Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CREDFor the climate-change message to finally sink in, for the 64 percent of Americans who don’t believe in the problem (according to a recent Pew poll) to start changing their minds, the place to begin might be the local high-school gym.

Have a respected teacher—maybe from the science department—lead a public presentation. She should mention some compelling data, but also tell about her summer trip to Australia’s drought-stricken Southeast and the dust that coated her morning tea.

She would say something like, “We can’t know every detail of what pumping the atmosphere full of greenhouse pollution will do. It’s like driving your car off a cliff—you can’t predict which parts will break, but you know enough to know the results won’t be good.”

There would be plenty of time for questions and planning a group response. Finally, it would help to flood the gym so attendees could sit up to their ankles in water, to really feel what flooding is like.

Such a plan incorporates leading research on how our minds respond to the threat of climate change, which is neatly synthesized in a new guide, “The Psychology of Climate Change Communication.” The 43-page booklet was released Wednesday by the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University, which conducts fascinating laboratory and field research at the intersection of psychology, anthropology, and behavioral economics (The New York Times Magazine profiled it last spring).

Aimed at scientists, journalists, educators, political aides, and “the interested public,” the guide begins with the blunt admission that climate communicators are failing. Global warming slipped to the bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns in a January Pew poll. CRED offers reasons why and suggests how to do better.

For example, people work harder to avoid losses than to seek gains, so “save money” might not be the best pitch for convincing people to buy efficient home appliances. A message like “avoid losing money on higher energy bills in the future” does better at appealing to this loss-aversion instinct.

To be clear, CRED’s researchers don’t suggest flooding the gym—that’s my scenario, based on their principles. Those include using:

Happily, the guide has cartoons. CRED graciously allowed us to reprint them. Click through the following pages (see navigation at the bottom of each page) for an overview of the guide's eight chapters, based on the illustrations by Ian Webster.

Point 1: Know your audience ...

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

... and expect them to have different mental models than scientists’. Newcomers to the climate issue might be sick of getting too much ice in their Dr. Pepper, so explain how sea ice is different.

Case study: Ozone is not a football term

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

There’s a useful side study on how people frequently confuse the ozone problem (a big hole) and the greenhouse gas problem (a blanket):

Some Americans thus reason that this “hole” either allows more solar radiation into the biosphere—warming the planet—or, alternatively, allows heat to escape—cooling the planet.

Nope. These misconceptions need plainspoken correcting.

Point 2: All climate activism is local

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

Consider the framing carefully, remembering that local appeals are powerful. CRED’s research suggest New Yorkers will care more about sea-level rise that floods their subway tunnels than sea-level rise that floods farmland in Bangladesh. Forget moral purity for a moment—this is about finding appeals that work.

Point 3: Make it real

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

Translate scientific data into concrete experience. Children don’t learn to keep their hands away from a hot stove through charts, or even through urgent warnings from parents. They learn best by touching one. One much-lamented problem with climate change is that by the time most of us experience it, it’ll be too late to do anything. Our minds have evolved to respond much more quickly to immediate threats (tiger! mouse!) than to long-range ones.

But we are still swayed by personal anecdotes and stories, which the guide calls an under-used tool in sharing the climate message.

“We’re not entirely doomed, because we respond to each other’s stories,” coauthor and CRED Associate Director Sabine Marx said in an interview last spring.

Case Study: Visually speaking

Use vivid imagery. The guide highlights this New York City recycling ad as a good example translating an abstract number into a visual analogy.

Point 4: No screaming!

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

Don’t overuse emotional appeals. They grab attention at first, but too much leads to emotional numbing because of what researchers call our “finite pool of worry.” In one study, farmers in Argentina rated how much they worried about political risks, weather and climate risks, and economic risk. They were then shown a climate forecast predicting a rain shortage the next spring. As their concern about climate increased, their concern about political instability diminished, even though the political situation had not changed.

This principle also helps explain why global warming concerns shrank as economic concerns rose after last fall’s financial crisis.

Case study: Channeling action

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

Another key phenomenon: the “single action bias.” Researchers find that “individuals responding to a threat are likely to rely on one action, even when it provides only incremental protection or risk reduction and may not be the most effective option.”

