A Call for a Communication Solution to Trump's Climate Information Pollution
The longtime progressive public relations pioneer David Fenton and I have disagreed on some things - most notably the role of nuclear energy in powering a climate-safe future. But we agree on lots more and his media and communication insights are invaluable.
That’s why I had him on Sustain What awhile back to talk about his learning journey and book. Here’s an excerpt where we discussed the inutility of centering campaigns on “climate justice” even though that might be your end goal (few Americans have ever heard the term):
Notably, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication just released a survey and study “developed in partnership with climate justice advocates and experts across the U.S. and in Canada”1 focused on climate justice and it largely corroborated Fenton’s concerns. [See correction in footnote.]
With President Trump settling in after an initial chaotic and dangerous salvo of executive orders, Fenton has written a short post offering climate-focused progressives a long-term road map to reclaiming the foreground. It’s on Framelab, the newsletter by linguist George Lakoff and journalist Gil Duran that is an essential guide to recognizing and utilizing framing in confronting the many urgent issues facing Americans.
Here’s an excerpt and link (full post is here):
Democrats and progressives ceded the narrative propaganda war to Trump. We failed to communicate at the level of people’s values or daily struggles — if we communicated at all. We built no lasting mass or digital media institutions or even a corps of social media influencers to counter the right. We suffer from what Lakoff has dubbed “the Enlightenment fallacy” — that great ideas sell themselves. They don’t. We are now seeing, in real time, the consequences of this failure across almost every issue of importance.
The good news is that we still have time to fix these issues and reclaim power for the public good. However, we must act quickly to protect democracy and ensure that Earth remains a livable planet.
Trump is waging war on Earth and its people — but the people mostly don’t know it. Trump is putting oil and chemical lobbyists in charge of dirtying our air and water while claiming to be for “clean air and water.” The oil, coal, and gas industries are now effectively running all branches of government. Trump is propping up their collapsing markets by opposing electric cars and even sun and wind power, our cheapest and most abundant forms of energy….
On the bright side, we have most of the data we need to apply linguistics, framing, metaphor, and cognitive science to solve the public knowledge deficit. Our community has all the resources we need to build the infrastructure to transform the political and public will on climate. But we are spending most of it on science, policy, and law instead of public knowledge, urgency, and mobilization.
Meanwhile, the extreme right has built up a network of digital media institutions and influencers. This is how Trump won. The pro-democracy, pro-planet side has mostly not done this. The extreme right has a unified echo chamber to stay on message relentlessly. We have a progressive Tower of Babel. The right prioritizes simple messages and images — and the means to deliver them repetitively, as cognitive science teaches. We tend to love complexity and hate repeating ourselves.
We can change, and doing so is an urgent moral necessity. We can build influencer networks, content production studios, media war rooms, and mobilization platforms with broad public appeal. We can micro-target specific audiences and geographies just as much as the Republicans do. We can unify our own truth-based amplification chamber.
Plus, we have a significant advantage: the weather will keep speaking ever louder, unleashing disasters that will awaken tens of millions of Americans, but only if we tell them what’s happening. If we don’t reach the public with a simple conceptual framework to explain why it is happening and which special interests are intent on making it worse out of pure greed, we will lose the future.
I remain steadfastly optimistic and am working full-time to find a solution. When the public realizes what is truly at stake for their health, prosperity, safety, and security, they won’t say, “Go ahead, kill my children. Destroy their future.” Instead, they will demand change and never again vote for candidates who threaten their children’s future. Because they will understand what’s at stake…. [Read the rest and do subscribe to Framelab.]
When I read Fenton’s description of the deep and long-term strategy of the far right (and I’d include corporate and ideological power brokers who hide behind the far right), I was reminded of a conversation I had early in 2017 with a longtime professional communicator of climate doubt, Myron Ebell.
Ebell had capped two decades of “Cooler Heads Coalition” work, mostly at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, by helping run the first Trump transition at the Environmental Protection Agency. We met up in Manhattan after he attended a celebratory Competitive Enterprise Institute luncheon at the 21 Club.
“It’s been said to me that you guys got lucky because Trump as a candidate adopted a lot of positions that you agree with and you got lucky that he won the election,” he said. “But the way I look at it is that we at CEI and a few hundred other people at other groups and around the country have spent decades making the case against global warming alarmism and against energy rationing policies. And when Trump and several other candidates ran, they saw that there was a strong constituency that supported those policies that we have been advocating.”
Their core target?
“I think people who deal more with the material world than your typical member of the bicoastal urban elite - people who make stuff, who gut stuff and grow stuff for a living - have a different view of weather and climate than people who look at their screens and are told what to believe.”
His description of their core target aligns smoothly with research findings by sociologists lik Robert Emmet Jone and Riley Dunlap.
Here’s Ebell’s core idea as a shareable image. What do you think?
This has been corrected. I initially wrote that the Yale program “was hired..by funders.” As Anthony Leiserowitz, the director, said in an email, “[W]e are not “for hire” pollsters. As scientists, we decided to investigate how Americans were responding to these issues, and in fact published a peer reviewed paper on our findings.” That paper is here.
At a high level I agree with this, but I cash it out differently. We needed to communicate that the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere has created and will do harm. We (into the future) will be better off if we (in the present) start to reduce that harm. Fortunately the cost of reducing the harm are pretty low, readjusting the relative price of fuels that emit CO2 (and processes that remove CO2) in relation to other prices.
Unfortunately the environmental movement has given the impression that the harm of CO2 accumulation is so great that we must bear great costs to deal with them, greater that people are willing to bear and so the movement has focused on policies to reduce CO2 emissions that are invisible even thought they are greater per unit of CO2 emission avoided than necessary.