Tue, Jul 18, 2023 page9

• Climate movement: right answers, wrong words

  Big oil has sold lies about the climate crisis for decades, and the climate movement must learn from its tactics

  • By Jonathan Freedland / The Guardian
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  You might think we have all the proof we need. More of it is in front of us right now, with heat waves scorching through Europe, breaking records, wreaking havoc. In Athens, they closed the Acropolis on Friday as temperatures at the site headed towards 48°C. In Lisbon, visitors expecting perfect blue skies have been disappointed to find them streaked with gray — not clouds, but smoke from forest fires. In Italy, there was no spring this year: Floods gave way to unbearable heat with barely a pause.

  It is happening all over — biblical downpours in New York state, unquenchable fires in Canada — and yet humanity is not acting as if it is confronting a planetary emergency. Extreme weather is fast becoming the norm in the US, and yet Americans tell pollsters it is a low priority, ranking it 17th out of 21 national issues in a recent Pew survey. Even when the impact is personal, as it was for many Australians when bushfires raged through the country in 2019, opinions prove stubbornly hard to shift: One study found that among those “directly impacted” by the fires, about one-third saw no connection to the climate. They were “unmoved.”

  How can this be? How can we, like Nero, fiddle while the Earth burns? Some of the explanation lies in human nature.

  

  Illustration: Yusha

  As a species, we tend to prioritize the urgent over the important: “Thanks to our evolutionary history, we’re programmed to deal with the lion coming from the woods, not to strategize how to save our civilization over the next hundred years,” Jeff Goodell, author of an essential new book, The Heat Will Kill You First, told me.

  There is, too, the syndrome captured so well by the movie Don’t Look Up, namely the very human inability to contemplate our own destruction. We would find almost any excuse to look elsewhere, to find something immediate and diverting: In Britain last week, it was the alleged conduct of a BBC TV presenter, but there is always something.

  Those faults are in our stars; They are hard to change. And yet there are other explanations that are more susceptible to remedy. Most obvious is the fact that a vastly wealthy industry has spent billions to make people think the way they do. In just the three years following the Paris accords, five of the largest fossil fuel companies spent more than US$1 billion on communications and lobbying.

  However, the effort goes back decades, centered on selling one commodity above all: doubt. Like the tobacco industry before it, oil and gas has sought to persuade the global public that they cannot be sure the climate crisis is real, or human-made or that serious. It has been hugely effective. To take just one number: Only about one in seven Americans understands that there is a consensus among climate scientists, defined as more than 90 percent having “concluded that human-caused global warming is happening.”

  This specific problem, such as the climate crisis itself, is made by human beings — which is simultaneously enraging and encouraging. Enraging, because it is born of a greed that puts gargantuan profit ahead of a habitable planet. Encouraging, because most problems made by human beings can be fixed by them. Enter the climate movement — the scientists, the activists, the campaigners who have done so much for so long to combat this threat. Except, it turns out, they are part of the problem, too.

  The trouble is, they have not been communicating the threat loudly enough or in the right way — and some of the most committed fighters in this battle are saying so.

  Start with the most basic terms. “Global warming” was rightly rejected by many some time ago, not least because, as Goodell writes, it “sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather.”

  However, talk of heat is not much more apt: “In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new.”

  Yet “climate change” does not work either. Mere “change” is too gentle: It does not indicate whether the change would be negative or positive. It is not immediate: It hints that its consequences would be felt only in the future, when we are feeling them right now. Which is why this newspaper is right to speak of a climate crisis or emergency.

  There are multiple other terms favored by the climate cognoscenti, but they fall at a more basic hurdle: They are simply not understood by the wider public. Net zero, decarbonization, 1.5°C: When tested, they meet blank faces. People either do not know what they mean or find them confusing. David Fenton, a longtime public relations specialist for progressive causes, cites as one example the phrase “climate justice.” When most voters hear the word “justice,” they think of courts or police; bolt it to “climate,” and people are not moved, just confused, Fenton said.

  Of course, this connects to a perennial problem for the left — which so often makes its case using statistics and abstract concepts, rather than simple images and emotion. (Think of the remain campaign.) Fenton urges the climate community to speak of pollution — a word everyone gets — and to settle on the image of a “blanket of pollution trapping heat on Earth.” Every oil and gas emission makes that blanket thicker — and all that trapped heat helps cause floods and start fires, he said.

  Once settled on, that metaphor has to be deployed again and again, repeated so often it becomes exhausted — and exhausting — to those using it. This, too, clashes with progressive habit, which tends to hold to the “enlightenment fallacy”: The belief that the facts would persuade all by themselves. They do not need to be repeated, or simplified or embedded in moral or emotional stories: Their sheer truth would prevail.

  Perhaps this is why the climate movement has devoted relatively few resources to reaching or persuading the public, outside of periodic fundraising drives — certainly nothing to compete with their polluting opponents, who hire ad men steeped in marketing science to push their message relentlessly.

  “We’re in a propaganda war, but only one side is on the battlefield,” Fenton said.

  To enter the fight would require serious donors to dig deep, but also a change of mindset. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, who now hosts the aptly named Outrage + Optimism podcast, admits that the climate community has recoiled from marketing, which it regarded as “sort of tainted. It’s icky. You know: ‘We’re too good for marketing. We’re too righteous’... hopefully we’re getting over it.”

  It needs to do that fast, deploying whatever tools work to push a double message: both fear and hope. Fear for all the beauty, life and lives that would be lost from a parched planet — and hope that we still have time to avert the worst.

  Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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