Just in case you missed the live event, here’s my Sustain What conversation with two passionate climate communicators, both with experience in broadcast news media, pursuing distinct strategies via online video. Each has a very distinct vision of the path to action, and - as I exclaimed during the show, that’s exactly what’s needed. The climate challenge, and audiences out there, are both far too prismatic for one approach to be “right.”
My guests:
Chase Cain, who recently left NBC News after a decade focused on climate change reporting there, has launched a YouTube channel aiming to bridge cultural gaps by highlighting stories forging closer, and more relisient, relationships between people and nature.
Betsy Rosenberg, a former CBS radio journalist who has spent decades trying to engage audiences on the vital need to stem global warming and conserve the natural world. Her current platform, also on YouTube, is Code Green:
In our conversation, a listener on Facebook, Courtney A. Kaaz, posted this great question:
Make more desalination, hydroelectric dams, that chemically filter water, make breakwater piers that also clean the water, explain how you can use solar in a way that is actually economical in real time. All of Texas could get on board if you can give us economical, safe water and solve our toxic summer oceans, ponds and lakes.
Cain offered an answer that completely syncs with my view that often the best way to gain traction on energy and resilience choices that can improve climate outcomes doesn’t involve focusing on that grand, and divisive, thing called climate change:
I think what i think part of what [Courtney] is saying is she didn’t also say the word climate, and in a place like Texas that’s probably what’s going to reach people.
If you say climate you’ve lost the Fox News audience but we need and want the Fox News audience. I’m not saying that everything I’m going to do is devoted toward that. But I do want to create content that is accessible and as an invitation to those people.
…The Fox News audience probably spends more time in the outdoors, probably spends more time in nature than an MSNBC audience or an MSNBC audience, whatever it’s called. So they love the outdoors. They love nature. I just don’t know that they’ve connected the dots to how some of these policies are impacting the things and the places that they love. And so if we bridge that divide, then gosh, you’ve just won a huge segment of the American population, which would, I think, almost overnight flip our politics.
That closing assertion about a quick flip is pretty questionable (and Rosenberg expressed a very different view and strategy) but Cain’s core point is important.
Please watch and share the full show and weigh in.
There’s more background in the curtain raiser post that preceded the show:
And here’s my related conversation with Sammy Roth, the former Los Angeles Times climate columnist who’s moved to Substack:
