Behavior Change is Not the Solution
How Business is Capturing the Narrative on Climate, to the Detriment of Society
In early October, I attended Dickson College’s BE.Hive conference in Carlisle, PA, a convening of about 400 students, academics, and climate activists, concerned with the effects of climate change and eager for fresh ideas to make their own campuses more sustainable. Between the vegan-gluten-free-dairy-free snacks, the 1950s radio show-esque student drummer-comedian duo, and the beanbag-ed waffling sophisticates, I was struck by a critical lack of imperative.
What I mean by a lack of imperative is they had a comedian-drummer duo cracking jokes on stage at a conference where people met to search for solutions to the world’s looming existential threat; that there was no urgency in the way speakers presented; no apparent understanding of the severity of the crisis all of us are now facing.
The conference was hosted in large part by RARE, a sustainability organization that touts behavioral change as the most effective solution to climate change. RARE had been employed by Dickinson College to aid in their goal of becoming carbon neutral, a pursuit that Margee Ensign, President of Dickinson, announced the college will achieve by the end of the year.
This in itself is an undeniable good; for a college to put out the financial, administrative, and social effort to become carbon neutral is fantastic. However, RARE’s role in the hosting and structure of the conference was unusually omnipresent, and the achievement of Dickinson College was soon crowded out by RARE and their assemblage of behavioral psychologists and sociologist, business executives, the three or four students who were permitted speaking time, and representatives of RARE itself. The product of their efforts at Dickinson — that the college will become carbon neutral by the end of the year — was completely lost in its productization — in the rearrangement of a solution that was already fatally flawed into a universal, easy fix for the world’s biggest problem.
That solution, said RARE through a succession of corporate executives, was behavioral change.
This much is made clear by a quick glance at their website. On the main page, it reads: “Human behavior is both the cause and the solution to every major conservation challenge. Changing our behavior is hard, but it is the single most important thing we can do to ensure nature’s survival.”
This is the central dogma of RARE, and, indeed, a great portion of the entire private sector as well: that individual behavioral change will be enough, in lieu of government action, to defeat climate change.
This thesis was furthered by RARE when they outlined their seven behavioral changes that if only 10% of the American population engaged in, then the U.S. would be put on track with their goals under the Paris Climate Accords. I commend all seven of these behavioral changes, as they would make some difference and would be the morally right thing to do for anyone who recognizes the existential threat posed by Climate Change. However, I do not believe that this alone would be enough to stop or sufficiently hinder Climate Change to avoid the tipping points and the point of no return for global climate.
The procedure in that seven-step process is an example of how RARE believes that there is a simple solution for Climate Change, and that it is in individual behavior change, and only in individual behavior change.
Again, their website states that “…as individuals, we often feel powerless in the face of the scale of change needed. However, voluntary actions at the individual and household level can significantly contribute to overall U.S. emissions reductions and can do so in the absence of policy.”
This is achieved, according to RARE, through behavior change, often in terms of the American public’s relationship with business — businesses such as themselves. The solution, therein, as RARE argues, is in RARE itself; it is in RARE and the private sector’s ability to innovate — and in innovating, find solutions for society’s problems.
The private sector, as faith in government has collapsed, has adopted a new vision of themselves: of them being the best-suited and sufficiently positioned to take on global crisis; of them having a duty to make the world a better place through charity and the furthering of their own innovation; and of impressing upon society their solutions as the correct solutions, and, therein, the only solutions.
Business interests must therefore inherently align with that of the public: because government is idle, as the business interest says, the private sector must assume that role and take it upon themselves to act as government. However, the drive for profit remains the fuel of the private sector, regardless of their self-belief in them being a — and, indeed, the only — powerful benevolent force. They have learned to teach themselves of their own inherent goodness: that their interests align precisely with those of society, because their innovation is the only true good, and that they can therefore do little wrong, as every action in the pursuit of profit must itself be helping the “little guy.”
Anand Giridharadas puts it well in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World:
“A charitable interpretation of this idea is that the world deserves to benefit from flourishing business. A more sinister interpretation is that business deserves to benefit from any attempt to better the condition of the world.”
