8
Climate messages may be all wrong
A screenshot of 350.org's ad with models stripping for climate change.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: I'm gonna say a couple of things now, by way of setting up this next story, that I can only hope won't make you turn off the radio: Global warming, greenhouse gas emissions.
If you're still with me, first of all, thanks. And second, the tendency to tune out when people start talking about climate change is pretty widespread. A report from Pew shows only about a quarter of Americans think global warming is a top priority. Lobbying, financial regulation and moral decline all rank higher. Which has environmental and climate groups scrambling to get people to care.
From the Marketplace Sustainability Desk, Adriene Hill reports.
Adriene Hill: It's hard to sex up a topic as science-y and scary as billions of tons of pollution causing our world to heat up -- not that some groups haven't tried.
Commercial: Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, dry places have droughts. We need to cool off.
And to cool off, the ads features hot models stripping down -- way down. Compelling? I'll leave that to you. But coming up with a message that resonates with people and makes them care about our warming planet can be tough, especially because it's so complicated.
Jamie Henn: Talking about any scientific issue and doing it in a way that motivates people to take action will be a challenge.
Jamie Henn is the co-founder of 350.org, an activist group focused on the climate. He says to really get people thinking about the environment, you've gotta tie it to issues like jobs and the economy that are more top of mind.
Henn: Finding a way to take this global problem and bring it back down to a human scale as much as possible.
One strategy that doesn't seem to have worked so far, focusing on all the horrible things that might happen if we don't act. Consider one of the environmental movements biggest ad failures, from the climate group 1010UK. In it, kids who don't want to participate in a plan to reduce pollution get blown up.
Sounds of explosions and screams
1010UK ad: Now everyone please remember to read chapters five and six on volcanoes and glaciation, except for Phillip and Tracey, of course.
It's not just the grossness that makes messages like this fail. There are psychological and social reasons that doomy-gloomy-end-of-the-world messages don't work.
Rob Willer is a sociology professor at UC Berkeley.
Rob Willer: There is this general tendency of people, and Americans especially, to believe in the world as just and fair and orderly.
Willer says apocalyptic climate messages can challenge that core belief.
Willer: And when information arises that threatens that view of the world, people tend to disregard that information.
Willer's study found people's strong senses of a just world were less likely to believe the climate is changing when it was presented in really dire ways. His advice for organizations working on campaigns: Be honest, but be positive.
Tom Bowman is the president of Bowman Global Change. He works with scientists on coming up with ways to talk about their work. He says the conversation needs to move away from the problems to solutions.
Tom Bowman: I would move beyond that conversation and talk about: How are we going to solve this? What does it mean to us to solve it?
Bowman says it's time to re-brand climate change: Dump the downer-impending-environmental-catastrophe image. And instead, come up with something more inspiring, a promising, new way forward for the country.
Bowman: It could be about a new patriotism, it could be about transforming ourselves to be the world leader in the new economy.
Perhaps visions that would garner attention without the addition of nearly nude models.
I'm Adriene Hill for Marketplace.
yes, without a doubt the message to the consumer is not only how does this impact on your wallet, but what are one's options to change for the better, both financially and for the good of the environment.
having studied this since back in the late 70's and witnessed what little our efforts have done to take care of the planet we are on, i'm certain the correct course of action is to emphasize investments in renewable energy and mass transit. more importantly we must invest in the related infrastructure. just as we provided the model for china and india to mass produce automobiles, etc, we need to be out in front both for future growth of our economy "jobs" and to provided the new model for those impact eclipsing countries, to emmulate.
we see futal efforts by our administration, in recent proprosals for mass transit ie. high speed rail. we are way behind many other countries with regard to all these initiatives.
in the not so distant future, it will be seen not only as vogue to be networking/conferencing to and from work via rail; but realized as financially burdensome let alone frowned upon to commute singularly by conventional automobiles.
it is not by coincidence that warren buffet and the like have invested heavily in rail, etc. these iniatives will and have to be the new boom, just like industrial revolution and the dot com boom. call it what you like, save the planet boom; whether you like it or not, your on it.
there exist atleast 12 well documented and published areas globally that we need to focus on to ensure that generations to come may survive on our earth.
curious final note, if nasa can be directed to inspect toyota's uncontrolled acceleration issues, i would think they would be a wise candidate to help resolve our ability to exist on this planet while minimizing the impact to it. did you say epa?
