Radical Ease and the Limits of Climate Intentions
By Ashley Muspratt, President & CEO of CET
Since 1970…
Earth Day has been a fixture on the environmental movement’s calendar. Every April 22—or, for the ease of participants, the nearest weekend—millions of individuals and organizations around the globe have mobilized for a day of action.
I credit Earth Day for catalyzing a groundswell of U.S. environmental legislation in the 1970s and 1980s, for activating a global environmental movement, and for reinforcing the public concern about climate change. But as the leader of an organization that works to accelerate adoption of decarbonization solutions 365 days per year, I know that despite overwhelming concern, uptake of climate solutions like insulation, non-fossil-fuel heating, EVs, and food waste reduction, lags among households and businesses.
Today, we are already facing irreversible climate change, and we are on track for increasingly catastrophic impacts as carbon emissions continue to climb. It’s time for the environmental movement to rise to a new challenge, from compelling people to care to compelling people to act in meaningful and sustained ways.
Effort as a determining factor
Behavioral science offers a useful lens here into the human psyche—and into what motivates our decisions and actions. Turns out, much of human decision making is shaped by cognitive efficiency, not by the outcomes of careful analysis. Faced with competing demands, the human brain tends to conserve effort, relying on habits, defaults, and paths of least resistance.
Within this context, research from Zoe Chance at the Yale School of Management is particularly instructive. She summarizes a consistent finding across studies:
“Ease is the single best predictor of behavior.”
This insight complicates some common assumptions about climate action. It suggests that even when motivation is present—and even when solutions are cost-effective—the effort required to engage with those solutions largely determines whether action happens at all.
In practice, climate-related decisions often involve multiple layers of complexity: understanding unfamiliar technologies, coordinating with contractors, navigating incentives, and managing administrative requirements. Each layer introduces friction.
Individually, these steps may seem manageable. Collectively, they can be enough to delay or prevent action.
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The distinction between access and uptake
Recent progress in climate program design has focused on expanding access—lowering costs, broadening eligibility, and improving equity in who benefits from available solutions.
These advances are essential. But access alone does not ensure uptake.
A program may be financially viable and widely available, yet still experience limited participation if the process of engaging with it is difficult to navigate. From a behavioral standpoint, the threshold for action is shaped not only by affordability or awareness, but by the total effort required to move from interest to completion.
This helps explain a persistent pattern: high levels of concern about climate change alongside relatively low levels of participation in available solutions.
Radical ease is the lever for mobilizing climate action
If effort is a central determinant of behavior, it follows that effort is a central determinant of climate action.
Understanding this reality of human behavior suggests that designing for radical ease is the single biggest lever for mobilizing people to adopt climate solutions.
In other words, program design must focus on how solutions are delivered and experienced, not just how they are promoted. Good design must prioritize removing barriers and minizing decisions.
In practice, this can mean:
These approaches recognize a basic reality: people are more likely to follow through when the path forward fits within the limits of their time, attention, and cognitive capacity.
RecyclingWorks in Massachusetts
RecyclingWorks in MA makes waste reduction simple for businesses, offering hands-on support, training, and guidance. By removing complexity, the program makes it easy to take action and sustain it.
Radical ease in practice
While radical ease may not yet be a de facto design principle, there are climate action programs operating with this ethos and the results speak for themselves.
In commercial waste reduction, for example, RecyclingWorks in MA is a no-cost assistance program for businesses that offers on-site waste assesments and recommendations, staff training, signage, and support identifying service providers. The program removes the hard work of strengthening waste management and makes it radically easy for businesses to say yes and sustain the new behaviors and practices.
In fact, the effectiveness of the state’s commercial food waste disposal ban has been linked to the presence of RecyclingWorks and its efficacy helping businesses navigate the practical realities of implementation.
Similarly, in residential energy, programs that combine financial support with end-to-end guidance—addressing both economic and cognitive barriers—have demonstrated higher participation rates and more comprehensive upgrades than traditional approaches.
Across these examples, the distinguishing factor is not simply the availability of solutions, but how easy it is to adopt them.
From intention to follow-through
Closing the gap between climate concern and climate action requires shifting climate action from daunting to doable. It’s obvious, yet in practice, ease is more frequently treated as a “nice to have” than as a necessity of human psychology.
Addressing the mismatch between the complexity of the actions being asked and the conditions under which people make decisions, doesn’t require lowering ambition. It requires reducing the effort needed to achieve it.
From one climate solutions practitioner to another, the call to action this Earth Month is to look at your programs and ask:
When we commit to making climate action radically easy, when adopting climate solutions is the path of least resistance, we will finally see the pace and scale of decarbonization thats needed to protect life on this planet as we know it.
Further Reading
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Zoe Chance
Influence Is Your Superpower
A practical look at how people actually make decisions, including why ease often matters more than intention. -
Yale School of Management
Behavioral science research on decision-making, including the “Gator vs. Judge” framework. -
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection
Resources on commercial food waste reduction and the role of technical assistance programs like RecyclingWorks in Massachusetts.
Ashley Muspratt
Ashley Muspratt is President and CEO of CET where she focuses on turning climate ambition into action. Her work centers on how systems, programs, and partnerships can make climate solutions easier to adopt at scale.