CRED researchers found that Argentinian farmers who built extra storage space for grain where less likely to use irrigation or crop insurance, even though using all of the options would have provided the most protection from drought.

The guide even suggests evidence of a mass single action bias in the election of Barack Obama. Millions of voters did their One Thing to be politically engaged, then checked out, despite the fact that our political structure prevents the president from doing much on his own.

For a simple step on counteracting this effect, the guide suggests simply helping people become aware of it. Then, it says, offer them a checklist of good options.

Point 5: No exaggerating

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

Address scientific and climate uncertainties. Don’t overstate things, but anticipate that there are crucial words that scientists use differently than the general public. (There’s a good list on page 27 of the guide.) When scientists say “uncertainty” for example, the public hears “not knowing.” CRED suggests “range” as a better word.

It quotes California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: “If 98 doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t, he is fine,’ I will go with the 98. It's common sense--the same with climate change. We go with the majority, the large majority.”

Point 6: We're all in this together

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

Tap into social identities and affiliations to remind people that they share common resources (the tragedy of the commons and all that). CRED highlights Knoxville, Tennessee’s campaign to “Make Downtown Green, Block by Block” which appealed to city identity to rally downtown businesses and residents to buy 400 blocks’ worth of renewable energy.

Point 7: Join hands, please

Illustration courtesy Ian Webster/CRED

Encourage group participation. OK, so it sounds hokey. But research of farmers in Uganda and lobster fishermen in the Florida Keys found that people process complex information better in groups. They tend to accept both anecdotal and factual information in such settings.

Point 8: Go ahead and do the easy stuff

Courtesy

Related Links:

On “climategate”

What to make of the new climate poll

Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Enlightenment thinking

The Canadian campaign Moms Against Climate Change just released a provocative video (below) that makes a boldly emotional appeal for action on global warming.

Set in an unnamed city, the 86-second video “Demonstration” features a protest march comprised entirely of children. Riot police block the street, tap their shields and clubs ominously, and hold back barking dogs. Eventually the cops let loose on the children, chasing one boy up a chain link fence while another falls in the street.

It ends with the message, “If our children knew the facts we do, they’d take action. Shouldn’t you?” The violence is presumed, not shown explicitly, but the implication is that we’re all engaged in violence against children by failing to head off the climate changes whose biggest impacts will unfold later this century.

There’s more: Moms Against Climate Change also launched a new website that encourages Canadian mothers to post photos of their children beneath a message to the Prime Minister: “Stephen Harper: Remember who you’re representing in Copenhagen.” Given the reservations many parents have about posting private information about their children on the internet, it’s a strategy likely to cause controversy. The children’s first name and hometown accompany the pictures, and there is a note about private protection in the “Upload” section.

The campaign is a joint effort of two Canadian environmental groups, Environmental Defence and ForestEthics. But it holds importance everywhere, because the Conservative Harper is a world leader that climate negotiators are particularly worried about.

The prominent Australian author and climate activist Tim Flannery recently called on Harper to change his “obstructionist position” on a climate treaty.

"We desperately need Canada to play a much more positive role in the coming months," Flannery said at a recent news conference in Ottawa. "Canada is an important country with important obligations."

With the “Moms” campaign, Harper will hear that message from Canadians too.

The video:

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Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books for Clean Energy

China, India, U.S. commit to seal Copenhagen deal

Was the U.N. Climate Summit held in a marble bathroom?Photo: U.N./Marco Castro It was no barnburner of a speech, but President Obama’s address at the U.N. Climate Summit Tuesday morning amounted to the boldest climate change speech of his presidency. That's because it was essentially the only climate change speech of his presidency.

Until now, President Obama's message about energy has been all clean-tech innovation, green jobs, and economic growth, with just passing mentions of climate change. Candidate Obama, to be clear, had plenty to say about climate (example: his interview with Grist in July 2007). On Tuesday he finally returned to the topic.

“No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change,” he said in the address to world leaders. “Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.  More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.  More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.  On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.  The security and stability of each nation and all peoples—our prosperity, our health, our safety—are in jeopardy.  And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.”

