The pace of change

Temperatures across the Earth have increased more in the past 50 years than in any 50-year period over the past two millennia. That’s just one of the statistics included in the Sixth Assessment Report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on March 20. Here’s another: Greenhouse gas emissions from humans are now 54 percent higher than in 1990 – the year the IPCC released its first report. As a result of our lack of action, we will not be able to hold the warming of our planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a target that has been considered as critical to limit loss and damage from climate change.

This raises some critical questions: What does it take for societies to change? What’s the distance in time between societal awareness and concrete action? Can one recognize a cultural inflection point while it is happening?  

We know societies are able to change. As we reflect on the impact of climate change and its increasingly visible effects, we often ask: Will this particular event be the catalyst for change in societies’ decision-making and behavior?

This is especially common in response to extreme weather amplified by climate change, such as wildfires and floods, as well as increasingly extreme and frequent hurricanes. 

But that isn’t how change works. It isn’t a switch. Changing beliefs, values and practices is a process, sometimes slow and occasionally painful. And getting to meaningful outcomes varies by who is making the change (governments, businesses or individuals) and the level of complexity to address the concern (single action vs. suite of policies vs. extensive cultural revolutions).

Societies can make shifts with urgency. The discovery of the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was made public in 1985; two years later, nations universally ratified the Montreal Protocol, which phased out man-made chemicals that contributed to ozone depletion. More recently, as Russia’s war against Ukraine disrupted energy markets, Europe made significant strides to diversify its supply chain and hasten transitions to clean energy. The Economist reported that Russia’s war in Ukraine led to Europe shaving five to10 years off clean energy transitions. Germany now aims to generate 80 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030.

If we rewind more than a century, we can see how powerful a single narrative can be in shifting both public perception and public policy. In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s graphically written and wildly popular novel “The Jungle”—drawing on his research of the dangerously unhealthy conditions in American meat-packing plants — led President Theodore Roosevelt to form a special commission to investigate Chicago slaughterhouses. The subsequent damning report and the public outcry motivated Roosevelt to push through the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act to regulate food additives and prohibit misleading labeling of food and drugs. This led to the formation of the federal Food and Drug Administration and growing public confidence in food safety.  

A half-century later, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s best-selling exposé, “Silent Spring” about the deadly impact of pesticides and other poisons on the natural world led to the banning of the pesticide DDT within a decade of its release. The book is rightly credited with helping launch the environmental movement and modern ecology. Carson’s writing is foundational to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the first Earth Day, both in 1970. 

But often, change is a tortoise rather than a hare.

It took nearly 50 years from the first federal regulation regarding safety restraints to near-complete adoption of seat belts. Today, 9-in-10 Americans wear seat belts. But 40 years ago, seat belts were a hot-button issue. For example, letters to newspapers argued that seat belt laws violate bodily privacy. 

The U.S. Congress passed the first federal seat belt law in 1966. The law mandated all new vehicles include shoulder and lap belts in front seats; it didn’t require passengers to use the seat belts. In the early 1980s, only about 1-in-10 Americans wore a seat belt. From 1984-1995, 49 states and Washington D.C. passed some level of seat belt mandate. By 2000, more than 70 percent of Americans used seat belts, and since 2015, the number has hovered around 90 percent.

The first U.S. surgeon general report on the relationship between smoking, cancer and heart disease was written 59 years ago. As of 2020, about 12.5 percent of Americans smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, down from 42 percent in 1965, the same year Congress passed the first requirements for warning labels on cigarettes. Since the 1960s, concerns regarding the health impacts of smoking and second-hand smoke have led to laws banning smoking on planes, in restaurants and workplaces, and even in proximity to doors. 

Lawsuits further changed perceptions in the U.S., including a 2006 ruling that found the tobacco industry lied to Americans about cigarettes’ health impacts and the industry’s efforts to market to children.

These past examples are insights into our present — and into the shape and the pace of our future. Following publication of “Silent Spring,” Carson was invited to testify about her findings. “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves,” she told a congressional subcommittee. Her words could be the opening to the IPCC’s most recent report.

History shows that change regularly unfolds at a maddeningly slow speed, but it also indicates that knowledge combined with policy and motivated advocates can, in time, produce a culture shift. It’s been 35 years since the formation of the IPCC in 1988. Time isn’t on our side — we need to up the tempo. 

It is not good enough to muddle our way through a couple more decades of awareness and minor policy shifts, as we saw with seat belts and smoking. We need to move past inertia, mistrust and disinformation. We need collective urgency and action to reduce emissions, phase out fossil fuels, capture carbon and build adaptive capacities for all. We need the best and brightest and a committed, even inspired public demanding change — and working tirelessly to make it happen. 

Peter Schlosser is an environmental physicist and vice president and vice provost of Global Futures at Arizona State University (ASU). 

Steven Beschloss is professor of practice in Arizona State University’s College of Global Futures and founding director of ASU’s Narrative Storytelling initiative.  

Ayrel Clark-Proffitt is a communication specialist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at ASU.