University Place Academy Evenings  Sharon Dunwoody, et al Barriers to Addressing Our Climate and Energy Challenges  May 9, 2013 UP875   cc >> Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I'm Jane Elder, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, which organizes these Academy Evening talks. We're thrilled to have you here tonight for a very special panel that looks at climate change and energy challenges from a fresh angle, how we process or fail to process information about risks that may seem impersonal and abstract. Whether or not we as a society can grasp these risks and take appropriate action will have serious consequences for us all. Whether we call it global warming, climate change, or global climate disruption, the impacts will play out in different regions of the world in different ways. It's more than the just tragically cliche image of a polar bear floating adrift on a hunk of ice. Right here in Wisconsin, climate change is affecting our lives, and is something you need to grapple with, both in terms of mitigating the pace and scale of change, and adapting when we can, to its effects. We will all have roles to play in those strategies. These are daunting issues, but they're not hopeless ones, and our panelists will help us consider the way forward. But before we dive in, I need to mention a few things. 

This event is being videotaped by our friends at Wisconsin Public Television, who will broadcast it at a later date. You will also be able to watch it online on both Wisconsin Public Television's website, and ours. Also, there'll be time for questions after tonight's panel. Once we begin Q&A, please wait for someone to bring you a microphone before you speak. That way, everyone can hear your question. Also, please take this opportunity to silence your cell phones. A few words about the Academy. We're an independent non-profit, separate from the university and the state, and we're supported in part by our members. During the slide show, while you were getting seated, I hope you saw the information about joining the Academy for just $30. After tonight's panel, feel free to talk to me or any of the other Academy staff members here if you have any questions. 

Members support not only the Academy Evenings, but also our magazine, the James Watrous Gallery, and other terrific programs, including our initiative on Wisconsin's Climate and Energy Future, of which this panel is one part. Our goal is to connect people and ideas to make Wisconsin better, and your participation is a key ingredient to making that happen. In addition to our members, we also have terrific sponsors, and I'd to thank the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, the Great Performance Fund at the Madison Community Foundation, and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation for their generous support. Now, let's move to our topic for tonight, "Barriers to Coping with our Climate and Energy Challenges." After a few remarks of my own, we'll hear from three people on the cutting edge of this field. First, we'll have Dietram Scheufele from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at UW-Madison. He also happens to be one of the newest fellows at the Wisconsin Academy, inducted this fall. Then we'll hear from Sharon Dunwoody, of the UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Sharon and Dietram are experts on the way science gets communicated to the public, and how people make decisions about issues that are affecting their lives. Kathy Kuntz, the executive director of Cool Choices, will complete the evening. Cool Choices is a non-profit that helps individuals, businesses, and communities cut their greenhouse gas emissions through voluntary action. 

Cool Choices makes sustainability easy, social, and fun. Kathy will show you specific examples of how they've made that happen. To set the stage for Dietram, Sharon, and Kathy, I'd like to share just a few concepts from my own background in communications. It'll just take me a moment here to find the slides.  There we go, great. Climate change and energy issues are complex. There are unique communications approaches for dealing with complex issues. Many of the historic models for social change communications are based on information based models. These are known in the trade as the KAB models, or the Knowledge, Attitude, and Behavior models. They're based on a variety of assumptions. 

For many years, this was the classic public education strategy. The notion is that if you provide people with information, they will assimilate it and gain knowledge. Then the next assumption is that with this knowledge in hand, logical reasoning leads to a shift in attitudes. And in theory, this increases concern and motivation to take action. Then, driven by this change in attitude, people will change their behavior and take action. It's a great model, but it doesn't work very well. [laughter] Human attitudes and behaviors are really complicated as we know, and so are the things that influence them, from our cognitive processes to the people we hang out with, to the culture we grew up in, and to the sea of media influences and messages that reach us every day. Humans are complicated beings, and that's why we're not all logical, reasoning objects, or Spock. So if you look at communications strategies, we have to look beyond the notion of just infusing knowledge and hoping it works. There's been a lot of research in the area of communicating about climate change, some of the most notable at the US Center on Climate Change Communication, and I encourage you to explore their work. 

Sharon will be touching on it a little bit today. They're helping us understand why so many sectors of the public really don't grasp or don't find the way to act on this issue. So for tonight's discussion, our panelists will explore insights into the barriers about communicating about climate and energy, and the ways to surmount them. We have some tremendous talent. I'm delighted to welcome them here tonight. Let's start with Dietram. [applause]  >> Thank you so much. >> You're very welcome. >> Thank you, first of all, for having me, and thank you for being here. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking, hopefully, less time than I was planning. 

I know both of the other two panelists. I admire their work. I use it all the time. So I'm looking forward to hearing what they have to say, and also hopefully to discussing this a little bit further. Most importantly, I just want to touch really quickly on three related things. That animation on the PC is in red, and not in green, so thank you to Apple and Steve Jobs for switching the color. By the way, if you'd like to see those slides, I uploaded them on SlideShare. If you go to my Twitter account, which is @Scheufele, you'll see you can just download them there directly, including the correct colors. So really quickly, the first point. I just want to talk about climate change as an issue that's maybe not quite as representative as other scientific issues for where we are at the public-science interface, but therefore, also much more complex. 

The second thing that I quickly want to touch on is, well, if it's not information, and I very much agree with what Jane just said, then how do we make decisions. I want to touch on three different things that we know that we've seen across scientific issues, and I'll show you how they work out for climate change, and then end with what I would a little bit of a blasphemous idea, and you'll maybe see why, and if you want to yell at me for it, that's exactly where we should be going with this. So that's the red, and where the animation should be. Let's start with that one, really quickly. The public-science interface, especially on climate change. An interesting thing, is the US of course, is in many ways different than all other countries in this world when it comes to science and technology, and in other ways it's exactly the same. I'll show you some of the differences first. This is simply asking questions. This is from a Pew survey, asking how much people worry about climate change, a great deal, plotted here on the Y-axis, and you see already from how I ordered the countries, exactly how this is going to play out. Meaning, the US being at the very bottom, below even China, in terms of general concerns. 

Again, this is not something that's necessarily unusual, but it's something that makes the US consistently different from other countries. The problem, and just to reiterate what we just heard, the problem is that what you see in the lefthand corner, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Nova Science, the Science Section of the New York Times, are really the tools that we've traditionally used to connect, to close those public-science divides. The tricky part with that is if you look at Nova Science, for instance, a good show attracts 2% of the American public. The Science section of the New York Times, and so on of course, is read by a very unique set of audiences. The problem is one way or the other, we rely on that knowledge deficit model. Sometimes it's called the familiarity hypothesis, but it's all based on the same assumption. The assumption is that if we just teach people the science, they will be able to make better decisions, meaning pro-science decisions. They'll be more supported. As a result, what good science communication is, what good engagement with the public about science is, is explaining the science better. And if we just manage to do that, then that works out. 