By comparison, Obama’s Earth Day speech in April was all about the economic potential of clean energy:

Now Obama may have just been telling leaders at the U.N. what they wanted to hear, making the right gestures without committing to much. As my editor points out, the only hard number in the speech was G20—Obama didn’t pressure Congress to commit to specific emissions cuts. And he hasn’t yet given a climate-focused speech like this directly to Americans. But he still spoke about the underlying reason for an energy revolution, and that’s significant.

In green circles, there are endless discussions about what messages play best—the green jobs stuff, the think-of-our-children appeals, the moral reminders that the Third World poor will bear the brunt of our pollution’s impact. There is room for all of them, of course, but conventional wisdom is that jobs and prosperity talking points are much safer than the buzz-kills about suffering. Tuesday’s speech was a tentative departure from that script.

Full text of the speech.

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Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

September 6, 2009

Here's a quiz:

1)  What’s worse from a messaging perspective, “the public option” or “cap-and-trade”?

2) Tell me in one sentence what team Obama says is the benefit of passing a health care reform bill.

3)  Tell me in one sentence what team Obama says happens if we fail to pass the climate and clean energy bill.

On health care, no simple, repeated core message exists, so the whole effort is a muddle.  Obama needs to delete and reboot.  Let’s hope he does so Wednesday night.

On climate, at least we have one positive message:  clean energy jobs, jobs, jobs.  That is a key reason public support has held firm even in the face of a multimillion dollar campaign of fraud and disinformation by the fossil-fuel-funded right wing (see Yet another major poll finds “broad support” for clean energy and climate bill: “Support for the plan among independents has increased slightly” and Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1).

Normally, however, a winning campaign has four messages, as I discussed in this post from a year ago, “Can Obama win with half a messaging strategy?“  Since team Obama got its messaging act together pretty fast after its near-fatal lameness of August 2008, I’m hopeful they will do the same after the near-fatal lameness of August 2009, since I don’t think they can deliver health security and energy security with half a message (or less).

Let me repeat what I consider to be Messaging 101, which apparently has been lost again by team Obama and progressive leaders.

As psychologist and Political Brain author Drew Westen explained in Huffington Post during the 2008 campaign:

There is a simple fact about elections that has eluded Democrats in every presidential campaign they have lost in the last 40 years: that as a candidate, you have to focus first and foremost not on a litany of “issues” but on four stories: the story you tell about yourself, the story your opponent is telling about himself, the story your opponent is telling about you, and the story you are telling about your opponent. Candidates who offer compelling stories in all four quadrants of this “message grid” win, and those who leave any of them to chance generally lose.

I’d actually put it a little differently. You need a story about yourself and a story about your opponent. And you need a counterpunch to your opponent’s stories about himself and about you. Ideally, the stories can be boiled down to a catchy slogan (”it’s the economy, stupid”) or one or two words (”compassionate conservative”) that make use of the memorable figures of speech from the 25-century-old art of persuasion, a.k.a. rhetoric (see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1"). Same for the counterpunch ("He was for it before he was against it.”).

The word “story” here is roughly equivalent to two other popular terms — “frame” (as George Lakoff uses the term) or “narrative.”  It is also equivalent to rhetoric’s “extended metaphor,” which I argue is the most important figure of speech in my not-yet-bestselling unpublished manuscript, Politics, Religion, and the English Language (see “How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address, 4: Extended metaphor").

Good candidates will pound away with a strong positive extended metaphor of why you should vote for them and with an equally strong negative extended metaphor of why you should not vote for their opponents. Winning two-term candidates, like President George W. Bush, with the help of Karl Rove, will have a counter-punch to their opponent’s positive and negative extended metaphors. The counterpunches always use the same figure of speech — dramatic irony, wherein someone’s words unintentionally mean something quite different from (and often opposite to) what they intended (see “How to be as persuasive as Abe Lincoln, Part 2: Use irony, the twist we can’t resist").

The goal is to find a powerful dramatic irony in their opponents’ words or deeds that blow up the opposition’s own extended metaphor. That always makes a great story, since it is satisfying sport for people to be hoisted with their own petard or for people to be uncovered as hypocrites.

Think Michael Dukakis in an army tank, or President Bush on the aircraft carrier with the “Mission Accomplished” banner in the background, or the Swift Boat ads run against John Kerry. Dramatic irony is the key to understanding both popular culture and politics — but that is another post.

