There is a popular belief that technological innovation will solve climate change without fundamental shifts in society and politics. For example, the World Economic Forum claims “we must invent our way out of climate change.” Solving climate change, the thinking goes, means investing in innovation.
Technocratic policies, such as the carbon tax, also assume a direct path between problem and solution. The idea of a carbon tax assumes that if emissions are priced correctly, firms and consumers will automatically reduce carbon use and invest in cleaner alternatives. The “solution” lies in engineering policies to calibrate the tax rate, coverage, and enforcement mechanisms.
Technological innovation and tech-oriented policies are a vital part of the way forward, but the approaches suffer from a blind spot. Both overlook key social and political factors underpinning climate action. This tech-first mindset rests on three myths about how global social change happens.
Myth 1: Environmental policies, activism, and solutions develop as a natural response to environmental problems.
When environmental problems get worse, we might assume that we’ll naturally respond with more ambitious action. But that’s not necessarily the case. More extreme wildfires or heat waves, for example, ought to generate support for stronger climate change policies. But decades of research in sociology and political science shows that grievances and need alone do not automatically produce movements or reforms.
Consider the “London Fog,” one of the most well-known examples of an environmental problem that persisted for decades without meaningful reform. For more than a century across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Londoners lived with a lethal smog that blanketed the city. It was such a feature of everyday life that it became normalized in media at the time; the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House famously characterizes a dense fog that chokes the city as an ordinary part of urban life. It wasn’t until 1956, when political conditions made action possible and people also saw pollution as a preventable public health problem, that the Clean Air Act was passed in the United Kingdom.
In the case of climate change, extensive evidence shows that environmental understanding and concern does not automatically translate into action. For example, among developing countries, environmental associations tend to emerge in countries where ties to global environmental networks are deepest rather than in countries facing the most severe environmental degradation.
The presence of a problem alone, even if there is awareness, is not enough to generate mobilization or reform. Social causes require organization, political opportunities, and compelling narratives in order to succeed.
Myth 2: The right technology and policies will automatically lead to change on the ground.
If the first myth assumes problems naturally produce solutions, the second assumes that once the right technology or policy appears, meaningful change will follow.
When it comes to policy, research in sociology and political science shows that countries and organizations frequently adopt policies for reasons that have little to do with solving the underlying problem. Policies often serve as a signal of modernity or demonstrate alignment with global norms, producing legitimacy. At times, symbolic adoption can create the appearance of action without necessarily producing real change, a phenomenon known as “loose coupling.” Although some instances of loose coupling are intentional acts of “greenwashing” intended to gain legitimacy while avoiding the costs of action, in other cases actors may simply lack the capacity to enforce or implement policies.
Take the Paris Climate Accords: Nearly every country in the world ratified the international treaty a decade ago, but many are not meeting their promises to cut world pollution levels. Many countries failed to submit their updated nationally determined contribution plans by the 2025 deadline, as required by the treaty. Airline carbon offset programs offer another example. Companies often adopt policies that allow passengers to pay to “offset” emissions from their flights, but there is limited evidence that these policies meaningfully reduce overall emissions in practice.
When it comes to technology, successful solutions can fail to spread because of social and political dynamics. For example, from a technical standpoint, induction cooktops use less energy, offer faster cook times, and provide substantial safety and indoor air quality benefits relative to traditional gas and electric stovetops. The technology has been available for decades, yet uptake is slow due to a range of individual, social, and institutional barriers. These include the hassle and expense of replacing your stove, the norm of gas stoves as the “professional” standard, and the failure of big box retailers to add induction stoves to their display rooms.
Myth 3. Scale is a silver bullet.
The third myth is that solutions work better if they are scaled. If the problem is global, then the solution must be to scale promising technologies and policies to everyone, everywhere.
This line of thinking tends to equate local effectiveness with scalability. But interventions that are effective in one context often fail when transplanted elsewhere, even to settings within the same country. Moreover, research also shows that large-scale reforms can generate reaction and backlash. As environmental policies and institutions spread globally, they can provoke reactions from groups who see these changes as threats to their values, autonomy, or ways of life. These groups emerge in reaction to large, ambitious reforms that seem disconnected from their own interests and work to challenge, deny, and roll back environmental policies.