As we just heard, there's very little empirical support. That correlation between knowledge and attitudes, and support for science, is weak at best, and the more controversial the science gets, study after study after study shows that correlation is almost to zero, meaning there is almost no correlation anymore. I just want to show you climate change really quickly as one example. One of the things, for example, that Gallop has done for a long time now, is track how people view public communication, or media coverage of climate change, and how many people think that the seriousness of the issue is exaggerated. You see on the Y-axis here the percent of folks who say that the issue is exaggerated in the media. So this is how it looks since 1997. You see a slight increase going up, with a few peaks. Those peaks are exactly what I would describe as a boomerang effect, meaning the more we talk about climate change, the more people think the issue is exaggerated. If you look at popular movies, for instance, that has really put the issue on the public agenda, and have created other types of media coverage. Then of course, Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth," his winning an Oscar, and then eventually us going into Cancun, the big climate change conference, where we tried to find solutions. 

Again, being the peak of climate change coverage, and also the peak of the general American public thinking that we're really exaggerating the issue, So, having this boomerang effect. This already gives you a very good indication of what happens if we just tell more of the science to the general public. So, how do we all make decisions, and how does this play out? This is a slide that some of you may have seen, but I wanted to put it up one more time, because it really captures what we do. This is us. This is us every day, making thousands and tens of thousands of decisions, none of which we think about very much. But for some reason, we think that when it comes to issues like nanotechnology, and stem cell, and climate change, we invest a lot more time than we would finding childcare, doing the things that actually do have immediate consequences in our lives. Again, climate change may have as well, but it's a more difficult sell. A lot of people have referred to this as low information rationality. So, what we do every day, meaning we invest as much information as we think we have to, but not a lot more, is very rational. It's just dividing our attention across all these tens of thousands of decisions. 

So, a lot of political scientists, psychologists, and communication researchers have said, look, it doesn't make a lot of sense. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to not invest a lot of cognitive energy. So that whole literacy idea really doesn't fit with how we as human beings make decisions. But of course, we do constantly judge if climate change is real. We judge if cutting funding for stem cell research is a good idea politically. We constantly make scientific decisions, but we make those based on shortcuts, based on replacements for information. I just want to tell you about a few of them and how they play out in climate change. The first one is one that's pretty central to my work, and I think very, very important for communicating science in public settings, and I'm going to tell you why. It's the concept of framing. Framing refers to the idea that I can show you a picture like this, the Genetically Frosted Fakes, Tony the Franken-Tiger, and you immediately know what I'm trying to say. 

I didn't give you any information. I didn't give you any facts. I didn't explain anything to you, but it immediately ties the issue of genetically modified organisms to something that you already know, to a cognitive shelf that you can put the issue on. Of course, that's why it's an important tool for journalists, as well. This is an article from the Atlantic Monthly, talking about frankenfood. It's not talking about genetically modified organisms, the pluses and minuses, it's actually a fairly positive article. But you also see the carrot stitched up and with a screw through it, exactly like Frankenstein, tying it to an image in your head that you already know. So, how does it work? Well, it works in part based on, the work has been explained by Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Dan Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in psychology. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but he did, in 2002. 

One of his arguments was look, you can't look at the world without a frame of reference. There is no such thing as objective perception. All perception depends on a frame of reference. That idea was not necessarily new, but they did a lot of experimental work to really show us why that matters, why that matters in particular for what people have called ambiguous stimulus, meaning a stimulus that could mean one thing or another. This goes back to some experimental work in the '50s on the broken "B" stimulus. The broken B stimulus refers to this. It could be a one and a three or it could be a B. Well, what it is depends on which mental shelf you put it on. And which mental shelf you put it on depends on which experimental condition you're in. If you're in experimental condition one, you put this on the letter shelf. 

If you're in experimental condition two, you put this on the number shelf. At least you're much more likely to do it. In other words, this B is science. The B is stem cell that could all be about unborn life, or stem cell that could be about curing Parkinson's. It could be about nano being the next plastic or nanotechnology being the next asbestos. And how it's being described, how it's framed, how the terminology's chosen influences which cognitive shelf all of us put it on. Let me just show you, give you one additional kind of quick summary of what framing is. On the lefthand side, you see a book by Frank Luntz, and I don't mean to necessarily push books by republican campaign strategists here, but it's an excellent overview of how framing works. Frank Luntz has been doing this for the republicans in DC for a long, long time, essentially figuring out which words make us put political issues on particular shelves. Framing, and this is the important part, coming back to Jane's part from earlier, is not about information. 

It's not getting different information. It's about taking the exact same information and presenting it differently. From politics, you know this. You've seen Obama talking about a bank bailout, and realizing that within two or three days, that that's a really bad frame, and shifting it over to the rescue package, because nobody wants to bailout banks, but everybody wants to rescue the economy. Gun control and gun safety. Gun control says taking away constitutionally guaranteed rights. Gun safety say children, accidents, gun locks. So simply by using a different term, and this is what Joe Biden began using, by the way, taken straight from the Bill Clinton playbook, that's a different issue, changing essentially how we think about gun control. But they're not just tools for spinning, they're tools that we use every day. If I say something in this room and I see 100-200 blank faces, I'm going to switch the frame. 

I'm going to try and find a cognitive shelf that I can communicate to. I'm going to try to find a different metaphor, a different way of describing the issue. That's what framing is ultimately all about. Coming back to the terms that Jane also mentioned earlier, framing has one key problem, and that is, once the frame is established, once we're talking about Frankenfood, it's very difficult to change. John Holdren, who left the Belfer Center in the Kennedy School at Harvard to go to the Office of Science, Technology, and Policy, for Obama, learned his lesson the hard way when he came out and said look, he went to DC and said I'm going to change the language, I'm going to talk about global climate disruption. We're going to stop talking about climate change, because people need to understand that this is not gradual change. They need to understand that these are disruptive patterns that will influence everything. He got hammered immediately by Fox News who said, you're going to try and re-spin this issue for political gains. You're going to try and change the language simply to shape public opinion. And of course, to some degree that was true. 

As a result, it never really stuck. Once the frame is established, it's not changing. So that's the first one that I think is extremely important as we think about climate change, how we talk about it, and any other scientific issue is extremely important. The second one, priming. Priming is the idea that not only does how we speak about issues matter, but also when we do make decisions, most of us have somewhat stable attitudes, with the key being somewhat. Most of our attitudes are susceptible to change. One of the most subtle changes is due to the five plus/minus two considerations that at any given moment are in our memory, in our bank. The ones that you can most easily retrieve from memory. That's how we judge candidates. That's how we judge issues. 