What conservatives have figured out is that since the media doesn’t really police the truth in a meaningful fashion, you can pretty much take whatever your opponent says out of context and turn that into a defining dramatic irony. Or just make stuff up entirely.

The other point of having the four stories or frames or extended metaphors is that it makes responding to attacks very easy. If you know your messages, then whenever the other side launches a phony attack, you just frame the response with one of your narratives.

Of course, if your opponent has no positive plan, which is true in both health care reform and climate change (though not entirely true on energy), then your messaging job should be easier — but only if you are willing to be very blunt about what happens if we do nothing.  In the case of global warming, of course, many people on our side have been duped by dubious polling and focus groups and dial groups into pulling their punches on the climate science message (see “Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica’s phrase ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’ isn’t going to replace ‘global warming’ — and that’s a good thing” and Mark Mellman must read on climate messaging: “A strong public consensus has emerged on the reality and severity of global warming, as well as on the need for federal action” — ecoAmerica “could hardly be more wrong”).

I won’t spend much time on health care.  Like the 99 percent of people who aren’t expert on health care reform, I have no idea what Obama’s plan is nor what it would actually do.  I do know that most people could care less about the uninsured — they just don’t want to join that group — and while people may say they want cost containment, in fact they don’t want their own costs “contained,” they only want their premiums lower.

What Obama needs to sell is health security.  I was glad to see David Axelrod repeat the word “security” in his health reform pitch on “Meet the Press” this morning.  That suggests to me they are starting to do some serious message polling.

In the next few weeks, I will lay out all four climate and clean energy stories.

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

What do they know that we don't?A scoop in The New York Times doesn’t surprise me. A scoop from nine months into the future does. This morning the Times Environment page featured a ClimateWire story dated May 15, 2010.

“Senators Spend Recess Fine-Tuning Messages on Cap and Trade” finds Senate Democrats still hand-wringing over the proper messaging of a climate bill. It finds Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) still confounded about how to line up his 59-vote majority behind a bill.

From the Times crystal ball:

OK, the actual story lists the date as Aug. 28, 2009. Probably safe to say the 2010 date is an error.

Bonus Good News from South Dakota--The story reports on Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.):

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

On “climategate”

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Photo: Mark O'DonaldWake up, America!
Miley Cyrus, the JoBros, and other Disney mouseketeers tweensters want you to "send it on" -- your love for the earth, that is. However, when it comes to this sugar-pop single, we suggest you only send it on to your worst enemies.

Bagging climate change
It's Jack Handey meets eco-advert ... but we're pretty sure it's just a bunch of hot air.

Photo: Ricardo FariaSpooning
What happens to all those ice-cream taster spoons once you've slurped off the chunky monkey? They become the light of your life!

Onion rings true
PETA: "We have no intention of changing our tactics until every last animal on the planet is given more respect than women."

Heard it through the grapevine
EPA admin Lisa Jackson on Obama: "I haven't seen a brother take on so many issues at once since Marvin Gaye put 'What's Going On,' 'Mercy Mercy Me,' and 'Inner City Blues' all on the same album." How sweet it is, indeed.

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Photo: Stephan Geyer via FlickrDuring my travels to the Rothbury Music Festival, I ended up in a cab in Grand Rapids, Mich., with a very cranky driver who wanted to talk ... about cap-and-trade ... at midnight, after I'd had a long day of traveling.

He began with the standard, "Where to?" But then, skipping all manner of weather-related small talk, he said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "So what do you think about that whole cap-and-trade thing they're debating?"

"Oh, well, it just passed in the House!" I said cheerfully.

"Yeah, I know. And I'm about to call up my representatives and ask them what the hell happened. They're supposed to be representin' me! And I sure as hell can't pay for this cap-and-trade nonsense. I'm losing money as it is."

To this guy -- living in a state that's been hit especially hard by the tanking economy, where the unemployment rate is about 14 percent -- cap-and-trade sounds like a bum deal. He drives a cab for a living, and he sees this new legislation as a threat to that living. Maybe he thinks he'll have to buy a new, more fuel-efficient cab or pay for the "privilege" to pollute. Maybe he believes the debunked but persistent right-wing talking points claiming that cap-and-trade would cost every American household $3,128 a year. Maybe he doesn't believe climate change is happening. Or maybe he doesn't quite understand how all this will affect him and the prospect of change is frightening.

