THIS. Every time an article on EVs or alternative energy solutions is posted we see the same comments by the same people, who assume that everyone else is living the same way, in the same environments, and that the same constraints apply. I can charge at home. I live in an apartment. I have solar. I have no public charging access. I live in a city and commute using an EV daily. I live in a rural area and routinely drive 1,000 miles in the cold with a single 5-minute stop for gas. We really need to concentrate on understanding that there's not one single sole solution that works for everyone. But at the same time we need to recognize that our particular use case just might be an outlier... and that there's a good chance that a solution can be found that works for the majority of people. And that the world will move forward, regardless.
As I do my analyses of climate problem areas and purported solutions, one of the things I work to overcome are my own cognitive biases. Similarly, I look for cogitive biases that might be impacting the work of others to make it or their expressed opinions less reliable. This infographic resonated in that respect, specifically about the impacts of the availability bias, also called the availability heuristic. That bias simply says that as we think of a problem, our brains leverage whatever data points most easily spring to mind and use them as the basis for a snap decision. As Kahneman and Tversky pointed out, our brains are lazy, and we will fall into System 1 thinking — fast and energy cheap — unless we force ourselves into System 2 thinking — slow and energy intensive. When thinking about decarbonization levers, North Americans see electric cars and light trucks looming large globally as a lever. On the flip side, many in the oil and gas industry assume that the rest of the world will turn to North American patterns of transportation as they gain in affluence, assuring a customer base for their product in perpetuity. Neither are nearly as true as the two groups believe. The availability bias explains part of this. When most North Americans go anywhere, they see a lot of cars moving and parked, usually with only one person in them. You have to live in downtown cores of walkable North American cities well served by transit such as New York or Vancouver to live outside of the North American paradigm. This is indicative of another part of the available data points. These modal patterns exist because North American cities grew with cars, unlike virtually any other geography in the world, Australia being the other outlier. A similar disparity exists between North American detached, single-story homes with big rooftops and the accommodations of the rest of the world, where dense multi-unit residential buildings dominate. The assumption that everyone has lots of room for residential solar and that plugging an electric car or pickup into the home for both charging and as a battery on wheels is a relevant climate wedge looms large, and is mostly based on the availability heuristic. True in North American, not true in the rest of the world. I fight biases by constantly trying to find denominators, by working to find data, by fighting my laziness to get into System 2 thinking, trying to recognize my own biases and by trying to extrapolate only what is sensible to extrapolate from very rich US published data to the rest of the world. I wrote this piece two years ago, and suggest it to people regularly, with the faint hope that they will realize that they are subject to biases of their own which they are not acknowledging. https://lnkd.in/guueiawF #bias #psychology #climateaction