Look, it's great to talk about solutions, but we can't pretend that the reason for addressing climate change is so that we can be patriotic and make more money. That's not why we stopped using DDT in this country, nor is it why we got lead out of paint and motor fuels. Rather we did those things because failing to do so would have meant a more Silent Spring and more dead children.
The problem with the messaging has been a failure to pivot from what the problem and its consequences are to truly smart solutions that can lead to innovation, greater prosperity, and maybe even short-term benefits.
We goofed around too long and too much with a complicated cap-and-trade system that ended up giving away too much to polluters and doing too little for the rest. Here's what to do:
1. Eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, development and use. It's bad enough we don't pay the full cost of using fossil fuels, and these subsidies just make it worse.
2. Tax carbon the same way we tax the chemical feedstocks that gave us all those Superfund sites. Producers will (and should) pass along the tax just like any other cost of doing business so that consumers / carbon users bear the cost of our contriibution to climate change.
3. Use the proceeds to: (a) reduce the taxes on what we want people to do more of, like save and hire workers; (b) provide incentives, technical assistance and R&D to make it easier to avoid paying the carbon tax (e.g., weatherization programs, building bike lanes, etc.); and (c) fund initiatives to meet the adaptation needs of our own and other species. No matter how much we cut GHG emissions, we're gonna have a warmer and more volatile planet for at leat 100 years, and without sufficient habitat protection and other measures, we're going to have a very different collection of neighbors than we have now.
Just tax carbon and be done with it. Use the proceeds to pay for adaptation and to
And let's not forget the other issues on folks' plates everyday: lack of good education--and funding in the tank in almost every state, 14 million americans in poverty, house values on a continuing slide in many areas, loss of jobs, and the corrupting influence of Wall street and the (from all fronts) lobbyists. How are folks supposed to wrap their worry around climate change with all this going on? It's the one negative part of our existence that's not downright "in your face." We have to get folks working on clean energy, from the standpoint of jobs creation, and as a benefit to our cost of living. That's a starting point, with a three pronged results: lowering fuel costs, creating clean jobs and pushing the feeling that "I am doing something positive about this problem." It's a strong place to start. We need more energy efficient cars, homes, and (clean sources of) fuel.
This piece on making global warming a national priority seems to me to overlook the elephant in the room: the fact that so many “average Joe’s and Jane’s†don’t believe it exists. It's not just about people thinking the world is fair or being unaware of the issue or lazy--it's that many people really don't believe it. When we lived in Madison, WI—a liberal, university town--most of our acquaintances (religious and non) at least accepted it as a reality, but when traveling in rural WI and now moving back to TX, we find most people we know—or even bump into—see it as a fraud. What environmentalists fail to recognize is that political conservatives see global warming as a liberal fraud perpetrated on the masses by either corrupt or atheist scientists (and it’s not too hard to find reasons for this belief) or by a liberal government who wants to increase its presence in American lives. By and large, global warming is seen as a LIBERAL issue, and no amount of exposure will change that. Every time it snows or we have even cold temperatures, I hear the following: “Yeah, this looks like global warming!†I hear that from my 72-year-old farmer friend, my stay-at-home mom neighbor, and even the 12-year-old fencer at my son’s fencing class! Though my husband is a Ph.D. chemist who accepts global warming, we cannot get my libertarian brother to even acknowledge that ANY scientific claims for global warming are credible, and he constantly has tons of blogs and articles critiquing every part of the “data.†I suspect this is the case in more neighborhoods than ours, and no number of sensational commercials or pleas for awareness will change it until it becomes divorced from its strong political associations. Reframing the debate in terms of frugality, stewardship, reasonableness, etc. without all the apocalyptic language, carbon marketing “schemes†(like credits), and intense political rhetoric would be more effective.