There's some stability, but there's a lot of variability that comes simply from what we're thinking about at the moment. So let me show you this set of data really quick. Remember that earlier table where I showed you that Americans in general were really low in terms of how much they worried about climate change. Well, here's a slight variation on this question from an AP-GK poll, asking if reducing climate change, global warming, if you don't do it, how serious a problem is this going to be. From where I put the label, you can already tell where the somewhat serious and the very serious people are here, 80%, totally inconsistent with the previous graph that I showed you. Except, of course, this was right after Sandy. This is when it happened. So when it happened, yes we do have stable attitudes in climate change, but weather patterns or events can very easily change them. Because all of a sudden, when we think climate change, we think Sandy. We've seen this with the death penalty for a long time. 

If I ask you in a survey, for instance, about Oklahoma City, about the Boston bombings, and then I ask you for your attitudes on the death penalty, you'll be significantly more likely to support the death penalty, simply because in your brain, when you retrieve information, those two things happen to be very salient, because I just asked you about them. The same thing is happening here. It happens in a much more complex way than you think. There's a study coming out of the University of Maine, I believe, that's forthcoming in weather, climate, and society. What they did is actually fairly smart, and I don't mean to say "actually," it is very smart. What they did is they did a national survey. They also geo coded where every person is. They calculated if, in that location, where that person lives, there's a deviation of degrees down here in centigrade, from the average weather pattern that's normal at that time. So you see the deviations. There's a whole set of depressing findings in here. 

[laughter] One, if you look at the two ideological groups, the democrats and the republicans, you see very clearly that they don't change much based on the weather. They just go by ideology. Democrats believe in climate change, republicans don't. There's not much of a change. The interesting thing is the green group, and that's equally depressing, because that's a larger and larger group of the electorate. And of course for them, you see an almost perfect linear correlation, meaning the warmer, or the more positive deviation there is from their general climate or the general temperature in their area, the more they believe in climate change. And the colder it gets, the less they believe in climate change. So in other words, this is exactly the idea of priming that we're talking about, where how warm it is today, if you ask in a survey, and if it's above average warm, I'm more likely, if I'm independent, to believe in climate change. So your classic priming, and coming back to the person with their coffee cup and their cell phone driving the car at the same time, that's how we make a lot of decisions about what's really happening in the world around us. The last one I want to talk about really quickly is the idea of perceptual filters. 

That's the idea that all of us are wearing, if you will, colored glasses, when you look at the world. The color of those glasses is determined by the values, by the beliefs, by the political ideologies. If anybody says they don't wear those glasses, it's a lie. We all do. It's just a function, again, of what the color is. All of us look at the world, and all of you are going to walk out of this talk, and out of this panel, thinking and drawing different conclusions, having seen different things, liking speakers differently. And mostly because you all came here with a different set of values and beliefs, and so on and so forth. You will see the world through those lenses. Again, this goes back to the idea that all perception is reference dependant. One of the most dramatic lenses that of course we've been using in the past months and years, are the blue and the red ones. 

As I said earlier, these are perceptual filters, ideological filters, and the same piece of information, the same piece of news, means different things to different people. Let me just show you one Wisconsin example here, on biofuels, on energy, as one of the ways of dealing and mitigating climate change. I'm just showing you some simplistic breakdowns here. There are more complex models that we published in Life Sciences. But basically, what we did is we looked at how much people paid attention to news about climate change, in this case, bioenergy. Actually, I saw Brett Shaw earlier, who was part of this article, one of my colleagues in Life Sciences Communication. We looked at if more attention to news increases peoples' beliefs about the economic impacts, for instance. Do they think that there are economic benefits to climate change? To some degree, you can say, well, you know, clearly there will be a difference between democrats and republicans because they watch different types of television, and that's somewhat true, if you look at Fox News and MSNBC as two ideological poles. But that's not necessarily true for local newspapers, which we also include. It doesn't matter really how you slice the media, what you see is exactly this. 

What you see is that it doesn't matter. They look at the same types of news. They extract different things. All of us do. If we have strong ideological beliefs in one direction or the other, we extract different things. If we're democrats, more news use leads to the belief that economic impacts of biofuels are really a good thing, or that they have a positive economic impact. If you're republican, reading news and watching news on television leads to the exact opposite conclusion. So in other words, and I can show you experimental data, I just used the biofuels example. There's work on cultural cognition and others, and motivated reasoning, that show the exact same thing. The exact same piece of information is interpreted differently, simply based on the lenses that we all wear, the lenses that we wear in terms of religiosity, in terms of ideology, and so on. 

So really quickly, one last slide with as I said, a somewhat blasphemous idea. Maybe it's not quite as blasphemous, but it goes back to Al Gore, who I think has not been our best messenger for climate change. I'm going to put that out there, mostly because of course, he's a somewhat strong ideologue, and of course he turned one gigantic PowerPoint presentation into a movie, falling right back into the knowledge deficit model. If we just preach to them, then eventually they'll get it. And most research in part coming out of the climate group has shown that that was preaching to the choir. I think there's an increasing number of people who are saying, look, if we communicate successfully about climate change, it's not about knowledge. It's not about actually being right on the issue of climate change. If we don't convince anybody that climate change really exists, but if we get them eventually to buy into mitigation or adaptation strategies, we've won the battle. In other words, it's not about being right in the end. It's not about necessarily for an issue like climate change, it may not be about convincing people who are extremely difficult to convince, based on all the things I just talked about, based on well established frames that are not going to change any more, based on ideological lenses that we're all using, and based on weather patterns having a stronger impact than a lot of other things. 

So at this point, it may just be by building political coalitions, and Tom Friedman has written about this. Mitt Romney in many ways has written about this saying, look, it doesn't matter if we build more fuel efficient cars or invest in biofuels out of competitiveness with China or because of global warming. If the outcome is the same, then we don't have to be right on this issue. It's perfectly fine to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or without knowing the right reasons. So I'm going to leave it at that and I'm looking forward to discussion. Thank you very much. [applause]  >> We were all actually trying to come here last winter with the snowstorm. [laughter] And now here you are, back again in the rain. So, it's a pleasure to be here, and I really appreciate the opportunity to have this chat with all of you. We hope to have an interesting panel discussion when we all three get back up here. 

I want to talk again about the kinds of barriers that people run into, that we all run into when we think about changing behavior in service to climate change. I'm calling this, "To Overcome Individual Barriers, It May Take a Village." And I'll explain to you what I mean by that in a few minutes. But first, I want to talk about three things, and some these, Dietram has covered very, very, well, so I'm going to go skipping over the surface of some of this. But three barriers that interest me greatly to individual commitments and action to anything, and we're talking about climate change here, one is the argument again that has been very thoroughly torpedoed in this talk tonight, that again, the problem is that people don't know enough. Another is this problem of emotional indifference, that people don't care enough about the issue. And I also want to talk very briefly about what I call a dysfunctional cultural narrative, that we're all being subjected to narratives that advise us to be indifferent and even actively hostile to some of these issues. Then I'm going to get to the point of the title of this talk, I call this a talklet, soon after that. So this is about folks just don't know enough to care. Again, both Jane and Dietram have done a good job of making this point. The argument, of course, the traditional argument is that if you don't support climate change action, then we need to jack up your level of knowledge about the issue. 

