Can you teach an old society new tricks?

Can you teach an old society new tricks? We're often told that people are voting with their feet and their wallets for the world as it is. But people are not voting. They're playing a game in which the dice of day-to-day decision making are hugely loaded, reinforcing the carbon atrophied economic structures around us.

Habits of over-consumption that push our excessive carbon emissions run deep. They are locked into our subsidised, car-biased transport system, our cheap-flights holiday culture and the numbing complexity that confronts us if we want to give our homes a green makeover. More fundamentally, we live in a culture that defines us first and foremost as material 'consumers.'

We've become locked-in as carbon emitters on three sides: surrounded by physical, economic and cultural infrastructure that gives most individuals precious little carbon room for manoeuvre.

In terms of physical infrastructure, decisions to go ahead with new large, centralised coal and nuclear power stations (which aren't, by the way, carbon free) lock-in huge energy inefficiencies that the individual can do little to effect.

Economically, price signals don't work because they exclude climate-costs. For example, Network Rail recently sent 200 workers to a meeting by road rather than rail because they deemed the train too expensive. Almost the whole of economic policy is geared toward growth and promoting energy intensive material consumption. Culturally, we are constantly and disproportionately prompted to behave primarily as self-absorbed consumers, and only remotely as engaged, publicly-minded citizens.

Worse still, work on the psychology of how we make 'free choices' suggests that we dramatically over-estimate the role and potential of individual free will to make the necessary big, changes.

Flights that are cheaper than railway journeys, car upgrades subsidised by the taxpayer, and a government publicly committed to airport expansion - it's hardly surprising that many individuals are unmoved, or at best confused, when exhorted to cut their emissions.

The dirty secret of Britain's official approach to getting individuals to cut emissions is that the government wants to have its carbon cake, and eat it too. The mixed message sent is deeply de-motivating for the general public, especially when getting people to behave differently is up against so much else.

It is not the case that we have no free will. Thankfully we do. But decades of research show that it is psychologically expensive to employ. For the vast majority of our actions, as a result, we take prompts from the world around us: from other people, from culture, from advertising, and our own habits. Here is the biggest obstacle to change. These factors guide our behaviour, inform our identity and even effect how our brains work. It is a vastly under-estimated dynamic.

Take what psychologists call 'stereotype activation.' In one brilliant study, a group of people were subtly primed with words relating to the stereotype of being elderly. Compared to a separate control group, they then began to exhibit stereotypical behaviour for old age. They walked more slowly and actually became more forgetful. What does this mean for our crisis of over-consumption and carbon emissions?

Recently, doing research to deliver a lecture for the Schumacher Society, I counted two things during a normal working day. First, I added up every advert I saw that encouraged me to be a materialist and consumer. Second, I clocked every message that prompted my behaviour as a public-spirited citizen, who might, for example, take action on climate change.

By the end of the day I had been exposed to 454 adverts and... just 3 'public citizen' messages. The latter were so few that I could remember them all. One was a police notice requesting witnesses to a murder, one a train company message asking people not to attack their staff, and another pleading with motorists not to run over cyclists.

Allow for more newspapers and more television at the weekend, and that means that in a single year, I calculate I'm exposed to over 180,000 prompts to consume, compared with just 1,000 to be good citizen. On this small but pretty typical sample, you could say that the 'stereotype activation' in our culture is loaded in favour of consumerism and against good citizenship at a stunning ratio of 180:1. Is it surprising that consumer society is so often blind to the planet it depends on?
For individuals to change, we somehow have to change the physical, economic and cultural circumstances in which they find themselves.

In economics it means taxing more what we want less of: carbon emissions, and less what we want more of: everything that will go into greening our energy supplies, buildings, transport system and agriculture. And, contrary to the rhetoric of 'necessary cuts,' the government will need to spend more, not less.

History tells us that cuts don't work in times of recession. It's basic economics that productive, targeted public spending pays for itself. The stimulus creates a multiplier effect and returns cash to the exchequer by saving jobs and generating employment. The case must be put that it's precisely by spending on a real green new deal that the public debt can be reduced in the medium to long term.

New, low cost credit lines to pay for new efficient, low energy infrastructure could be created but the money is already there, being wasted on other things.

According to Dr Stuart Parkinson of Scientists for Global Responsibility, the UK has the world's 4th largest military budget. He points out that spending per person on arms in the UK is 2.5 times more than Russia and 17 times that of China. In 2008, the UK government spent 34 times more on military research and development compared to researching renewable energy . For the cost of a single Eurofighter, a large 90MW wind farm could be built. Forget swords into ploughshares, its Trident into wind turbines that is needed now.

Apart from all the necessary carbon savings, productive expenditure on the great low-carbon transition will yield far more jobs. As the government seems set on incurring the ￡74 billion cost of replacing Trident, they might look at the research from University of Massachusetts that reveals how many jobs you get for a typical $1billion investment. Compared to military spending, investing in homes and energy efficiency creates 50% more jobs. Spending on public transport, 131% more. Research by York University estimates that while cancelling the Trident replacement will cause initial job losses, redirected spending will ultimately generate 105,000 new jobs.

In a similar way, the Ed Miliband's decision to push for new nuclear generating capacity is an example of perfectly irrational policy making. Every pound spent on new nuclear is a pound wasted, that could be spent reducing carbon emissions faster, more efficiently, with greater security and creating more jobs on a wide range of renewable alternatives.

So much for simple economic signals and energy infrastructure, much more will be needed to make the right choices easy and likely. Recently the New Economics Foundation published The Great Transition which sketches a sweep of positive, self-reinforcing changes that would deliver both rapid carbon emission cuts as well as a wide range of social and economic benefits.

History tells us that social norms can be changed quickly and positively in extreme circumstances, but that it requires comprehensive action from below and above. To do that we'll have to tackle the relentless conditioning that activates the default 'stereotype' of everyone being principally materialistic consumers.

We could begin, perhaps, by following in the footsteps of parts of Maine in the United States and Sao Paulo in Brazil where billboard advertising was banned to reduce visual pollution and create a calmer environment.

In the meantime, we will probably have to assume the 'environmental brace position,' because that orgy of materialism we call Christmas is just around the corner. If Santa would just fill his sack only with solar panels, wind turbines and insulation we might just get the new role model we need.

Andrew Simms is policy director of nef, and head of its climate change and energy programme. He is the author of Ecological Debt: Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations, and co-author of The New Economics: A Bigger Picture.