The Ostrich Effect

It isn’t true that ostriches stick their heads in the sand when they’re frightened. They’re too smart for that. We humans suppose ourselves to be smarter than birds. So why, when faced with the most terrifying threat in human history, are we sticking our heads in the sand?

In psychology, the Ostrich Effect is defined as “the result of the conflict between what our rational mind knows to be important and what our emotional mind anticipates will be painful.” It’s meant to refer to people who avoid paying bills and seeing doctors, but it pretty much describes our collective response to the very real threat of global warming.

You’d think, with our heads in the sand, we would feel the Earth getting hotter. This May in southern Mexico, for instance, 180 howler monkeys fell out of their trees, killed by the heat. In Mexico City, where the temperature hit 45 degrees C., birds died in the air and fell onto the tops of street cars. In May 2020, the United Nations reported a record 100 million people displaced from their homelands, some by conflicts and violence, but 23.7 million by “weather-related events” – and who’s to say the weather wasn’t partly responsible for the conflicts? Rice farmers in Vietnam now plant their fields at night, using head lamps, because it’s too hot to work during the day. In 2018, the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that more than 150 billion work hours were lost because of extreme weather. If we cared to, we could watch glaciers melting and measure sea levels rising: NASA reports that the world’s oceans have risen an average of 8 inches in the past century, an increase “unprecedented over the past 2,500 years.”

Yet here we are with our heads in the sand. For a recent study published in Science Advances, 59,000 people around the world were asked whether they thought that climate change was a serious threat and that action was required to avoid global catastrophe. On average, 86% of respondents replied “Yes.” The most Yes responses came from the Philippines (97%), with Brazil, Ghana, and Turkey close behind (each with 93%). But in the United States, only 77% said they were worried about climate change, and only 68% supported government policies to address it.

It shouldn’t be surprising that there are more climate-change deniers in countries where the effects of climate change are least felt. Most North Americans and northern Europeans aren’t going to be driven out of their homes by soaring temperatures and rising waters (except maybe in the Netherlands). But it’s also true, as Bill McKibben pointed out two years ago in The New York Review of Books, that climate crises aren’t caused by the people suffering from them. They’re caused by the people who are denying them. “The average Somalian,” he writes, naming a country where five consecutive rainy seasons have failed and 1.7 million people have been displaced by drought, “produces barely one two-hundredth as much carbon as the average American.” The United States, with 4 percent of the world’s population, has produced a quarter of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. “You could fairly say,” McKibben writes, “the climate crisis is a kind of crime Americans have been committing.”

To be fair, McKibben could have included Canadians and Europeans. In Canada, the United States, and Europe, politics are rapidly shifting to the hard right, and it’s the far-right, populist political parties that are working hardest at deleting climate change from their countries’ action agendas. Fossil-fuel companies like Exxon have given millions to politicians and right-wing think tanks to distribute false information about climate-change – for example, that our cars will be taken away and we’ll all have to eat lab-grown meat and insects. Politicians listen to such nonsense. In May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation prohibiting the sale of lab-grown meat in the state, saying he was taking action “against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish, or bugs, to achieve their authoritarian goals.”

According to the Washington Post, oil cartels contributed $6.4 million to Trump’s presidential campaign in the past three months. And last month, leading up to the EU Parliamentary elections, Inside Climate News reports that “a think tank linked with Hungary’s right-wing authoritarian government openly tried to challenge the EU consensus on climate action,…attacking the EU’s 2050 net-zero goal and touting their success in stigmatizing EU climate policies as harmful to a growing number of voters.” With notable success: in the Parliamentary elections last week, far-right parties “made serious gains in France and Germany,” said the New York Times, while the Greens dropped from fourth to sixth place at the polls.

Our apathy is allowing policy-makers to slide global warming off the table. As in the United States and Europe, most of Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions come from industry, not from private cars, and industry is being given a free ride. Despite Canada’s commitment to the Paris Agreement, where we agreed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030 (the catchy phrase is “30-by-30”), Canada is now the second-worst carbon polluter of the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): this year, Canada’s carbon emissions increased again by 2.1 percent. And yet, in April, a former Conservative Party climate-change critic posted a statement saying that “if greenhouse gases are a problem, they’re a global problem. Canada can do nothing by itself.”

If greenhouse gases are a problem? And no one is asking Canada to do anything by itself. If you’re going to stick your head in the sand, it would be a good idea to keep your mouth shut.

Frank Bruni, in the New York Times last week, noted that we are “far too complacent” about what is happening around us. He was referring to the upcoming US elections and the tendency of many Democrats to assume that the ship of state will right itself without any input from them. That’s the Ostrich Effect at work. But our complacency applies equally well to our do-little approach to global warming. Forbes magazine advises corporate leaders that complacency “is often a result of overlooking something that’s amiss,” which causes us to “fail to notice important trends and events.” To fail to notice that the planet is burning is to be dangerously complacent. It’s sticking our head in the sand and hoping the big, scary thing will go away. Even ostriches know better.