Oh wait! They don’t.

In a great post by Marc Gunther, “What’s for lunch? Behaviorial economics meets climate change,” he summarizes Dan Ariely, director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, on why it’s hard for American brains to take global warming seriously.

The climate crisis is a particular challenge for behavioral economists. It’s a long-term problem, and we tend to focus on the immediate. (That’s why Americans can’t resist dessert, and had a negative savings rate for many years.) Greenhouse gases are invisible, unlike other pollutants. Measuring the impact of individual actions is all but impossible. Global warming will harm other people, mostly poor people in the global south, before it damages the U.S. “If you said, I want to create a problem that people don’t care about, you would probably come up with global warming,” Ariely says.

Yuck. That’s one reason I’ve been trying to connect green technology to a host of other American values and histories. Standing alone, global warming just doesn’t get most of us worked up in the way, “the economy” or “crime” do.

I had a great conversation yesterday with Michael Lotker, one-time vice president of business development at Luz, the world’s largest solar company til it went bust in the early 90s.  He said that the company perceived American support for solar as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” People were willing to pay a lot of lip service to the cause, but little else. The company went bust when tax incentives that would have cost the government nearly nothing were stopped or bungled.

Image: flickr/abetterbuzz. This is the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. It is awesome.