Petrol prices and our lizard brains

The government’s decision to cut fuel taxes this week highlights just how hard it is for politicians and voters to deal with short sharp shocks to the system. The ‘lizard brain’ part of our body politic has evolved to recoil from a petrol price shock, but this type of ‘thinking fast’ will need to be replaced with ‘thinking slow’ if we are to engineer a just transition to carbon zero. To find out more, Bernard talks to political scientist Bronwyn Hayward, environmental sociologist and public health researcher Kirsty Wild and economist Rosie Collins about how to replace thinking fast with thinking slow in our climate change actions.

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