Why Your Brain Can’t Process Climate Changehttps://time.com/5651393/why-your-brain-cant-process-climate-change/... When you think about yourself while inside the narrow metal tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a certain part of your brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, will light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If you think about a family member, the MPFC will still light up, though less robustly. And if you think about other people whom you feel no connection to—like, say, the inhabitants of the South Asian island nation of the Maldives, which will likely one day be erased by climate-change-driven sea level rise—the MPFC will light up even less.
You don’t need a $3 million MRI machine to know that human beings are self-centered creatures. But as Jane McGonigal, the research director of the Institute for the Future, noted in a 2017 article for Slate, if you think about your own self, but in the future, you’ll see less activation in the MPFC than when you imagine your present self. The further out in time you imagine that self, the weaker that activation. As McGonigal writes: “Your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about.” And if we view our own selves in the future as virtual strangers, how much less do we care about the lives of generations yet to be born?
Economists have a figure for this: the “social discount rate,” which quantifies how much value declines as we look into the future. The higher the discount rate, the less we value the future economically. The climate-change denying Trump administration, for instance, uses an annual discount rate of 7 percent for its analysis of the social cost of CO2 emissions—how much economic damage each ton of carbon dioxide is estimated to cause—which is significantly higher than what was employed by the Obama administration.
Discounting makes sense over relatively short time horizons, like when a business is deciding whether or not to take out a loan. But when we begin to look into the further future—future on the scale of climate change, many decades and even centuries from now—discounting can spit back results that seem confounding. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit wrote that “at a discount rate of five percent, one death next year counts for more than a billion deaths in 500 years.” To put that in monetary terms, with a 5 percent discount rate, it would only be worth spending about $2,200 today in order to prevent $87 trillion in damages—the size of the total world economy now—in 500 years. Make it 700 years and it would only be worth spending 13 cents today. That’s how much we discount the far future, and it’s one reason why we’ve been so reluctant to take serious action on climate change.
The problem is that, as the Yale futurist and sociologist Wendell Bell has written, “a present sacrifice for the welfare of the future appears to be a one-way street.” We experience the sacrifice in the here and now, and people we will never meet enjoy the benefit. So instead the present is essentially “colonizing the future,” in the words of the social philosopher Roman Krznaric, treating it “as a distant colonial outpost where we dump ecological degradation, nuclear waste, public debt and technological risk.”