Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
This section is split into two parts. In the
first
part
I outline some of the environmental policies
that are being developed in order to address the
more-than-rational drivers of human behaviour.
The
second section o
utlines some of the critiques
that have been levelled at new environmental
behaviour changing policies.
in the US (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008: 190).
According to Thaler and Sunstein (2008: 191), the
Toxic Release Inventory actually reflects a type of
social nudge
, or a policy, that uses people's
emotional sense of how they are being judged by
others as a basis for promoting pro-environmental
behaviour change.
Often new environmental behaviour change
policies combine aspects of disclosure with peer
pressure. An interesting example of this type of
initiative has been suggested in the UK. The
UK government is currently encouraging energy
suppliers to not only disclose to households their
levels of energy consumption for the previous
quarter, but how this compares to other consumers'
levels of energy use (whether it be in relation to a
local or national average). Using energy billing in
this way attempts to achieve two main things.
First, it provides a frame within which to assess
your level of energy use. If you just receive your
household's energy use data on your bill, it is
very difficult to assess whether this is high or
low, and thus in need of reform. Second, this new
billing strategy generates a degree of peer-to-peer
pressure, through which social norms about dom-
estic energy use are utilized as prompts to behaviour
change among higher-than-average energy-use
consumers. Initiatives such as these are premised
on the fact that human behaviour is influenced by
a complex series of more-than-rational factors. In
particular, they recognize that domestic energy
use levels are not just based on individuals making
rational calculations about how much energy they
use, but are also influenced by long-held domestic
habits and assumptions concerning what is a
normal level of energy consumption.
Other initiatives have explored how it might
be possible to encourage households to adopt
renewable energy alternatives. Studies have shown
that although household investment in solar
panels, or ground heat-source technologies, can
have significant long-term financial benefits to a
family, only a minority of households actually
invest in renewable technologies. An irrational
barrier appears to exist to domestic investment in
8.5.1 New ways to save the planet
In their influential 2008 book,
Nudge: Improving
Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
, the
behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass
Sunstein outline the ways in which the emerging
insights into the nature of human behaviour
(outlined above) can be applied to 'saving the
planet' (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008: 183-196).
A central component of Thaler and Sunstein's
discussion of environmental policy-making is the
importance of
disclosure
(Thaler and Sunstein,
2008: 189). Disclosure simply refers to the ways in
which corporations or public bodies disclose the
impacts that their products and services have
on the environment. A specific example of an
environmental disclosure policy that Thaler and
Sunstein discuss is the US government's
Toxic
Release Inventory
. The Toxic Release Inventory
(which was passed in 1986) requires that corpora-
tions must disclose the amount of harmful
materials that they are placing in the environment.
At one level, this policy may seem like a fairly
traditional form of legal restriction on human
behaviour. But Thaler and Sunstein point out that
the Toxic Release Inventory does not require
companies or individuals to necessarily stop their
polluting activities. What it does do, however, is
force corporations and individuals to be more
aware of their relations to the environment, and
how those relations may be perceived and judged
by others (whether those others be consumers or
peers). Interestingly, without legally requiring
any form of direct change in the ways in which
people behave towards the environment, the
Toxic Release Inventory has been associated
with significant reductions in toxic pollution
