The Ineffectiveness of Fearmongering

The environmentalist community believes that escalating fear will engender change in human activity. Fear does work, but only to a degree. Humans in the first world have been motivated by fear to modify some of their behavior resulting in dramatic reductions in air pollution and dramatic improvements in water quality even as the population grew and industry thrived. The environmentalist community would have us believe we need radical change now, and the way to get people to agree is to spread ever more fear. Anyone who has studied human behavior will tell you, that fear is not the best motivator, and can often have the opposite effect.

Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference makes many excellent observations on the psychology of changing behavior. Teen smoking has exploded even as the anti-smoking lobby and it's government agents have been restricting it further, and further and spreading ever more fearful and explicitly shocking advertisements. The assault on teen smoking which uses ever escalating scare tactics to "prove" it's points is a colossal failure.

I highly recommend both of his books.