Can we start talking differently about climate change? (Patreon)

So. It's been a while, eh?

I've been involved in some super intense and heavy work for the last 5 1/2 months, which has pretty much eaten up all my time. I am genuinely sorry and should have been writing more - if not for anything else than my mental health, which has taken a battering.

I'll write in more detail about that another time; but today I want to talk about framing.

So I'm a PR and communications guy (not a lobbyist despite what many would have you think)(which isn't to say I don't do any work that might be considered "lobbying "; it's just a tiny portion of what I do).

But when I tell people I work in PR or communications, they immediately think I'm some slimy spin doctor. Sure, there is an element of that. But I think that people in my industry ironically don't talk about what we do very well.

When you want to communicate with someone, you usually think of only what you will say. Where I come in is I help make your audience understand what you want them to say.

Saying stuff and having your audience parse/understand/feel/think in response are often very different things. And when you're communicating to try and change behaviour, this is very, very important.

As people, we are driven by emotions more than facts and logic. Facts don't win arguments. Feelings do.

So if we want people to do something, we must tap into an emotion. In the media training I do for clients, I talk about this and how in the political context, most politicians are rat shit at talking about something that pulls at heartstrings. Politicians talk about policies a lot, but then they don't get to the outcome of those policies - and the outcomes make us feel. And the most powerful feel of all? Hope.

As part of that training, I talk about how, in the 2016 US election, Donald Trump was actually the candidate of hope. For just enough people in the Appalachian regions, he convinced them that he could bring back their coal mining jobs, factory jobs, and various other blue-collar jobs that foreigners had taken. He made those people hope. Whereas on the left, we tend to get all technocratic and explain our policies in great detail, as though that resonates.

This is all a very long-winded intro to talking about climate change. For as long as I can remember climate change getting consistent mainstream coverage, we've used the language of fear to talk about it. Painted pictures of floods and fires and devastation. Surely our political class and our citizens would be too terrified of such a future that they'd just course to avoid it. And ... not really.

Fear is an interesting one. Because it is an emotion, but it's also not very good at driving long-term behavioural change. If you are old enough, you'll remember the 1990s drink-driving ads (if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot). They were all filled with smashed cars and flying corpses etc. But then they did a lot of research into what's called 'social marketing' and found that fear can drive behaviour change. But only in the immediate term. This means if you were going out that night and saw that ad just before you left then sure, you might not drink that night. However this wouldn't last and you might be drinking and driving next week.

What does drive behaviour change, though, is that word hope. And aspiration. So that's why those ads are now primarily "if you don't drink and drive you're a legend", because while fear stops us from doing something that instant, hoping to become a legend gives us something to aim for. It lasts longer.

So if we apply that to climate change, instead of focusing on the potential disastrous environment we're facing; what's the positive of acting? What is the future state we can hope for if we only do XYZ? Is it children swimming in pristine rivers with their parents? Grandparents taking their families for a walk through densely populated forests? People living great and wealthy lives by working in the clean tech industries? We have the tools for this, we're just not using them.

But the biggest problem here is that this doesn't actually address the root cause of climate change. Which is profit and capitalism. At the moment, it's still more profitable for big polluting companies to continue to pollute. And what those companies have managed to do is individualise the problem. So we turn on each other for driving an ICE car, or not taking public transport, or using a plastic bag at the supermarket, or flying somewhere.

So while there is still a lot that our politicians and citizenry can do about climate change, there is far more that those corporations can be doing (or not doing). And so how do we get them to do that? Well we can either make it so that being clean makes them more money than polluting does. Or I'll make an exception and we'll allow fear. We need them to fear us. And the way we get them to do that? Why we show just how well fed all the people of a country will be if they just eat the CEO of ExxonMobil. I sure do hope there's enough food to go round.