The more you know, the more supportive you will be. Now, there is some modest evidence for a relationship between knowledge and support for a variety of science issues. But again, what you find very often is it's modest at best, and sometimes no relationship at all. So, when the topic is unsuccessful, of course, what do scientists do? They opt for more information. Again, as I've said earlier, knowledge does matter up to a point. But as Dietram indicated, information seeking and processing is hard work for busy people. Most of us are not going to engage in that kind of effort unless there's a really important reason to do so. It's frightening to look at how frequently we glide over the surface of issues and just make decisions on the basis of very modest pots of information. I mean, for example, even lift threatening decisions, we often make, you go into a doctor's office and the doctor says something fairly unpleasant to you, or scary to you. What most people do is walk out and take that person's advice. 

They have acted in a life threatening situation on the basis of the advice of one person. So again, we're very busy souls. We don't spend a lot of time gathering information. I spend most of my research program trying to figure out the circumstances that would lead us to process information systematically. In other words, put a lot of effort into learning, digesting, analyzing, reaching some conclusions, and we are hard pressed to find that situation. We certainly don't find it with climate change. The other thing that Dietram has already mentioned as well is that even when we do process information, we're likely to do so through the lens of what we already think is true, rather than opening up to a conversation about an issue that would lead us to change the beliefs that we have. Again, a lot of this is examined through a variety of data. If you go online, you can find a lot of information these days. I thought I would put up one type of information here by Tony Leiserowitz who is at the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. 

Jane mentioned this work before. There are a lot of very good data gathering going on around the country. But I thought I would introduce you briefly to Tony's Six Americas. He has clustered individuals who are wearing particular lenses, and as a result, developed beliefs about climate change that lead them to action or no action. He calls them the Global Warming's Six Americas. You have the Alarmed, the Concerned, the Cautious, the Disengaged, the Doubtful, and the Dismissive. These are sort of psychographic categories based on questions that Tony has asked samples of the American public. This particular slide, which gives you a spread of Americans is now a little different. Tony has just come out with some new survey data from September 2012. What he finds is not much different than what you see here. 

Thankfully, from the point of view I expect of many people in the audience, the largest categories are still the concerned and the cautious, followed by, in the 2012 data, people who are alarmed about climate change. So, you are seeing a slow but steady accretion of individuals over onto the side of the issue that is concerned about climate change. Again, this accretion is slow. It is warped by other variables that come along, and that makes it very difficult for us to think about public perceptions or public policies, because finding majorities in these kinds of data is very difficult to do. The emotional shortcuts deal I think with, again, this concept of emotional indifference argues that folks don't care about this issue because they have no personal encounters with it. Again, that is the case with a lot of issues. There's that ever present polar bear. Tony, again, has done I think most of the work so far looking at the kinds of images that pop into our mind when someone approaches us and says, as Tony does, "Climate change, what is the first image that pops to mind?" What he finds, time and time again among Americans, are these images. Images of things, drastic things that are happening, the things that are happening very, very far away. The argument here is that we are sort of effectively or emotionally indifferent to this issue, because although we can sympathize with animals-- Oh, the light isn't as good here, but this is melting glaciers in Greenland, which is getting a little scary now, huge amounts of water making their way into the ocean, fresh water. 

But again, we can be sympathetic. We can be even horrified in a certain gentile Midwestern way, but it's not about us, okay? Now, one question one should ask is, is that beginning to change. Are things happening that are changing our emotional reactions to climate change? The answer is probably yes. This is a map of, between 1982 and 2012, of heat wave days in the state of Wisconsin. If you look at the red, that's the part of the state we are in. These are heat wave days in excess of 70-79 days. Again, it's clearly getting warmer in our part of the state. And as Dietram noted, when that happens, we react. This happens, again, on a large scale and both a local scale. The Yale Project, for example, did a survey of 91,000, or took data looking at surveys from 91,000 people in 89 countries, and found that people do accurately remember the weather in their areas, that they can accurately tell you that the weather in the past year got warmer or colder. 

Then their beliefs about global warming are associated with those perceptions. We also find it at the local level. We put a few questions last September on the Marquette Poll that Charles Franklin does periodically and found the same thing. Remember, in September, we had just come out of a terrible drought and heat wave. We asked residents of Wisconsin about their perception of the weather in their county, and found that again, if you told us that your weather was a lot hotter this past summer than usual, you also told us that you were far more certain that climate change was taking place. So again, those kinds of experiential elements may be, however volatile they may be, influencing, again, our emotional reactions. Some of us do have, are beginning to have personal experiences that we relate to climate change. This is, and I told my partner Steve, this is the moment, Steve, birders out there, tell me, what is this? Carolina wren, excellent, okay. Carolina wrens normally don't hang around Wisconsin. You've probably been hearing them. 

We had a pair in our yard all winter long. They should not be here. They're not well adapted to cold weather. They're now, as best as we can tell, breeding somewhere in the yard. So again, things are happening. Individuals are having experiences that may in fact lead them to some sort of emotional experiential reactions. But again, there are also cultural narratives that can get in the way of our beliefs about climate change. Again, one is that there are lots of technological ways to solve the problem. So as innovative Americans, we can fix whatever goes wrong. This particular image is a series of river gates that was built in the 1970s to protect London from storm surges. 

It was called the Thames Barrier. In 1990, the barrier closed once or twice a year on average. In 2003, it closed 14 times. Again, sea level rise, they're expecting to use it more and more frequently. Or even that the kind of out of the box thinking even happens. A University of Arizona Professor Roger Angel is proposing solar shields to protect the earth. They would be massive, 100,000 square mile shields, made from trillions of lenses that would deflect the sun's rays, and allow a cooler surface. Cultural narratives are real barriers. One of the big cultural narratives you run into is again, if everybody else doesn't care, why should I care? This leads me to my it takes a village argument. One thing that we're exploring, and this would be a good segue to Kathy's talk, as well, is the concept of social norms. 

I have a strong interest in changing people's values and getting people to care about issues like this, and to do it, because they think it is important and they value that kind of behavior change. One way to do this may be to change the behavior first, and that's what the social norms, of course, will do. The argument of social norms is that individuals will use perceptions of others as a standard against which to compare their own behaviors, and that we do this all the time. Dietram was very successful in arguing about the ubiquity of frames. This is also a ubiquitous behavior. You and I go through life monitoring the world around us, looking at our community to figure out what other people are doing, what other people care about, and for the most part, we want to be like them, particularly again if we find ourself in an ambiguous situation where we're not quite sure what the right act is, the right behavior might be. And when other people out there are a lot like us. Again, the argument here is you can change people's behaviors, attitudes and values may follow. So this sounds entirely backward from the scenario that Jane set up for us. But there's some interesting work going on. 