I don’t know because I didn't ask. I'm ashamed to say I just sat there and listened to him complain without challenging his points, without suggesting that cap-and-trade could actually create jobs and help revitalize his state's economy, without spouting some science on how we have to do something or else we're all screwed.

Maybe I'm a bad environmentalist. Maybe I was just tired. Or maybe we haven't quite figured out how to talk to people like my cab driver. People who aren't part of the big, bad, pollutey companies we like to villainize, but who are barely squeaking by in industries that will be affected by the bill. What do we say to them?

What would you have said?

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

What to make of the new climate poll

Carol Browner strongly backs bipartisan cap-and-trade bill

We are what we think. With our thoughts we create the world. -- Buddha

OK, first, let me hasten to say that I find myself, as most any physical scientist would, irritated by the ancient quote above.

I expect a modern person to know, though the Buddha may or may not have known, that the logic of the physical universe is so intricate and so precise that mere human thoughts are grotesquely insufficient to create it, that some objective reality must exist.

What You Think About Determines What You Think

There is another sense, though, in which it is precisely true that we create the world with our thoughts. We live in a world both of artifice and of nature. Our environment shapes our minds and our minds shape our environment. What we are thinking about matters.

Consider the matter of Iran, for instance.

By now everybody's talking about Iran, but early last week there was immense frustration directed at the major media in a small niche community, for ignoring the story entirely. That niche community was Twitter users.

It was an unusual week among Twitterphiles. We were experiencing the world much as one did when the Berlin Wall was coming down, with a sense that noble events of great and auspicious consequence were happening in the world, that one should at the least fervently wish for the success and safety of those of pure heart, and that little else could possibly have comparable relevance, not even climate change or health care or the economic, um, thing.

But if you were not the sort of person to use Twitter to get news, you might have barely registered that something was going on in Iran. You may have had a mild interest in the events but you are still a bit confused about who possibly stole what from whom, and what Twitter could possibly have to do with it.

This fact in itself is an interesting part of the story. Not only was Twitter an important player, your level of interest in Twitter was at one point a strong predictor of your level of interest in the outcome of the whole crisis in Iran!

Isn't that strange?

Perhaps not. The ideas that fill our minds are the ideas we are exposed to every day. One reason we were upset was because we saw events of immense importance taking place, and a press that was treating it as a non-story. Recall the substantially similar events in the Republic of Georgia six years earlier. There was some news coverage, but it didn't take over our consciousness, because none of us were watching media where the story was pervasive.

What we think about is determined by what we experience, and what we experience is determined by what we think about. As a result, we live side-by-side in different worlds.

Idea Clusters

Comparisons of how different groups, be they professional or ethnic, construe related ideas are usually revealing. Trouble and misunderstanding often arises when the habits of mind of different communities of interest are brought to bear on the same subject.

These ideological clusters emerge from habits of mind. The habits of mind emerge from language, and from the accessibility of concepts. Russians, who have no word for blue, but rather two separate words for light blue and for dark blue, apparently are quicker to distinguish light blue from dark blue objects than speakers of other languages. And then there is the infamous precision of Inuit with regard to snow and ice, which may or may not be apocryphal, but I suspect there is something to it. Have you ever listened to a conversation about snow among skiers?

It can be stunning how differently different subcultures address related ideas. Economists vs energy providers, reporters vs bloggers, cat lovers vs bird lovers, industrialists versus environmentalists, ecologists versus climate physicists, scientists vs politicians, journalists vs entertainers, engineers vs economists. The consequences of differing vocabularies and habits of thought are everywhere and are increasing as the world becomes more crowded, complex and interdependent.

Economists' faith in eternal growth as opposed to the environmentalist's fear of imminent doom is a case in point. It leads me and a few stalwart others to a synthesis position: an intent to find patterns of thought and action that avoid the doom associated with compulsive growth, and instead create a reasonable steady state economy. This is the idea cluster that I'm trying to participate in building.

