The cover feature in the The New York Times Magazine‘s recent “Green Issue,” “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” delivers rich food for thought for communicators. The article delves into what decision science research tells us about how people respond to environmental issues. Basically, our tendency to undervalue future benefits, assess risk based on emotion, and deal with a “finite pool of worry” spells trouble for efforts to deal with climate change.

It’s a long article not amenable to summarization, and it’s worth reading in full for the insights it provides on how we might communicate more effectively about climate change solutions.  For example, this nugget: a fee for carbon pollution described as an “offset” gets much more support than one described as a “tax.” Turns out it’s not necessarily the principle of paying for pollution that people object to; it’s the negative loaded term “tax” that inspires rejection.

That’s no surprise, you might think, but in environmentalists’ discussions of the pros and cons of a carbon tax, “people won’t accept a tax” is always a main con. Calling it something else to make it more palatable doesn’t seem to have emerged as a solution. People may fear that it won’t work because the public will see it as a dodge, but that may be true only when you’re using alternative wording that’s already been tagged as misleading and has its own negative connotations–”fee” instead of “tax,” for example.

Such solutions lead author Jon Gertner to an interesting ethical question: is this unfair manipulation? Gertner writes:

[Elke] Weber and David Krantz, two of the co-directors of CRED [Center for Research on Environmental Decisions], have given the matter a good deal of thought, too. ‘People need some guidance over what the right thing to do is,’ Krantz told me. But he said that he was doubtful that you could actually deceive people with decision science into acting in ways that they don’t believe are right. ‘Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?’ he asked. ‘You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.’

I’m with Krantz: what’s the harm in helping people get to an end they want (and I think most people, even if they don’t see it as a priority, would like to halt climate change) by working with their brains instead of against them? Read the article and see what you think.

The more analyses I read about how this or that technology won’t deliver the kind of energy (or whatever) we need, or can’t deliver enough of it, the more I think the primary challenge we face in pursuing sustainability is not technology—it’s how we think about solutions. (I’m not alone; there’s a recent book on the topic, The Power of Sustainable Thinking, by Bob Doppelt. If you’ve read it, please chime in.)

The negative conclusions of these analyses are often based on the assumption that we can’t—or won’t—change the way we do things. Because we don’t want to, or powerful interests don’t want us to, or it’s just not convenient. But, as venture capitalist Vinod Khosla points out in a recent interview, radical social change is hardly unprecedented (he cites the mobile phone, e-mail, and personal computers), “It just feels improbable before it happens.”

The upshot for communicators is, we need to make change seem possible as well as desirable. We need to make change seem exciting, fulfilling, status-enhancing—whatever it takes. (And yes, those are all emotional concepts, because our “rational” rejection of change often comes from an emotional fear of it, played upon by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo.) Not so long ago, a lot of people were chanting “Yes we can!” We need to keep chanting that—about more than a presidential race.