Just one quick example. This is not about climate change, but it is about recycling. This is called the hotel towel experiment. I'll just give you a quick view of it, by some social psychologists, where they essentially-- In a hotel room, you all run into the ubiquitous tag in the bathroom that says, you can help us help the planet. Recycle your linens. Recycle your towels. And some subset of you do that. Now, this experiment involves that tag, but the wording is different on the three conditions. Here's one tag that said basically you can help save the environment. The classic tag, there was a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, for that, that you can help save the environment if you are willing to reuse your towels. 

Leave them on the rack. What they typically find with that kind of a tag, in this study, 37% of the people who checked in and then checked out did that. Now we're going to change the tag just a little bit. Now we're going to say join your fellow guests in helping to save the environment; 43% of people in those rooms reused their towels. Then there's one more. "75% of the guests who stayed in this room recycled their towels, reused their towels, how about you?" 49%. All that changes here is the wording, okay? What changes is absolutely crucial. Basically, the change says people like you reuse their towels. Even in that minor thing, where nobody's watching you, nobody cares, more people choose to reuse their towels and take classic social norms. In fact, when you say lots of people who have actually checked into this darn room just like you reuse their towels, boom, you get a very large increase in the number of people who actually reuse. 

There is a great deal of activity, attempt to use social norms now to change our behaviors with respect to energy conservation with an eye then to influencing climate change. Oh, I'm sorry, this is Goldstein, Cialdini, and an unpronounceable name [Griskevicius], 2008. Sorry. But again, one classic company that's doing this right now is a company called OPower. Actually, Cialdini played a role in its creation. This is my last slide, so I'll be abandoning ship here in just a minute. But again, OPower mails home energy report letters to residents that compare a household's energy use to that of similar neighbors, and provides energy conservation tips.  Think of this. Social norms. You get something in the mail that tells you how much energy your neighbors are using, okay? All right. 

The average customer receiving OPower reports has cut energy usage by more than 2.5%, okay? And when you ask them why they cut their energy, they will give you a lot of answers like I care about the environment. I spend less money if I use less energy. They will not say to you it's because I got a letter that shows me that all my neighbors are using less energy than I am. But then when you do the analysis, and there are some smart people looking at all these experiments around the country, the best predictor of your change in energy usage in your home is the letter, okay? The social normative effect of knowing what your neighbors are doing. OPower is currently working with something like 85 utility companies in seven countries. I don't believe OPower has infiltrated Madison, although I know my utility, MG&E, invites you to go onto the site where I can see comparisons of my energy usage with energy usage of other Madison residents. I haven't had the courage to do that yet personally, but you know. So again, this is where the village comes in, again, a concept of social norms, I would argue is a way to use a community set of behaviors to begin to first change the behaviors of other people, and then let those behavioral changes induce changes in the values that those people have. I'm going to stop here and invite Kathy up. [applause]  >> Sometimes for an evening presentation, it seems like being last isn't the best thing. 

In this case, it's like the most fabulous of all things, because Dietram and Sharon do such a good job of setting up this issue for me. It's just kind of like I sort of think they should go everywhere I go to talk, and just cut some deal around that. So as Jane said earlier, I'm Kathy Kuntz. I lead an organization called Cool Choices. We're a non-profit, and our quest is to get individuals, communities and small business to adopt sustainable practices that reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. We're essentially at the epicenter of this quest to make people take action on these issues that as Dietram and Sharon pointed out, are really difficult to motivate people around. I want to talk a little bit about how we think about some of the challenges behind what we're doing, and then really move into what we're doing to overcome those. But when we think about sort of the world of challenges we're looking at, just a couple of things from a slightly broader perspective. Here in Wisconsin, when we talk to consumers about these issues, everyone wants to save money. I think a little bit, that's just our Midwest pragmatism that, if I'm wasting money, tell me where it is, and I'll get it, kind of thing. 

There's also this really strong commitment to the local environment. We see this everywhere we have done survey work in Wisconsin. This is often expressed by people saying things like I want my kids and grandkids to hunt and fish in the places I hunt and fish. So it's a very kind of emotional attachment to place. It's a very local place. Now, people are not worried about climate change in the same way. Climate change, they tend to dismiss these conversations more often, and partly right now because we're in a tricky economic place and folks have a lot of other things taking cognitive space for them. The other thing about their cognitive space-- So, my personal background is I spent about two decades doing energy efficiency programs in the kind of electric and gas industry. So, I say this with full acknowledgement that I was part of that problem for plenty of years. We just overloaded people with information from a million different places, about what they should do. 

Then there's the stuff your brother told you you should do, and it's all conflicting. If you add up all the different ways you can save energy, it's probably about 200% of your bill. So there's a way that, you know, none of this makes sense, and the easiest thing to do is just stop paying attention to it. The other reason people stop paying attention is these issues seem really enormous. And very often, folks will say to me, but I'm one person. They're turning on new power plants in China all the time. Nothing I do can possibly make a difference. So, again, that gives you a really good reason not to act, because my actions are too small. My favorite of all reasons not to act, though, is this one. See, that's the PC/Mac thing. 

[laughter] That's okay. We know absolutely that we're not the ones wasting. [light laughter] Each of us has a really strong sense that yep, there are people wasting energy out there. There are people wasting water. There's a lot of surveys to indicate most of you can point out who they are in your block. [laughter] But none of it is at your house. Again, that means that you don't have to do anything. This is all about other people. Those other people should pay attention to all that information overload and do something. So, all of that is sort of the context in which Cool Choices needs to motivate people to adopt sustainable practices. 

So, our ideal change strategy, as we sort of looked at that and looked at best practices in other universes, we need to give people a simple path to follow. We need to make the complicated less complicated. To Sharon's point, we need to give folks evidence that other people just like them are making changes, too. And that "just like them" is really important. So, our Cook Choices office is here in Madison. We do a lot of work in the Fox Valley. We do work out in La Crosse. We work in Milwaukee now. There's a lot of places in Wisconsin, when I stand up and say I'm from Madison, everyone in the room goes, you are not like us. [laughter] So, I've got to show them that people like them are doing things. 

Then, people need clear feedback about how they're doing. Am I making progress? Sharon mentioned the MG&E website which actually, if you've never looked at your utility usage on that, you should. It's terrific. It does give you some reasonably clear indices on how you're doing. But a utility bill is not a clear indication of how you're doing. It's a maze. We don't have a lot of things that really give us a scorecard. OPower is a version of a scorecard. On this issue, we also need to figure out how to give people a sense of urgency, because the clock is ticking. When folks say to me, you know, I'm going to insulate my house, but you know, I'm thinking maybe I'll do that in five years when, whatever. 

