People are aware of climate change but often do not change how they live.

Almost everybody today knows about global warming, but most people continue to drive, to fly and to buy things exactly as before. There are several reasons for this, and there are also ways to change the situation.

The first reason is that the problem seems far away. A person cannot see the temperature rising in his own street, and scientists speak about the year 2070. When a problem is not visible today, people always think about it tomorrow.

The second reason is that changing is difficult and expensive. Electric cars cost much more than normal cars, and the bus takes one hour when the car takes twenty minutes. Also, many people think that their small action changes nothing, because factories and big companies produce much more pollution than one family.

To change this, governments should make the green choice cheaper. If public transport is fast and cheap and electric cars have lower taxes, people will choose them not because of the environment but because it is better for their money. This works much faster than advertisements about the planet.

Another idea is to show people what their neighbours do. Some electricity companies write in the bill how much energy the customer used compared with similar families, and after this many people reduce their consumption, because nobody wants to be the worst in the street.

In conclusion, people do not change because the danger seems distant and the alternative is expensive, but cheaper green options and social comparison can persuade them much better than information alone.

Public awareness of climate change is now close to universal, yet behaviour has altered remarkably little. The explanation lies in the structure of the problem rather than in indifference, and this determines what would actually change matters.

The principal reason is that the costs and benefits are badly aligned. Reducing one's own emissions is immediate, personal and inconvenient, while the benefit is delayed by decades, shared with eight billion others, and invisible to the person bearing the cost. No feedback ever arrives: someone who stops flying observes no change in the weather, which means the ordinary mechanism by which people learn that an action worked is entirely absent.

A second reason is the scale mismatch. Individuals are aware that industrial and national emissions dwarf household choices, so personal restraint feels symbolic rather than effective. This is not irrational — a single household's contribution genuinely is negligible — and it produces a rational reluctance to accept real costs for an imperceptible effect.

What follows is that persuasion should not target awareness, which is already high. The most reliable lever is making the lower-carbon option the cheaper and more convenient one, so that people select it for ordinary reasons: frequent affordable public transport, insulation that reduces bills, and pricing that reflects environmental cost. Behaviour then changes without requiring anyone to be persuaded of anything.

Social comparison is the second effective tool. Energy bills showing how a household's consumption compares with similar neighbours have produced measurable reductions, because people respond far more strongly to what others around them do than to statistics about the future.

In conclusion, the gap exists because individual action is costly, invisible and apparently futile. Closing it requires changing the defaults and the norms rather than supplying more information.

The gap between what people know about climate change and what they do about it is often treated as evidence of hypocrisy. It is better read as evidence that this particular problem is constructed almost perfectly to defeat individual motivation — and once the mechanism is understood, the question of what would persuade people answers itself.

Three features do the damage. The first is temporal: the cost of acting falls now and the benefit arrives in decades, and humans discount distant outcomes steeply in every domain, from pensions to health. The second is that the benefit is diffuse — it is shared with everyone on earth, including those who did nothing — which makes restraint a textbook collective action problem in which each individual gains by continuing as before. The third, and least discussed, is the total absence of feedback. Someone who gives up flying observes precisely nothing: no cooler summer, no visible improvement, no confirmation. Since people learn what works by seeing results, an action that can never produce an observable result cannot become a habit through the normal route.

Compounding this is a scale problem that is not irrational at all. Individuals correctly perceive that industrial and national emissions dwarf anything a household does, so personal sacrifice feels symbolic. Telling people this perception is wrong does not help, because it is broadly right; what is wrong is the inference that nothing therefore matters.

What follows is that persuasion aimed at awareness has been targeting a constraint that stopped binding years ago. Awareness is close to universal, and further information reaches people who already agree. The interventions that move behaviour are those that alter the choice itself.

The most powerful is making the low-carbon option the default and the cheaper one. When public transport is frequent and affordable, when insulation reduces a bill, when the efficient appliance is the one on the shelf, people choose it for entirely ordinary reasons and their opinions about climate become irrelevant to the outcome. This is why the sugar levy and the switch to renewable electricity achieved more than any campaign: neither required anyone to be convinced.

The second is social rather than informational. People respond far more strongly to descriptive norms — what others around them actually do — than to projections. Energy bills comparing a household with similar neighbours have produced consistent reductions, because a visible local comparison is salient in a way that a global average never is.

In short, the gap persists because individual action is immediate in cost, invisible in effect and negligible in scale. What would close it is not more information but a world in which the better choice is also the easier one — which turns the problem from a test of virtue into a matter of ordinary self-interest.