if they forsee a material gain for themselves their kin or their tribe." All of our past environmental successes (DDT, Ozone depletion, unleaded gasoline, etc) had some sort of smoking gun -an emotional trigger. The problem with climate change/ peak oil, is when we do get the emotional trigger, it may be a gatling gun on full bore.
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http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2243#more
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