How do we get them to make that a priority? Then finally, I need to be able to convince people that they're not the first drop in the bucket. They're the drop that makes the bucket full, that what they do and what other people do adds up to something more substantive. That was the quest. I have to tell you that probably for several months, at the end of 2010, when Cool Choices was brand new and it was me, I spent time with a lot of smart people going, okay, that's the quest; how are we going to do this. Then I hired this really sharp young man, who said, "It's sounds like a game." I have to tell you, the first, probably, six times he said that to me, I said some variation of, well, it's not a game. [laughter] This is this the future of humankind. And I started thinking, okay, what were we thinking. He thinks this is a game. He had me look at literature around serious games and meet with gamers, which was completely outside of my comfort zone. Ultimately, I realized he was right, and we built a game. 

So we have a game we play with corporate partners, because it turns out that your co-workers are one of the most important social norm groups that you have. You have a ton in common with your co-workers. You spend 8+ hours a day with them. They have the same kind of training you have. They have a number of the same concerns. We eat lunch in the same places. These are really influential people in your lives. Our game, though, is about personal actions more than professional actions. You can think of it almost like a corporate wellness program, except I'm trying to reduce your carbon footprint instead of your waistline. Our game is really simple. 

We give people a deck of cards, and I'll talk more about cards later. Every card has a sustainable action and a point value. You do the action, you claim the points. Points, not tons of carbon. Not million BTUs. Not kilowatt hours. Not any of the geek stuff that somebody like me cares about counting. We're counting all of that in the background, but players never see it. In the game, people get credit for things they were doing before the game. They get credit for new things they're doing. 

We keep track of those things separately, but for players, it's all very simple and straightforward. It's also completely transparent. Inside a company, when people are playing a game, everybody who's playing can see what everyone else says they're doing. That does two really important things for us. First, it keeps people much more honest. We're all very self involved. We all assume that if we're going to do something, everyone notices. People know the last time I wore this shirt, and you know, blah, blah, blah, because I'm the center of your universe, too, sort of thing. So, people don't cheat, because they're worried that Tim's going to remember that he saw me in the grocery store, and I did not have my reusable bags. He's going to report me to Cool Choices, and they're going to take away my deck of cards. 

[laughter] But it also inspires people. When you get to see what other people are doing, people go, oh, she did that, well we can do that. How hard can that be if she did it, kind of thing. So you know, you get some competitive juices going there. The last important sort of meta thing about the game is that we aggregate outcomes. So, when you play a card that says you turn off the water when you brush your teeth, the last thing I want to say to you is, wow, that one action today might've saved you 17 cents on your water bill. [laughter] Never would I say that. Instead, I say to you, the people in your company who you're playing with are on track to save $45,000 this year on energy and water cost based on what you're doing; good job. So it's a big number. It's a big bucket. 

And it feels good. What we're essentially doing, and it's great that we all had a polar bear slide of our own today. [laughter] We're taking this issue that's this far away, vague, some day it's going to happen issue, and we're turning it into a visceral competition against your co-workers. It's not far away now. It's personal. I mentioned earlier this, it's not me, it's you. This is actually data from a study last year funded by the Joyce Foundation. So this is, they asked Americans, how do you think your household energy use compares to other similar homes in your community. Look, a whopping 9% of us across the US think that our usage might be higher than the neighbor's. Everybody else is average or below average. 

We used to ask this question a lot in Wisconsin. There was a point where we used to do a survey and asked this in Wisconsin, and 80% of Wisconsin households said they used less than their neighbors. [laughter] So you guys are worse than this. [laughter] I mean, you know. So how do you counter act that sort of sense of complacency that I'm totally good, it's not me. Well, in the game, we give people points for submitting photos of what they're doing. So we're constantly collecting images of what your co-workers are doing. When you start seeing that Royce is checking the air pressure on his tires, and somebody borrowed a watt meter and is getting rid of their old dehumidifier, and all of these things, it's a little bit harder to be sure that you're in that, you know, perfect percent, if everybody else is doing all of these things. We're creating that level of competition and that social norming piece. What we're doing this with is really a pretty simple set of actions. 

Just to kind of give you a sense, we have cards about transportation. We have a category we now call wellness, which includes food, and waste, and consumption, and sort of a lot of things like that. We have water cards. We have energy cards. Some cards are about habits. Some cards are about one time things. You play cards through a web-based interface, so on your phone or on your computer. You log on daily and say what you did. You know, the interface is hugely important to me, because it's where we collect all the data about what everyone's doing and feedback to them their scores. But what really matters in this is this. 

We create an opportunity for people to have a conversation about sustainability. Part of what I've come to believe is our real challenge here is that most of our sustainable practices are invisible. So, you can notice the day somebody in the office forgets to double side their printing, or tosses something in the wrong bin. But you don't know if they turn off the water when they brush their teeth, or have tried to reduce their idling or practice eco driving, because they don't have a reason to tell you, and you don't have, sort of, a social infrastructure to ask them about that. The game starts all of these conversations, because people send in photos, or recipes of meatless meals that other people try, and they start talking about this stuff. And all of a sudden, you know that four of your co-workers are also interested in these issues. That becomes really important in what we're doing. One of the things we do in every partnership, is we start out with a baseline survey. We go into a company and we do a survey of employees to get a sense of where things are at, so that we roll this out effectively. We learn that maybe the most important question we ask is this question about sustainability. 

I'm going to show you the results from our very first baseline at Miron Construction, a commercial construction firm in Neenah, Wisconsin, about 330 employees. I like their baseline, because 96% of employees responded to the baseline survey. Commercial construction is crazy competitive and they had, you know, wanted 100%, so they got 96%. [laughter] Sustainability is important to me, 70% of employees said sustainability was important to them, seven in ten. Almost 90% of them thought it was important to the Miron leadership. So, looking at those two numbers, you have to wonder why Miron's leadership said, Cool Choices, we want you to come in and help us get our employees to embrace sustainability, because, and one of the Miron stories was because one of the owners walks around at night and it makes him crazy that all of these computer and task lights are on. It wasn't like only 20% of the task lights, kind of thing. So, the other piece here of course is, so what about your co-workers. [laughter] This, 43% of employees said their co-workers thought sustainability was important. So essentially, folks are walking around thinking other people don't think sustainability matters. 

If I turn off the light, they're going to think I'm one of those weird green people from Madison. So we're all leaving the lights on so we seem cool with other people who also wish we were not leaving the lights on. Again, what we're doing is creating an opportunity to show a bunch of pictures of people turning off the lights, so suddenly, it's more socially acceptable that we're turning off the lights. What we see coming out of that are workplace behaviors. So, again, Miron data, after the game at Miron, we asked employees across the company, since this game is over, has it changed how you turn off lights and equipment at work? And players, whether they were frequent or occasional, about 65% of them said yeah, we turn stuff off at work more often than we did previously. Non-players said no, it didn't affect us at all. What management tells me is it now socially unacceptable to leave a light on. They talk about new employees, they say you can tell when someone's new here, because just once, they toss something in the wrong waste bin or they leave a light on, and somebody will stop them and go, that's not what we do at Miron. Now, to Sharon's point, people who didn't play aren't going to say, oh yeah, the game influenced me, too, because people around me are doing these things, because we're adults and we don't think social norms matter to us. But they do. 