I believe that John Muir (the DIY VW fix-it guru, not the famous naturalist) wrote in the Velvet Monkey Wrench that a company could do as it pleased inside it's property as long as it did not affect anything outside and did not persist after the property went to other owners or was abandoned. His libertarian version of the Prudence Principle would have transformed environmental protection in the U.S. which he saw even in 1973 as becoming all about bureaucratic minutiae.
Now we have the if-you-can't-argue-the-facts-argue-the-law-if-you-can't-argue-the-law-pound-on-the-table stuff going on 24/7 in the big biz media echo chamber.
Toxins are not innocent until proven gulity.
Regulatory incrementalism is just a poison pill.
We need simple.
"No yuck in the air/water/soil."
"All income treated the same."
"No permanent bases on foreign land."
"Education for everyone."
And we need to start transitioning to simple.
Hello,
People have a really hard time grasping and appreciating the disastrousness of pollution-caused climate change because their degree of understanding of our biospheric reality is between wretched and zero.
If you had an accurate scale model of the Earth the size of a common globe the biosphere (Where we live and most of the atmosphere is) would be microscopically thin! ( less than the thickness of the ink) You could not feel or find the Himalayas or the Mariana Trench. outside of that layer is 450 degrees below zero. Under that is molten rock.
That biosphere is all we got...no second chances. People of our techno-culture are less aware of reality than our ancient ancestors who would see the starry sky regularly and who fully expected to die at the hand of natures wrath. We live in a dream world now. The "Bubble Age".
We block ourselves off from the unwanted effects of our actions so well that we can't see "it"... the most obvious thing in the world... coming.
Your homework: The Earth is a ball in space. Awhirl in the sunlight. Where you are turns all the way around the world in only one day; exactly one day. Coincidence?...I think not!
Now, the next time you walk out onto the planet's surface, open to the sky, day or night, cloudy or not, determine which way the Earth is turning.
Allow yourself to feel the moving Earth under your feet as a reward. You can't really feel it but let yourself have the experience anyway!
Climate Change has done to news editors and lazy copy and paste journalists, climatologists, progressivists and anyone in the discredited scientific community, what nasty priests did for the Catholic Church. As for the politicians promising to make the weather colder with tax, we expected as much.
SYSTEM CHANGE, NOT CLIMATE CHANGE.
In his State of the Union Address, President Obama, didn’t mention the words Climate Change or EPA once. So why are the thousands of consensus scientists not marching in protest? Thanks media. And meanwhile, the UN had allowed carbon trading to trump 3rd world fresh water relief, starvation rescue and 3rd world education for just over 24 years of climate control instead of needed population control. Nice job. And scientists produced cruise missiles, cancer causing chemicals, land mine technology, nuclear weapons, germ warfare, cluster bombs, strip mining technology, Y2K, Y2Kyoto, deep sea drilling technology and now climate change. And how ironic is it that up until 25 years ago when the CO2 Phobia began, scientists were condemned for producing planet killing chemicals and making environmentalism necessary in the first place? Continued support of the climate change mistake is making media quality worse and it splits environmental efforts, alienates support for responsible environmental stewardship. So lets all drop the CO2 and start stewardship of the planet anew, fueled with optimism and courage, not needless panic of a “dying planetâ€.
I'm a physician. I find that people are much more likely to be motivated to address their diabetes when we talk about how they will immediately feel better. The same principle likely applies in the discussion of environment. We can focus on the positive short-term benefits of environmental initiatives, knowing that the long-term benefits come along for the ride.