An idea cluster (or maybe let's call it a "meme complex"... ideas?) is much bigger than a meme. It is sometimes identical to an ideology, but it isn't always that. It is a cultural predisposition to notice certain things and think about them in certain ways.

Where Idea Clusters Come From

To see where we're going it often helps to consider where we've been.

In the past century, the century of mass media, it was the media that mostly provided the language, the Lego blocks, the molecules of thought for most people. Tiny little cultural clusters coalesced under the pressure of very powerful aggregators and distributors of information, not just through news but even through entertainment.

In America, the news media developed a set of scruples that reporting and commentary functions should be kept very distinct. The reporting people in particular were taught this as a bedrock ethical principle, and continue to defend it fiercely. A news medium is an economic entity, but its success depends on public trust, so the thinking went. Thus the reporter should be scrupulously "neutral". Because the ownership wanted an outlet for its own ideas, the "editorial" sandbox was set up for them.

So the raw materials for thought, the mindsets, the idea clusters, become 1) the world of commerce, trade, profit, wealth, "free enterprise" to give it its triumphal name 2) the world of strife, controversy, secrets kept and secrets breached, objectives baldly stated and objectives obscured, speech honest and speech mendacious, in other words the gritty world of "muckraking". Even the opposition to these ideas was framed in the same terms: "the workers control the means of production", "power to the people" "el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido" etc.

For a long time, this model served well enough. When there is a local question, say a road bond or new convention center, the tension between fiscal conservatism and boosterism is very well suited for this constellation: there is a horse race of two ideas, both resonate with the values of the community, no special expertise is required to understand the issues, and eventually, one side or the other will win. (Then, if the project is approved it will be executed well, indifferently or badly, again stories which the traditional media are well suited to examine.)

In the past, even national questions were somewhat more disjoint than they are now. Everything wasn't deeply enmeshed in everything else, specifically because the American landscape wasn't very crowded. So for the most part, even national issues had a local, parochial flavor; a public dance of debate, a backstage drama of arm twisting and intrigue, and on the whole, an increasingly homogeneous national character that matched circumstances well enough.

Thus emerges our habitual mental model: "there are two sides to every story". Everybody bends the truth in their direction. The public interest is the sum of every individual's self interest. Some people are especially influential because they control large institutions or large pots of money. Decisions are based on cultural affinities, alliances, and exchanges of political capital.

But the questions we face now are very different. Try to map this habit of mind onto questions of managing the earth as a tightly coupled and disrupted system and what do you get?

There's an nerdy joke among scientists, that a mathematician who knows what to do when confronted with a burning building will set non-burning buildings alight, thereby reducing it to the previous problem. When there is only one side to a story, the press will manufacture another.

The press has a natural cultural affinity for politics, especially the brawling, sometimes cynical and always entertaining world of local and state politics. The vocabularies and intellectual maps of the press and the politicans are closely entwined. Propositions have winners and losers, advocates and opponents. Eventually they are either enacted or defeated. Is that how we have managed to find ourselves in a world with people who are willing to be called "anti-environmentalists"? With our "friends" at Climate Depot, whose response to existential uncertainty on a planetary scale is mockery with a side order of cherry-picking?

I think so. This "opposition" is partly political opportunism of course, and it's partly entertainment for a certain sarcastic and defensive state of mind, but ultimately it is a creation of the media, which given an issue of importance goes off in search of an opposition. And so we have reached a pretty pass. We've managed to create a constituency which stands in opposition to the persistence of a viable planet.

We are thinking about our circumstances as if we were in opposition to each other, but it is in the interest of everyone on a ship at sea, be they communist or jihadist, butcher or vegan, that the ship not sink. Why are the words we use to think about our collective future so adversarial?

They didn't start out that way. If the issues came from the deliberations of scientists and academics, the discussions would remain polite, truth-seeking and unpolarized.

The polarization may not originally come from the press, but it is maintained by their conceptual maps, idea clusters, meme complexes. Polarization is embedded in their model of human activity as economic activity, of politics as contention. As a result, the words and ideas and conceptual maps that the public draws upon date from the industrial revolution: workers against capitalists, rich against poor, centralization of decisions versus distributed decision making, nation vs nation, lifestyle vs, lifestyle, sect vs. sect. Of course these problems have not gone away; of course they only make our new problems that much harder.