We work with the Energy Center of Wisconsin on evaluation things, because of course, I care that we're actually getting reductions, we're not just feeling like people are telling us this stuff. They tell us a couple of encouraging things about what we're doing. From the verification work they've done, it looks like the self-reports are pretty honest. People are being pretty honest in the game. The center just finished a billing analysis of the players at Miron. Miron was our first game, so we've got the longest time frame after it. So this was comparing people's household energy usage before, during and after the game. We're seeing an average reduction of 6%, which is really terrific on the electric side. Persistence looks pretty good in all of this. People are maintaining these habits, in part, because we made their habits public in their social community. 

So if you stop biking when the game is over, and there were pictures all over of you biking when the game was on, that kind of implies you just did this to, you know, have a shot at a coffee card or something from Cool Choices; what kind of a person are you? So, people kind of have to keep doing this stuff, because they built an image around it. Ultimately, we're trying and I think a little bit to Dietram's point there, to get people to have a sense that they're part of a solution, and they're moving this issue forward. I'll just close on a story related to that. This is a player who at the end of her game, she had an opportunity to go to some event in the Fox Valley and meet John Quinones, who does a show on some network. It's like a moral quandary show about what would you do if this happened to you. She took that moment to pitch to him that he should do more shows where they have sustainability quandaries, because there are, you know, lots of things people should do around this. Sherry is somebody who the game really empowered to think about, okay, I'm part of the solution now, and I'm going to help other people be part of the solution, too. So there is hope in all of this. That's the end. [applause]  >> The very last point on the slide for Dietram was that when people undergo mitigation efforts, regardless of whether you believe it or not, things change. 

We've had a little bit of maybe answering when you were saying Romney said it didn't matter whether he did it for the right reason or not. Why would people want to mitigate something if they don't believe it needs it? >> In many ways, there were some answers also in the other presentations, but I'll take a first stab at it really quickly. I think that's part of what politics these days has to do, unfortunately. And I think the graph that we saw on democrats, republicans, and independents, showed that quite nicely that we have grown so far apart politically, and part of it is the media system. And Rachel Maddow, for instance, who is a host on MSNBC, a couple of years ago did a lecture at Harvard, where she said this opinion journalism is making all the money that neutral journalism is losing these days. She didn't mean that ironically. She was quite serious about it, and I think provided a very good analysis. But basically, providing a justification for why that is. So the solution of politics will have to be building coalitions in the middle. Again, I think there are different ways of thinking about some of these scientific issues, and they will play to different cognitive shelves. 

What biofuel is for a more conservative person may be an economic issue, and for a more liberal person, biofuels may be an environmental issue. But why they buy into it is ultimately not a problem if they both want to invest in it. So we just need to overcome the idea that we have to be both getting political buy-in and be right at the same time, which is the beef that I have with Al Gore, right? Because he ultimately can't get over the fact that some people don't think that he's right. That's a problem, because it's irrelevant who's right or not. It's not irrelevant, that's an overstatement. But it's not irrelevant to the solution. It's not irrelevant to the mitigation. So I think most modern politics will have to, and this doesn't matter, the same thing is true for nanotechnology, right, one of the technologies where the Bush 43 administration has more than quadrupled science funding, which he hasn't done for most other areas. It's one thing, if some scientists argue this may cause cancer, multi walled carbon nanotubes. Other scientists have developed tools to use multi walled carbon nanotubes to detect cancer. 

So again, are we going forward with it? Well, it depends on how you look at it. So, all we have to really do, and it sounds really simple and it's not, is to find ways where we bring people in groups together who may have different motivations, but ultimately similar interests in terms of what the strategies are. And I think, again, Tom Friedman has written about this; Mitt Romney has written about this. In many ways, they have very similar approaches, as people on the left. Well, both of them have similar approaches, one of them being more left in the first place. So that would be one answer. >> I think good science has indicated that there is global warming, and that man has been the impact on it. As far as the issue for smoking, I think school education, educational curriculums, have made a big impact on that, when they finally decided to approach that issue, and change minds on our future citizens, on our students in the classrooms. But that whole issue is conflicted when it comes to curriculums in high schools, as far as global warming, and whether you're in a conservative community, or a school system, or whatnot. So why we work to attempt to address the overall public nationally on this issue,  our future citizen students coming up are getting conflicted information. 

How do we address that? >> Sure, well, I think one of the challenges in Wisconsin is we have local control of school systems. You know, every school district is deciding what they need to do to fit within the parameters of the laws. Certainly, some of, I think there are promising things. It's a little bit to Dietram's point about how you bring these things together. There's not a school district in the state who wants to know that they use more energy per square foot in their buildings than the rest of the school districts, you know. So there are ways to sort of engage them around the, okay, but it just makes sense to be energy efficient, and it makes sense to retool your bus routes so that you use less diesel fuel, and trying to move them on some of those things. And teachers around Wisconsin are doing amazing things, using those facility lessons as ways to talk about environmental science. It's a step forward. But there is a challenge, because we do let every district decide what they want to do about these things. >> I think there's also one second aspect to very much echo what Kathy said, but I think there's a second aspect to it, and that is, a lot of the issues that we as citizens deal with, we didn't learn about in school, right? I mentioned nanotechnology being one of them. 

I didn't learn about that in school, because it developed afterwards. So why is schooling still, and K-12 in particular, in science classes, and college as well, correlated to more open mindedness when it comes to science? One of my colleagues at Wisconsin, who's also doing a lot of work with Sharon, has done research on what she calls deference toward scientific authority. So the idea that all of us believe in climate change, not because we've researched it, most of us have actually never read the primary research. Most of us have would probably not understand the primary research, if we really admitted it. And if you look through Science magazine, for instance, most of the articles are just unintelligible to me. But why do I still believe it? I believe it because I believe in the process. I believe in peer review. I believe that certain disciplines and buildings at UW-Madison that I've never been in, that these people are doing very good research, and that research is scientifically sound, that it follows certain procedures systematically, and so on. Ultimately, that kind of understanding is being taught in schools. That strongly correlates with taking science classes in college and with K-12 education. 

So I think we're building that infrastructure. And if we don't build that in, if you actually look at the National Science Board's latest surveys, we right now are in a pretty bad spot in terms of how we teach that. One in five Americans can correctly identify elements of a sound scientific study. Which means if they see a good study or a bad study, four in five Americans can't tell the difference. Half of Americans know what an experiment is, a random assignment experiment. So again, you have half of Americans who couldn't tell the difference in the first place, if somebody gave them a poorly done experiment or a good one. So it's really more about building the infrastructure for judging, at least the infrastructure of science, because the specifics, most likely the types of science that we will encounter, and some of you may have read the last couple of weeks these articles on de-extinction, so that we're bringing back animals through genetic modifications, that are extinct, and essentially creating life from DNA and other cells. None of us learned that in school. None of us understood that. Most scientists don't know how to do it yet. 

