An interesting psychological observation

     After reading so much on human behavior and ways of changing it to move towards sustainability, I have become very observant of people, including me, and behavior in general. I came across a very interesting incident in my own home, that is very applicable to this topic. My housemates and I recently received a water bill, something which we do not have in the US, and since 3 out of 4 of us are Americans, we were a bit angry. As we looked through where the fees came from we were very frustrated to learn that we get charged for water coming in to our house and then again when it leaves, as well as rain water. All being students with out much money, we would prefer not to pay, and so we made some alterations to our lifestyle that will require less water, so that our bill would be less. Now the part that is interesting to me is that after this little event, one of my housemates, struggling for money, still leaves all of the lights on, and keeps the heat on high (and its not even winter yet...). I am constantly turning the lights off after him. I am hoping that when our electricity and gas bills come, he will want to make several more alterations. It just astounds me that the connection with electricity and gas has not yet been made in his head; he is a very bright person.
     In this situation educating the consumer probably wouldn't make a difference, the consumer needs the punishment of the bill to convince him to use less energy everyday. This is where things get scary. So many people aren't going to do anything about this problem until they can see with their own eyes that it is going to directly affect them, and it is going to happen soon. In this specific example it happens to be money, but there are plenty of people out there with so much money that they don't care, and unfortunately those people tend to have the biggest carbon footprints. It seems as though those people must be persuaded by force, but because they have so much money, in our current economic system, they also have a lot of power. So what do we do?
     From all that I have learned thus far it seems as though we are going to have to put together all sorts of different tactics to get the message across to all kinds of people. Different people create different size impacts in different ways. There is not one single way in which we can change their lifestyles, even just in terms of direct energy consumption. We need people to see what is going on, the average person doesn't want to read about or listen to some complex scientific information. We need them to see what life is going to look like if they don't shape up now. That 10-10-10 advertisement with people blowing up took it a bit too far in my opinion, but we need to grab peoples attention just long enough to convince them that plenty of horrible things are already happening right outside of their door, not just to the polar bears and penguins on the poles, and the monkeys in the rainforests.