Climate Change A Hard Sell
If the world’s leading experts in politics, psychology and game theory were to design a problem to be as difficult as possible to solve, it would probably look a lot like climate change.
Another UN climate change conference ends, another opportunity to save the world goes by. You could be forgiven for barely noticing; expectations were lowered so far that Cancún almost slipped under the radar. But even if it had been talked up like its predecessors, it would struggle for our attention. Climate change is peculiarly, and perhaps fatally, difficult to care about. That is because it’s the kind of problem our imaginations are least able to capture and our moral sentiments are least tuned to address. Its effects will be felt most by people not yet born, over periods of time far beyond our imaginative horizons.
