Dragons and Denial
According to the Emissions Gap Report 2024 from the United Nations Environment Programme the world is on track for a global temperature rise of 2.6-2.8°C this century, and without improved policies “we are heading for a temperature rise of 3.1°C” (Andersen, 2024). Comment on the UNEP report referred to a ‘catastrophic’ rise in temperature , to greenhouse gas emissions which rose last year “by 1.3 percent over 2022 marks” and to the need for a “six-fold increase in mitigation investment” in order to achieve net zero (Musto, 2024). Our failure to take adequate action will be explored in this post using three sources. The first is “ The Dragons of Inaction: Psychological barriers that limit climate change mitigation and adaptation ” which is mainly concerned with the different types of restraint on individual action (Gifford, 2011). The second is the more recent paper “Understanding and Countering the Motivated Roots of Climate Change Denial” which builds on Gifford’s psychology of ina...