Gas Hoarding for the Environment

A Great little piece over at Overcoming Bias: "How Biases Save Us From Giving in to Terrorism" that provides great food for thought when people try to introduce 'out of the box' strategies to accomplish popular yet difficult tasks.

Terrorists are hampered by biases as much as the rest of us. In a Wired commentary 'The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail' Bruce Schneier discusses the interesting findings of Max Abrams in his paper Why Terrorism Does Not Work (International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 42–78).

Basically, terrorists run into trouble because people use correspondent inference theory to infer the intentions of others: the results of their actions are assumed to be concordant with their intentions. If a person sweeps the floor we assume he wants it clean (but he could just be working off excess energy). If somebody hits somebody else, we assume the intention was to harm (but it could just be a game). Similarly, people infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of a terrorist - which likely leads to a misunderstanding of the real goals of the terrorist."

I had a simple idea just a little while ago that led to this dissonance when just explaining it to people.

Imagine a credit card that when you filled up your gas tank would also let you buy a percentage of oil and place it in storage for some determined time. Then when the oil was sold after a the time period you would be credited with the value minus some handling fee. If the environmentalists drove efficient vehicles but bought the equivalent of Hummer drivers the price of gas would go up for everyone. The economic pressure on gas guzzlers would increase and the economic value of efficient vehicles would increase, as well as the value of the stored oil that our envirohoard credit card users have credited to them. So when they finally release their hoarded oil the uses would likely be more efficient as well.

So the dissonance arrives when the public equates the action, hoarding gas, with the goal, to create a more efficient fuel economy. How to switch this up again to make the actions and goals seem to more obviously and positively align I leave as an exercise for the reader to post in the comments.