But our new problems do not look like that. And what we need is a new cognitive map.

A Better Word for Doom?

All of this is by way of addressing one of my perennial questions, which Andy Revkin again raised recently in a Dot Earth column:

If the science pointing to a rising risk of dangerous human interference with climate is settled, the thinking goes, then why aren’t people and the world’s nations galvanized?

People are casting about for the right words to describe our moral and existential quandary, words that will galvanize "action".

Revkin points out an article on Seed where several very appropriate people (myself oddly excluded, hrmph) take up the topic with varying degrees of success. I am most sympathetic to Ann Kinzig's approach. She concludes "If we accept that language is never neutral, why not adopt the terms that resonate with a broader swath of the public?" And indeed, I think language is never neutral, despite the protestations of people inculcated in journalistic culture. But what language should we use?

In the Seed article, Matt Nisbet, whose article with Chris Mooney is often credited (somewhat to my personal irritation since I've been going on about this stuff for fifteen years) with starting the conversation about how these ideas are communicated, starts off on the right foot but then stumbles into a rather feeble pair of examples:

The point is not to “sell” the public on climate change, but rather to use research on framing to create communication contexts that move beyond polarization, promote discussion, generate partnerships and connections, and that accurately convey the objective urgency of the problem. If the public feels like they are being marketed to, it will only continue to fuel additional polarization and perceptual gridlock. In shifting the frame on climate change, the goals should not be to persuade, but rather to start conversations with the public that recognize, respect, and incorporate differences in knowledge, values, perspectives, and goals.

In one prominent example of re-framing the debate, strategists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger have led the way by advocating that climate change should not be defined as a pollution problem that requires additional regulation but as an energy problem that provides an opportunity for growing the economy and creating jobs around clean technology. This reframing moves the debate beyond a narrow constituency of environmental advocates and opens the doors for a broader climate movement that includes labor, business leaders, and the investor class. The frame was a major emphasis by both presidential candidates in the past election, is emphasized in Al Gore’s “Repower America” television ads, and continues to be a dominant focus of the Obama administration.

A second framing strategy to move beyond perceptual gridlock is offered by scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Evangelical leaders such as Richard Cizik who frame environmental stewardship in terms of morality and ethics, engaging an Evangelical audience who might not otherwise pay attention to appeals on climate change. This frame is more than just a talking point or a rebranding of the issue: When scientists and religious leaders join together around shared values to work on a common problem, it builds bonds of trust that enables long-term collaboration and that breaks down prejudices.

Sorry, a shallow appeal to the fading paradigm of personal greed as one example, and a scolding from an evangelist on the other? Out of the frying pan and into two fires? What sort of help is that? Does that help you? It doesn't help me, and it apparently doesn't help Revkin who ends on a note of futility:

So what’s your view? Is the climate challenge one of communication style, of inadequate energy choices, of the hard-wired aspects of human nature?

My sense is there’s a big dose of the latter in this arena. Humans remain mainly focused on the here and now, and the worst outcomes in a warming world remain someday or somewhere. There’s still scant evidence we’re able to invest against inevitable shocks even when the danger is clear and local ...

Stop the Presses!

Stop the presses, Andy. You missed the point. Of course you missed the point, or pretended to, because the problem is you.

No, not you, Revkin, personally. Revkin, (despite my constant harping about you) you are among the best of a bad lot, trying to bring a journalistic sensibility to a set of problems that do not map onto the intellectual style of the journalist. The point is that that style is serving us badly.

If f the science pointing to a rising risk of dangerous human interference with climate is settled, then why isn't the press galvanized? Why do the stories run on page 13?

What we need is not a noun phrase, a new name for doom. The qeustion of "global this" or "climate that" is not going to help. We need a noun phrase embedded in a new way of thinking, an approach to planetary maturity on a suddenly depleted world. You can call it Mrs. Renfro's Corn Relish for all I care; it's the context that matters.

The Sustainability Mindset

Sustainability on a crowded and finite world is a fundamental challenge to every culture and ideology that ever emerged on the growing and open world. Humans are vastly adaptable, but the cultural matrices in which we find ourselves are not. The buildings of Rome are mostly not new, but they are much newer than the routes that the streets take through them. The main street through Bastrop TX carries little sign of the Spanish empire but is still called El Camino Real.