Consider the farmers’ protests that erupted in Europe from 2023 to ’24. In response to the European Union’s Green Deal, many farmers blocked highways, dumped manure on roads and outside government buildings, and drove tractors through key cities to protest laws they saw as threatening their livelihoods. Ultimately, these actions forced the European Commission to delay or relax key climate measures, which is a trend that has continued to this day. These actions are part of a broader trend, which also includes the Yellow Vest protests in France that emerged in response to a proposed fuel tax hike in 2018 and the recent push against carbon pricing taxes in Canada that led to their partial repeal in 2025.
Policies and technologies provoke resistance when they disrupt established practices, challenge existing identities, or are misaligned with local conditions. Scale can amplify all of these effects.
What can be done?
Our discussion points to the importance of understanding the social, political, and historical conditions that shape how solutions emerge, whether solutions work, and when inventions and climate policies can provoke backlash. Climate solutions do not operate in a vacuum: They interact with existing norms, identities, and interests, and they can fail when they conflict with them.
This means that top-down regulations and efforts to scale inventions and policy need to come with serious attention to understanding and addressing the concerns of groups whose identities or livelihoods might be threatened. Relevant stakeholders should be meaningfully engaged from the very start of design processes rather than as an afterthought during implementation. We can also work from the bottom-up, developing local or community-based solutions.
At the same time, we should think of new inventions, interventions, or policies as a first step toward the goal we really care about, not the end point. We should focus on outcomes like whether emissions fall, infrastructure changes, or behaviors shift at least as much as we focus on policy design and the development of technical solutions. This requires sustained attention to implementation. Potentially effective technologies, interventions, and policies can fall short not because they are wrong but because a lack of attention to social and political dynamics inhibits widespread behavioral change. For instance, energy companies routinely adopt voluntary methane reduction initiatives and publish extensive sustainability reports in some countries, but in practice implementation is weak as they evade substantial emissions reductions by continuing flaring practices in other countries with low enforcement or excluding overseas facilities from their emissions reports.
Finally, because countries and organizations routinely adopt policies to conform to what others are doing, public narratives have an important role to play in shaping what kinds of policies are adopted in the first place. These narratives are capable of provoking broad pro-environmental change by shaping our beliefs about climate change, creating more pressures on countries or organizations to act, and empowering new actors to advocate for pro-environmental change. The cumulative result of these cultural processes acting in the same direction is a systemic shift that can provoke social change, even when single policies or institutions look like they are weak or ineffective in isolation.
Addressing climate change means that people from different backgrounds with different viewpoints and different motives will need to act together to address the problem. When our solutions don’t acknowledge that, or are based more on hope than reality, we fall short of what the situation demands. If we treat climate change as purely a technological problem, we miss the necessary role of norms, identities, and worldviews in creating enduring social change.
Become a Subscriber — Special offer: Receive a copy of the award-winning print edition, Brain Meets World, or a Behavioral Scientist t-shirt or hat when you join at the Print + Digital + Events or Investor level.
Jared Furuta received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society from 2023 to 2025. He is broadly interested in understanding how the consolidation and fragmentation of cultural ideals at the macro-level can shape institutional change at the national and organizational levels. His research pursues these questions across areas including globalization, organizations, education, and the social sources of pro-environmental change.
Patricia Bromley is associate professor of education, environmental social science, and (by courtesy) sociology at Stanford University. Her research spans a range of fields including comparative education, organization theory, sociology of education, and public administration and policy. Her work focuses on the rise and globalization of a liberal culture emphasizing rational, scientific thinking and expansive forms of rights exemplified by many aspects of contemporary sustainable development, as well as recent attacks on this culture.
Original, thought-provoking reports from the front lines of behavioral science.
Climate Change Is Getting Worse. Why Don’t We See More Action? – Behavioral Scientist
Leave a Comment
