This week, Kevin Green, Vice President for Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment spoke with Sarah Lazarovic, Vice President of Communications and Creative Strategy at Rewiring America in a Rare Conversation called, “Sparking Change to Electrify Clean Energy Adoption.”
Rewiring America is a nonprofit organization focused on “electrification,” which means helping Americans switch to replace appliances in their homes that use fossil fuels (oil, coal, and gas) with ones that use electricity.
The conversation opened with a staggering statistic: 42% of US energy-related emissions come from homes and vehicles. Rewiring America’s goal is to reduce this number by making it easier for households and communities to go electric.
“Of course, systems have to change,” says Lazarovic. “Of course, we need to rework huge policy interventions to make this feasible for people. But also as humans, there are many things that we not only can do, but have to do to make this happen.”
Lazarovic believes that small, diffuse changes at the household and community level can complement big policy shifts towards emissions reductions.
Green agreed with the importance that individual action has on climate change, citing Rare’s Climate Culture Index, which found that one of the major drivers of behavior change is whether or not people believe that their peers are making changes as well.
“Behavioral science was a great tool in helping us articulate [the impact of electrification], because so many people just don’t know,” said Lazarovic. For example, she explained how she didn’t realize when she swapped out her gas furnace for a heat pump, she would bring her household emissions down by 75%. Part of the confusion is that there are so many solutions presented to people, that many people begin to experience cognitive fatigue and choice overload.
“And I find often in this climate space, people are being [given] a suite of solutions, some in good faith, some in bad faith. But how do we make it so that they can parse through those and just do the simple things that really matter?” asks Lazarovic.
Lazarovic believes that one day, society will look back on the way we’ve always done things and wonder why we didn’t make these changes sooner.
“We are selling a better story,” she says. “The benefits are myriad and it’s a win-win-win across everything from increasingly reduced costs to better health… We are at the last gasps of dealing with a status quo that is in fact, very brittle. And it’s brittle because people see that these things are crumbling, and people are seeing a better way.”