RARE is the fruition of such an ideal: a private solution for the public’s problem. Behavior change is the medium of change that the private sector, and therein RARE, find most acceptable and profitable — both in financial and business realpolitik terms.
Behavior change is the most acceptable modus operandi of change because it is the kind of change that is least likely to threaten the private sector’s inflow of profit and expression of power — power derived from the inflow of profit.
The critical irony in all of this is that the business community is the key, albeit not sole, culprit behind much of climate change. Their positioning as the essential problem solvers is perhaps an indicator of them shrouding and diverting attention from their own responsibility, and the change they propose might then be a means to obfuscate and conceal their continued responsibility in causing climate change.
Giridharadas writes: “…the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself.”
Policy change, in contrast with behavior change, has the ability to force business to make decisions that take more into account than solely profit, and may indeed force business to give up some portion of their decision-making power to government.
The private sector is a sector based on the pursuit of wealth, and therein power. As such, they believe that any solution must involve them, even going so far as to believe that if a government solution does exist — which, they conjecture, does not — then it still must have a function for business, or, more likely, must function subservient to business.
Giridharadas quotes Greg Ferenstein in Winners Take All: “This new ideology believes that government is an investor in capitalism. The government works not as a check on capitalism but for capitalism — to make capitalism successful, to ensure that the conditions for its success are in place.”
RARE seems to subscribe to some extent with this ideology: that government may play a role in the resolution of the climate crisis, but, ultimately, government cannot and will not lead the charge — business must. Therefore government must support humanitarian entrepreneurship (which is to say all entrepreneurship, as the RAREs of the world recognize entrepreneurship as identical to humanitarianism) to as great an extent as government can carry any burden of society, which, in the eyes of business, is little to negligent.
Such a vision of solution as the private sector touts is one which, by nature of the profit motive (which is still — and always — present), has no recognition of a perpetrator, because the ultimate perpetrator is indelibly business itself. Their proposed changes, therefore, exonerate the private sector, thus failing to solve the problem.
Again, Giridharadas writes:
“The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them.”
But this ideology is fundamentally wrong. Government, by right, ought not to be a function of capitalism. The hegemony of business destroys the free market with the advent of corporatist collision in the form of monopoly. And, furthermore, a private sector-driven solution is one fraught with businesses’ own self-exoneration; an abnegation of responsibility which makes the solution not only ineffective, but antithetical to it being a solution at all, by perpetuating the established system which created the problem in the first place.
What ensures that business is the best equipped to provide solutions for society’s problems, and therein fulfill the needs of society?
It is nothing. It is merely that they say they are, and have said it loud enough and long enough and from platforms more visible and tolerable, and have said it with such a music to the citizen’s ear so as to take the right to serve society away from the government and replace it with business, an entity free from the accountability of popular election and with only profit, not the betterment of society, as its ultimate goal. And they have learned to teach themselves of their own inherent benevolence: that their interests align precisely with those of society, and that they can therefore do little wrong, all the while helping the “little guy.”
There is nothing inherently wrong or evil about business. The profit motive is logical and can be a genuine good. It provides the ability for personal improvement and mastery of skill to be recognized in personal wealth and achievement. Wealth disparity, when maintained and regulated to ensure that all are provided sufficient sustenance to flourish and have opportunity to improve and master skill, can offer a physical manifestation of that improvement: wealth. The idea of equality is predicated on that equality being equality of opportunity; without capitalism, this opportunity is made universally available but meaningless. For only in a capitalist society does improvement in self translate into improvement in life.
But the private sector is not the problem solver for society: that is the function of government. Society establishes government for its protection; for its security. And that security is threatened in a world where global temperatures rise by 1.5–4.5 degrees. To address this, government is given power, and if a body is entrusted with such power, it has a democratic responsibility and moral duty to employ that to help society through the climate crisis.
There is a place for behavior change, and behavior change in itself does help combat climate change. But it cannot solve the crisis alone: policy must take the primary role.
