Human dominance on Earth is largely due to our heavily evolved brains. But our brains may be the death of us yet. Unless CSR steps up to its promise.

How can half the US public deny climate change at a time when the scientific consensus has solidified around its reality? And, more importantly, what can we do about it? Some new psychological studies explain it.

Jon Krosnick of Stanford University wrote that people only take problems seriously if they feel they can be solved. If the problem seems unsolvable, we find ways to rationalize it away. In Loss and Climate Change, Rosemary Randall of Cambridge Carbon Footprint goes further. Randall says that the size and intractability of the "problem narrative" contrasts with the diminutive steps recommended in most "solutions narratives." Boy, I get this! The world produces almost 30 Billion metric tons of carbon emissions a year. So let's take shorter showers!

Do you see the disconnect?

We are leaving ourselves an "out," a way of denying climate change, with the very solutions we offer. Hey, if climate change were a serious problem, someone would come up with serious solutions, wouldn't they? And since the recommended changes are inconvenient anyway, it's just easier to deny that we need to do anything, personal or otherwise.

So, what do we do about this? Governments failed to commit to serious solutions in Copenhagen. Too much corporate pressure from the wrong quarters was part of the reason. But in addition to the lack of policy, the failure left us free to continue to rationalize climate change away.

What we need to do is to introduce some dissonant facts into the rationalization landscape. We need to make sure that any individual's climate denial has to navigate around some pretty stubborn realities. A serious response in Copenhagen would have accomplished this. But there wasn't any. So here's where Extreme CSR comes in.

We need our corporations to step up and loudly declare that climate change is a threat to their business and the planet, and that their CSR program is being structured to address climate change directly. We got a taste of this when several major American firms, including Apple Computer and Nike, resigned from the US Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber's opposition to climate change legislation in Congress. These actions grabbed headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and web sites around the net. To someone in denial about climate change, these events represented a dose of reality that needed to be fit into the rationalization scheme. Maybe one or two of these will fit. But a freight train full of corporate alarm ringing on the impact of climate change on their businesses from CSR offices would force an end to denial, and a beginning to restructuring our world.