A Reminder that the Great Clamorous Climate Debate is Swamped by Real Life

And what to do about that

Once again, I dive in to get the best of X/Twitter and other social media so you don’t need to.

My friend Genevieve Guenther returned to X/Twitter today after a week spent offline. Here’s what she observed, and what prompted me to create the graphic above:

Genevieve Guenther

via X/Twitter:

I'm back after a week off—a week in which I had the surreal experience (which I have every time I take a real break) of living in a world that thinks, or at least *talks*, about the #ClimateCrisis not at all.

It's like that scene in Jaws, where everyone is frolicking in the water while Roy Scheider fears (and you of course know) that something horrible is about to happen.

I work really hard on analyzing the way people talk about #ClimateChange in order to craft effective messages for key target audiences—and that's valuable, sure—but right now I feel like the MOST important thing to do is just #EndClimateSilence.

So, this week: please, just BRING UP #CLIMATECHANGE in your life offline — especially when it's most awkward to do so. It will really help, I promise!

How to get climate traction

I replied with the artwork and these thoughts:

Nearly all of the heated discussions of climate, clean energy and other sustainability-policy questions are occurring on one small corner of the head of a tiny pin buried in a haystack of day-to-day considerations and concerns of the 6 billion adults on Earth. And this was true before social media hyper-concentrated single-issue debates. Elke Webeer and others long ago described the "finite basket of worry" we all tote around.

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I wrote, spoke and tweeted about this aspect of a human being’s “inconvenient mind” many times over many years, including here:

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To get traction when you try to end climate silence, as @DoctorVive suggests, first listen, a lot, to understand what people need. Identify what's getting in the way of, or can satisfy, those needs that fits with climate and clean-energy goals. And keep it up.

And then, more valuably, I poked back to provide a link for Weber’s research and found (via X/Twitter!) that she had done fresh research with others during the pandemic that undercut her old “finite pool of worry” hypothesis and replaced it with a different one:

Yes, I officially retract my 2006 Finite Pool of Worry hypothesis. Data more consistent with Johnson & Tversky 1983 Affect Generalization. But we find a Finite Pool of Attention and Action!

This may seem, literally, a bit academic but it isn’t because attention can be worked with through communication efforts far more than worry itself. So, as Guenther says, if you really care about building a safer human relationship with climate and energy, talk about it! Here’s the recent paper - Examining evidence for the Finite Pool of Worry and Finite Pool of Attention hypotheses.

Here’s more and please do subscribe and consider chipping in financially if you want me to keep up this Sustain What project.

Social sciences reveal the depth of the internal climate challenge: