By Anisha Jain
Climate does not vote, yet the language around it often does. Rising seas and record heat are filtered through the identities people hold, turning a shared reality into a contested story. The divide is not in the atmosphere itself, but in how we choose to see it.
Imagine a summer afternoon in Phoenix; the heat presses down like a fact no one bothers to debate. A typical homeowner might not think of herself as making a climate statement when she taps her phone to adjust the thermostat in her small ranch house. The “eco-mode” was the default when she installed her smart system and she never saw a reason to change it. What matters is that her electricity bill is nearly 20% lower than the year before.
The homeowner’s everyday technologies including the thermostat, LED bulbs, and high-efficiency refrigerators are greener in practice: consuming less energy, saving money, and quietly reducing emissions without requiring conscious choice. Not because she is choosing to “go green,” but because the options available to her are increasingly designed that way.
Her story illustrates the paradox: climate in much of our public imagination is politicized in language, but steadily depoliticized in practice.
The Identity Trap
Climate became polarized in the U.S. for reasons as much cultural as economic. Beginning in the 1990s, for example, congressional debates over the Kyoto Protocol framed climate commitments as a threat to American jobs and sovereignty, while industry-funded campaigns portrayed environmental regulation as an attack on growth and personal freedom. Over time, partisan strategy cast climate action less as a policy question and more as a marker of cultural identity.
Once an issue is coded as belonging to one party, psychologists note, people evaluate it not on evidence but on whether it affirms their in-group (meaning the social group with which they most identify). This is the identity trap, the behavioral bias that makes facts secondary to belonging. Research in political psychology demonstrates this dynamic: Kahan et al. (2012) showed that cultural identity strongly influences how people interpret evidence on climate risks, often overriding scientific consensus.
Behavioral science also shows how framing shapes response. Tversky and Kahneman (1981) found that the way options are presented significantly shifts preferences, even when the underlying facts remain the same. In climate communication, “climate policy” often polarizes, while terms like “clean air,” “energy security,” or “lower bills” generate broader agreement. The underlying action is the same, but the frame triggers different interpretations. For leaders, this is the first lesson: ideology divides, but framing around co-benefits creates alignment.
The Rise of Default Green
If the identity trap explains the polarization, choice architecture explains the progress. Choice architecture refers to the way environments are designed to influence decisions without restricting options. Behavioral science shows that people rarely opt out of defaults. For example, Johnson and Goldstein (2003) demonstrated that organ donation rates soar from under 20 percent in opt-in systems to over 90 percent in opt-out countries, illustrating the power of the default effect. In sustainability, the same principle applies:
- Standards as Nudges: Since 1987, federal appliance and equipment standards have transformed markets by phasing out inefficient products and setting efficiency as the baseline. In 2024 alone, these standards saved American consumers more than $105 billion. Consumers often “choose” greener models not through conscious intent but because the inefficient options simply no longer exist.
- Technology Curves: Since 2010, the cost of utility-scale solar panels has fallen by about 85% (IRENA, 2021). In many regions, including Europe, China, India, and parts of the United States, renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new electricity generation, making it the rational default.
- Behavioral Defaults: Smart thermostats, opt-out green energy programs, and paperless billing all reduce emissions by requiring little extra effort from households. Each intervention leverages the status quo bias to nudge millions of small decisions toward more sustainable outcomes.
The homeowner’s “eco-mode” thermostat wasn’t a conscious act of activism, but an example of choice architecture quietly doing its work.
Default Green at Scale: Walmart’s Supply Chain
Scale magnifies the power of defaults. And few organizations embody scale quite like Walmart.
In 2017, the company launched Project Gigaton, an initiative aimed at cutting one gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions from its global supply chain by 2030. What began as reporting dashboards and redesign templates soon evolved into a new way of doing business, bundled with cost-sharing programs, efficiency incentives, and public recognition for suppliers that met the goals. Even small changes, like switching to thinner cardboard, not only cut emissions but also reduced material costs by double digits.
By 2023, Walmart reported that its suppliers had collectively avoided more than 750 million metric tons of emissions, which was three-quarters of the 2030 target. That’s equivalent to taking about 160 million cars off the road for a year, or the annual electricity use of 150 million U.S. homes. For many suppliers, these adjustments were not framed as “climate action,” but simply as part of doing business with Walmart.
This is behavioral science at scale:
- Simplification. Streamlined reporting platforms reduced the friction of action.
- Incentives. Bulk procurement lowered the price of renewable energy and efficient technologies.
- Social proof. Public recognition of supplier achievements created reputational nudges.
Together, these shifts rewired the system so that the sustainable choice became the easiest, most rational choice.
A Global Contrast
The U.S. may debate climate in partisan terms, but elsewhere the framing is different:
- Europe treats climate action as both competitiveness and energy security in policies such as the European Green Deal and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) (European Commission, 2023).
- China and India frame it as survival, tackling lethal urban air pollution, linked to 4.2 million premature deaths annually worldwide (WHO, 2019) and safeguarding food security for populations where agriculture still employs about 22% of the workforce in China and over 40% in India (World Bank, 2023).
- Africa and Latin America emphasize adaptation, from Kenya’s Climate Smart Agriculture Implementation Framework (2018-2027) promoting resilience in drought-affected farming systems (FAO, 2018) to Brazil’s flood management initiatives in Rio de Janeiro designed to reduce disaster losses (UNDRR, 2024).
History reinforces the lesson. Humanity moved from wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to gas, not because of moral crusades but because the next option was denser, cheaper, and more efficient. Renewables are simply the next rung. As energy scholar Vaclav Smil writes in Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (2010): “Energy transitions are normal. They are not revolutionary; they are evolutionary.”
The contrast highlights a deeper truth: depoliticization does not mean apathy. It means embedding climate into systems where ideology becomes secondary to cost, resilience, and survival.
Implications for Leaders
For executives and policymakers, the rise of “default green” offers three practical lessons from behavioral science:
- Reframe for Co-Benefits: Words matter. “Climate” may polarize, but “clean air,” “resilience,” and “lower costs” resonate broadly. Leaders should frame sustainability in terms of the benefits stakeholders feel most directly.
- Design Choice Architecture: The most effective climate strategies are invisible. By embedding sustainability into procurement standards, building codes, and product design, leaders create systems where the green option is automatic.
- Anticipate Behavioral Inflections: Behavior shifts quickly once costs cross a threshold or defaults reset expectations. Waiting for political consensus risks missing the market turn. Leaders who move early can set the terms of competition.
These are not abstract lessons. They mark the difference between companies and governments that shape the transition and those that scramble to catch up once it has already happened.
The Quiet Revolution
Politics often lags material change. Seatbelts, once mocked as government overreach, are now unquestioned. Child labor laws, asbestos bans, unleaded gasoline were all bitterly contested before they became invisible standards. Climate may follow the same arc: noisy at the start, inevitable in the end.
As David Attenborough reminds us in A Life on Our Planet (2019): “The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world.” That dependency is not partisan. Nor is the quiet revolution unfolding in our homes, offices, and supply chains through thermostats, procurement dashboards, and refrigerators that simply come efficient by design. What once felt aspirational is now ordinary; what once seemed contested is becoming inevitable.
Reader Question
Red, blue, or otherwise, the future may already be default green. The only question that remains is this: if the world is already turning green without us noticing, what is left for us to do?