Why Climate Urgency Alone Isn’t Motivating Us to Change Our Ways

Forty-four percent of Americans worry "a great deal" about climate change, according to Gallup's April 2026 data — nearly matching the all-time highs set in 2020 and 2017. Concern about climate has been elevated for years. Whatever is standing between people and meaningful action, it isn't a lack of urgency.

But the instinct we’ve been following is to close the gap between knowing and doing by turning up the alarm. If people understand the crisis but aren't acting, make them feel it more urgently — more viscerally, more personally, more inescapably. Greta Thunberg's "How dare you" is the clearest expression of this impulse: moral urgency at maximum volume, directed at the people most responsible. She is not wrong. The moral stakes are real and the urgency is genuine.

I know that register from my own experience as a scold. Somewhere out there in the newspaper archives is a letter I wrote to the Tampa Tribune when I was roughly Greta’s age at the time of her famous speech — telling adults they should be ashamed of themselves for not recycling. The caring was genuine. The urgency was real. But what I was trying to activate — moral obligation — came across as oughtness: the feeling of being morally obligated without being personally moved, of hearing you should act without knowing where that action connects to anything real.

Oughtness is urgency experienced as accusation. What it reliably produces is not sustained movement but defensiveness, paralysis, or the slow drift toward not thinking about it at all.

(The recycling framing of that letter carries its own irony — what felt like a concrete, actionable ask was built partly on a fiction about what individual recycling actually accomplishes. That's the subject of the next essay. For now, the point is that even a tangible ask, delivered with genuine urgency and moral weight, still ran straight into this pattern.)

A friend who is a masterful storyteller shared a narrative framing device she learned as an MFA student — the difference between acute and chronic tension, and how it changes the way we experience narrative tension. Acute tension mobilizes: there is a threat, it is immediate, the story demands a response. Chronic tension does something different. It habituates. The nervous system is not built to sustain high-alert response to a threat with no perceivable endpoint. Over time, even genuine urgency at high volume produces not action but accommodation.

The climate crisis is constitutively chronic — its demands are unbounded, its worst consequences decades away, its causal lines too diffuse to locate. We have been trying to write it as an acute story for decades. The mismatch isn't a failure of communication. It's a structural problem with the narrative itself.

In "Is It Warm Out There?", published in The Atlantic in June of this year, journalist Joshua Partlow found Mark Griffith — 66 years old, a cowboy and construction worker — kneeling outside an Elks Club, spreading concrete. Griffith has spent his life outdoors. He has watched fire season creep from July into May. The four-foot snowpacks he knew in the 1960s and 70s are gone. He said, without defensiveness and without any ideological framing, that he was sure humans had caused a lot of it — "we ruin about everything we touch" — then went back to positioning a metal pole. He was building a sunshade. He knows what’s happening. He is not in denial, not checked out, not beyond caring. He is doing what the nervous system does with a chronic threat and no architecture to act on it: accommodating.

Psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman have documented what they call construal level theory: the finding that things distant from us in time, geography, social proximity, or certainty get represented in our minds as general and abstract rather than specific and felt. Climate change, even at its most urgent register, still scores high on every dimension of distance simultaneously — its worst consequences decades away, happening largely elsewhere, caused diffusely by everyone, uncertain enough in their local shape to stay slightly out of focus. That is not a character flaw in the people who find it abstract. It is the predictable cognitive outcome of how the problem has been framed and delivered.

The abstraction isn't inherent to the problem. It is a product of the architecture through which the problem has been delivered. More urgency, pumped through that architecture, produces oughtness — or accommodation — regardless of the volume.

We can see the same pattern at institutional scale. Companies that adopted sustainability commitments when reputational pressure demanded it are now withdrawing those commitments as the pressure shifts to short term value creation and and what is politically advantageous. That retreat is being narrated as a failure of corporate will. But I believe is something more structural — and plan to explore that in my next essay.

We won’t close the gap between knowing and acting by making people feel the crisis more acutely. Concern is already near record highs, and the gap remains. What would need to be different isn't the volume of the alarm. It's the architecture underneath — the conditions that convert external pressure into internal commitment, urgency into sustained practice. My next essay will examine the underlying architecture — the systems and structures we’ve built to try to close that gap — and why it keeps falling short.

Teresa Greenlees teaches Marketing and Sustainable Business at Western Michigan University and founded Radical Brands, a strategy consultancy helping brands find and live their purpose. Soul of Sustainability is an ongoing essay series.