Professor Ian Walker:

I will echo that initial point, which is that obviously education is important. Is it the first thing you would do? There are some well-known complexities that illustrate the problem. There has been some research for example on educating people through myth busting. The research shows that it is often counter productive to take myth busting approaches because by repeating the myth to explain why it is wrong, people just remember the myth. One can actually end up having a counter-intuitive or counter-productive effect through educational approaches at times.

Similarly, it would be desirable if the population had a high level of climate literacy to the point where they were able to work out by themselves what is greenwashing and what is not. A highly climate literate population would see terms such as "self-charging hybrid car" and see it for the greenwashing that it is. However, climate literacy, energy literacy and systems literacy are hugely complicated. We know from research that we and colleagues have done that even knowing where the energy goes in one's home is beyond most people. Most people do not know where their energy is going or how to address that, let alone having the wider literacy to understand all sorts of systems.

There is some hope. One of the nudgy things that have been very successful, and we have done quite a lot on this, is the issue of social norms and learning from others. This is when people hear about success stories, etc. We did work on showers. Showers are wonderful because they are incredibly private and none of us knows what everybody else does. We did some work which showed that if you tell people how abnormal they are, they instantly become more normal. If you tell people that their showers are short, then they start taking longer showers. If you tell people that their showers are long, they start taking shorter showers almost immediately. This is an area where there is an opportunity for media and communications to show people that they are not alone and that they are part of a bigger picture. There is a phenomenon to which Professor Lunn alluded a moment ago, which is called pluralistic ignorance, whereby people have a tendency to believe that they want change but they look around and assume that nobody else wants change because they are not seeing anybody else doing anything. Media and communications can have a powerful role in overcoming this pluralistic ignorance effect by showing that actually most people around you do want change and are doing things and that you are not alone. We could potentially get some consensus through that route. It needs more exploration but it does feel like a promising avenue that builds on sound behavioural science.