Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.
“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.
There you are, right on cue. Remember folks, you don’t have to change, this is someone elses fault. Keep consuming. Technology will save us. There’s no overshoot and no population too high. We just have to tell the companies we buy from to be more green whilst continuing to buy their products. They’re sure to change their behaviour any day now.
People in companies are part of exactly the same population. Companies are not some separate entity acting by themselves, they are still, in total, controlled by “normal people” (of course, narcissists and psychopaths rise to the higher positions…). Almost everyone in this system is employed in some company that uses the resources this is about, and is theoretically able to control their work there.
If all people would change, then necessarily all companies would change, since they only act on people’s will. So this is not some consumer-vs-producer thing. Most people are consumers as well as producers by the fact of working for some producer.