So, how do we make decisions? Well, this is exactly where the deference toward scientific authority comes in, and I think it's a really useful concept and it really shows us why K-12 and why science classes in college are tremendously important. >> I am waiting to see a Tasmanian Tiger, by the way. [laughter] But also, I think that too, that variance in the levels of education is staggering, the structures of schools, and it seems to be continuing political pressure to introduce more variance in the way schools are structured, rather than less. I would agree with Dietram. I think people, I actually think K-12 is critically important, and I've been rather impressed over the years with the amount of environmental instruction that I see in many, many schools. But again, to go back to this whole social norms effect, I think once people are out, they'll begin to look to one another for those kinds of cues. We're finding, and Dominique and I did some work together on this, we're finding, for example, that young people are using social media channels as ways of inferring how other people think about global warming. We did an experiment where we showed individuals a YouTube video. The only difference in the video that groups of people saw was that one video had like 1.7 million views, and the other had 700 views. Then we asked these young people who saw this global warming video about their perceptions, the extent to which people out there valued global warming, and if you saw the high-view condition, you were more likely to say that other people out there value global warming. 

So I think there are lots of ways of cueing individuals in the world around us, and our young people are picking up on these cues a darn sight faster than we are. [laughter]  >> Thank you. The issue of smoking has been mentioned, you know, by economists, I should say, in that this is a major effort in which success was made by raising the cost. We put a lot more tax on cigarettes. So, a number of economists and climate experts are saying what we need to do is raise the cost of carbon fuels. And you know, in order to give people more incentive, you know, than what they can, then I'm afraid that, you know, the kinds of exercises that we've been talking about here aren't going to get us there soon enough, and you know, we really need to go for legislation. I'd like your comments, please. >> I think you're right. It's two different things, and I'm saying this as somebody who still has German citizenship. Germany, I think, combines what I think a lot of what we've heard tonight, meaning changing behaviors to some degree through legislation and through incentives, and then those behavior changes leading to attitudinal changes, as well. 

Germans don't recycle because they want to. They recycle because they have to. And in fact, there's a commercial program, which means that the yogurt is taxed with a fraction of a penny, in order to be recycled by a company. Every household has a yellow bin, and that yellow bin, you can only throw things that have the little green dot. If you actually buy anything that's from Europe, you'll see the green dot, even in this country. What that means essentially, is that you're taxed, but you're taxed at a very small percentage. Then you put that in the yellow bin, and the yellow bin gets picked up by a commercial vendor, essentially. Same thing if you build a house right now in Germany. You will have to essentially produce, depending on which energy source you build in, a sustainable energy source, between 15-50% of energy from solar, from heat exchange, from whatever else it may be. That's just the law. 

So do people want to put solar panels on their roofs, which make their house 5,000 Euros more expensive? The answer is, no they don't. But they don't have a choice. Eventually what you see, is you see more and more of these behaviors catching on, in exactly the same way that Sharon talked about it takes a village, in exactly the same way where you establish social norms after a while. I think it's in part that you don't want to be seen, you know, not riding your bike anymore, but it's also in part that at some point, it becomes a social norm, where you can't even remember that it wasn't like that. I think certainly, while I grew up in Germany, that's exactly what happened, where now, nobody does not recycle anymore. But not because they chose to, but because they were forced into it. So to your point, I think absolutely yes. But it's not mutually exclusive, because what you described is exactly what gets us to where I think we've heard tonight. >> Okay, let's say that, and again, I'm a great believer in regulating when I can, but in that social norms world, if you actually punish someone, you know, force somebody to do something and punish them if they don't, the shift from I'm doing this, so I must value it, that shift from behavior to believing takes forever, because of course what you say every time, I'm doing this because if I don't, they're going to clobber me. So, if you want people to go from a behavior to actually believing, to valuing the behavior, valuing the issue, valuing the environment that that behavior creates, I'm much more a fan of accomplishing that through a sort of flying under the radar screen social norm thing, where you find yourself doing something, and you don't have a clue why you're doing it. 

It's because you're watching everybody else. But it's a lot easier to then say to yourself, well, I must be doing this because I care. It's the same thing that if you are called by the foundation that's raising money for your alma mater, if they can get you to make small donations on a regular basis, they know that the chances are excellent that you're going to become, well, excellent, that's wrong. The chances are, you're a possible major donor down the road, okay? The reason is that if you've given all these little chunks of money, you never say this to yourself, but you say, you know, your inference is well, I do this because I value that university. It must be that I like that place. It must be that I'm supportive. These are the people who turn into major donors. Now, if you were forced to do it, because, you know, there was some regulatory reason why you had to, you would be much less likely to make that shift from I have to do it, to I really want to. It's certainly worked for cigarettes, that's for sure. And you know, punishment does work. 

The reason why most of us wear seatbelts is that states began to arrest people who weren't. In states where those laws are more restrictive and more severe, seatbelt use is higher. So you know, there are lots of incentives. I just like the under the radar ones, I guess. >> And it's not mutually exclusive. I think, the example I think about is recycling. We didn't start out recycling in Wisconsin because it was a law. This is sort of an interesting one. Recycling really came to us through the K-12 system. In Wisconsin, when you talk to people about why you started recycling, most often what you heard was my kids came home from school and talked about how we needed to recycle, and so people started recycling. 

By the time we said, well, everyone should recycle, people's behaviors had influenced their attitudes to the point where they said, yeah, it's reasonable to say everyone has to do this. It's not hard. I do it. The neighbors should do it, too. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of merit to thinking about a tax on carbon. Today, I don't know how you would get that passed. Can we, you know, it's sort of like okay, but we are here. If we can get enough people feeling like they're part of a solution and it's not that hard to reduce your carbon footprint, can we move some momentum there. I don't think of it as either/or. I think of it as yes/and, kind of thing. 

We've got to kind of come at this from every direction we can, because we do have a very serious situation. >> With that, I always hate to cut our questions and a great discussion. I think our speakers may be willing to stay afterward a little bit. We would encourage people to take conversations into the hallway, so our tech crew can break down afterwards tonight. But first, I want to thank our amazing panelists. I love this topic, and I love what they bring to this topic. Thank you so much for sharing this evening with us and with them tonight. This is the second of our third forums on climate and energy. Our final one will be in Ashland, Wisconsin on June 12, come on up, where we'll be looking at the way forward for Wisconsin, but also a special look at the impacts on the north country. So, I thank you all for coming. 

Again, thank our sponsors, and thank those of you who tried to come in March, and made it back tonight. Again, please help me thank the panelists. [applause]