This is obviously true, but it's not a choice of "scaring" people versus luring or indoctrinicating or acculturating them. Most significant change in the way we affect our environment or others we deal with comes about through a systemic or internal accounting change - which is neither.

A typical method is to make a previously implicit variable explicit as a decision factor, and accounting for it as a cost or value. So to make people "more green", you reflect the costs of not being green for those that lag. This makes a systemic (though often small) advantage for those that lead and adopt conserving tactics first. The small benefit is enough over a lot of iterations to strongly favour those that take the lead. Anyone who's gone to a casino and seen what a few percent edge can do to their kitty knows that even one percent is worth having.

What makes this work is certainty: rather than relying on fines and a complex process of being caught (the ineffective "scare" technique) it relies on a simple process of say carbon taxes or direct payments for biodiversity or habitat losses. As long as there's a way to measure the loss or cost, there will be a way to calculate the gain from finding another way to do the same thing without causing the loss.

For so-called "security" it's much more complicated because almost all of what "security" defends against is low-probability high-impact scenarios. People won't experience any scenario more than once, most likely, and only a few overall. So only those measures that address a great many security challenges at once (like allowing only particular people to entering a building after business hours) tend to be applied.

However, combining the low-impact very-high-probability scenarios that lead to conservation-minded taxes and the high-impact low-probability scenarios invoked in a security pitch yields a much more compelling combination than either. As we see in the climate change debate, the major issue of our time, it climbed to the top of everyone's radar through combining the very low impact certainty of each greenhouse gas molecule adding a little heat to the atmosphere, with the very high impact (and moderate to low probability) harm and conflict scenarios. These are unpredictable but some number of them will arise as various areas are flooded, burnt, hurricaned, melted, tornaded and blown up by angry people from the places that were destroyed by the residents of the places blown up. Some places may freeze, notably those relying on the Gulf Stream to make their agriculture and infrastructure work.

When the former World Bank economist Nick Stern actually got around to measuring the impact of climate change in monetary terms, he argued it could cost as much as both World Wars and the Depression. So the basis for the accounting/taxes is now in place, and the early adopters of low-emission techniques can expect rewards. Of maybe one percent, which offsets the 1 per cent of global GDP Stern says climate change will cost to address now - as opposed to 20 percent later. Which is enough to change rational behaviour now.

It's not bad if some people get scared by the 20 percent, though.