“No Mask? You May Not Worry About Climate Change, Either” by Jenessa Duncombe has drilled down into an important demographic when it comes to both crises. We have a national experiment in the form of Covid 19 that could yield powerful, behavioral insights for the climate crisis.
Science and plain facts about Covid and the climate tend to be polarizing, galvanizing Team Us vs. Them, Conservative vs. Liberal, Younger vs. Older. The political and generational fault lines for both crises are the same. We have yet to make meaningful sacrifices for youth when it comes to climate, and for the Greatest Generation when it comes to Covid.
So how might we:
1) Stop making Covid about Covid? Stop making climate about climate?
2) Start getting creative about individual incentives for pro-public health and climate health behaviors at scale?
Incentives-based climate tech and cleantech are promising, but still incremental. We have yet to fully imagine the possibilities for transactive energy, or peer-to-peer energy trading, and demand-response financial incentives to reduce customer peak energy usage. The climate technology exists to directly engage with supply chains, consumers, businesses, impacted communities, and especially industry — the majority source of carbon emissions — generating financial incentives for all stakeholders, but has yet to do so. How might we fully support and develop this approach?
The public health response to Covid 19 in the U.S. needs to move beyond the hammer-and-nail solution. How might we begin? Now is the time to crowd-source solutions that lead us beyond the political and generational divides that have been so deadly. Do we have to wait until Covid becomes an undeniable danger for all demographic groups?
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there” — Rumi. Could that field be a value chain of stakeholder incentives?
