INTRODUCTION
Reversing the trajectory of global climate change requires widespread support for policies and incentives that will reduce carbon emissions. Although it is certainly in the world's best interest to promote carbon neutrality, it is not in the material interests of nations or individuals to hinder economic growth (Dyson 2006, Woodward 2008). Given that the link between the use of fossil fuel and economic development is a significant political-economic barrier to restraint, the greatest hope for transformative change may be mobilization of ideological communities toward a ground swell of support for carbon neutrality.
The popularity of environmental education initiatives, including Al Gore's The Climate Project, attests to a belief that increasing awareness helps change individual behavior and promotes advocacy, but there is little real evidence that this is so (Blumstein and Saylan 2008). Although short-term behaviors often shift as a consequence of educational experiences (Kaiser and Fuhrer 2003), the resulting behavioral changes are typically short lived (Dwyer et al. 1993). We must question the assumption that increased knowledge of the dangers will generate a sustained rational response (Janssen and de Vries 1998, Dessai et al. 2004), because even the behavior of conservation biologists, who frequently drive large pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles, suggests that this is not the case. Behavioral response to the threat of global climate change simply does not match its unique potential for cumulative, adverse, and potentially chaotic outcomes (Dyson 2006).
Despite ample evidence of an inevitable rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide during this century, Dyson (2006:120) argues that "humanity's experience of another difficult 'long' threat—HIV/AIDS—reveals a broadly analogous sequence of human reactions. In short, (i) scientific understanding advances rapidly, but (ii) avoidance, denial, and recrimination characterize the overall societal response, therefore (iii) there is relatively little behavioral change, until (iv) evidence of damage becomes plain." The implication is that only direct experience with adverse outcomes leads to behavioral change, leaving us with the question of why the connection is so flimsy between what we know, what we value, and how we behave.
This question is rooted in the ideas of Ernest Becker, whose work culminated in two companion syntheses: The Denial of Death (1973) and Escape from Evil (1975). Here I expand Becker's cultural and proximate psychological understanding of human behavior to provide new insights into the challenge of implementing a rational response to global climate change. First, I summarize Becker's ideas on psychological repression of death anxiety through symbolic perpetuation of the self, and clarify the empirical framing of these ideas within the branch of social psychology known as "terror management theory" (TMT). I then use TMT research paradigms, which examine how thinking about death influences human behavior (Pyszczynski et al. 2006), to make predictions about how individuals and groups respond to mortal environmental problems like global climate change. The purpose of this synthesis is to explore one of the key psychological links between the reality of global climate change and the difficulty of mobilizing individuals and groups to confront the problem in a rational and timely manner. I focus on Becker's mechanistic (proximate) understanding of self-esteem striving, transference idealization, world view defense, and outgroup antagonism, illuminating several ways in which death-denying defenses and perpetuation of the symbolic self are psychological barriers to the development of modern, rational, sustainable belief systems, advocacy, and action.