Most of us don't have a sustainability mindset.

Those few that think they do, mostly don't. The green movement have a Luddite view, a romantic view perhaps workable on a planet with a tenth of its present population. They are, I think, good people with much to teach us, but they aren't really facing up to the scale of the problem any more than most other people are, and their culture is actively suspicious of quantitative thinking. So much as I love greenies, as much as I hope the agrarian ideal eventually pans out, this isn't the time for it. We have big, collective problems to solve and we need a big, collective way of thinking about it. And not even a Woody Guthrie-esque "one big union" is big enough. Big government, big business, these are part of the solution.

The press isn't giving us the vocabulary to think about our circumstances.

Where the media are bored by a topic, the public is implicitly informed that the topic is unimportant. My experience of understanding that events unfolding in Iran were important before the press caught on was sadly familiar to me.

Just as early last week, when non-Twitterphiles were not thinking about Iran, most people aren't thinking about a way out of our quandary. People may think there is no quandary, or they may think there is no way out, or they may think that some other "They" have everything under control. What they don't think about is which approaches they would tolerate, what the menu of scenarios, getting uglier by the month, looks like. There's little awareness of the nature of the choices we face, and hence little support for people in the position to make the decisions/

The media are, in fact, bored. Sustainability, for the most part, doesn't map onto what excites them. Read my lips Andy Revkin.

There is no proper word for doom when that word only appears on page thirteen.

Even running the same old stuff on page 1 won't do. The entire way we organize ourselves, not just our cultures and our subcultures, but everybody else's too, have to change in ways that lack any precedent. And they will change, too. There is no maybe about that. The only maybe is how much suffering we will have to endure before our thoughts adequately conform, to the world we actually end up with. All of which depends, as Buddha says, on our thoughts.

Exhortation

I only know what to do in the broadest sense. We need to start thinking about the things we need to think about. All of us, not just a few wonks and nerds.

The new nominee to be head of research and development at EPA, Dr. Paul Anastas, puts it this way: "It's not enough to simply care about the environment, you need to learn about the environment and understand it deeply." I think this is precisely what I am saying. We need to develop a vocabulary of understanding; habits of mind that are planetary in scale and scope. We need to think globally.

We don't need a friendlier name for doom. We need a 24 hour doom channel. God knows it's not boring once you actually get the picture.

It's the future. The press, or whatever replaces it, needs to read more like science fiction. Let's talk about scenarios, about what problems nature will present us with, and about coalitions, how we will address them. Let's talk about social organizing tools. Let's look backward from 2400 AD and describe how we overcame the nation-state, the porliferation of mutually hostile religions and ideologies, and the ethic of greed. Let's think about how to extract unity from hostility and fear. Let's try to understand why surplus feels like poverty.

Let's not wait for "Them" to rescue us. There is only us. And whatever ends up serving the purposes of the "front page", let's put the "stuff that matters" on it, and not just "what's fit to print".

-----

(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Republication in whole with attribution to "Michael Tobis, Austin TX" is encouraged.)

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American Solutions for Winning the FutureThe people who brought you the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” energy plan have launched a new TV ad opposing the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, or, as the new 30-second spot calls it, the “national energy tax.”

American Solutions for Winning the Future, a group founded by former House speaker and Republican “ideas man” Newt Gingrich, will begin airing the ads on TV tomorrow. The ad shows the 1940 footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisting, heaving, and buckling in a windstorm, then collapsing.

"Factories closing... businesses failing... families hurting," says the narrator. "Now Congress is about to make things dramatically worse by passing a new National Energy Tax."

"We'll lose more jobs, pay more for gas and electricity -- pushing our economy to its breaking point."

The ad doesn’t cite its sources for those dire conclusions. It’s probably not the Congressional Budget Office’s evaluation of the cap-and-trade portion of Waxman-Markey. That report concludes the bill would cost only about $175 per year per household, as Daniel Weiss writes. And it doesn’t include the bill’s other sections designed to further cushion consumers from higher energy prices.

The ad asks viewers to call their members of Congress and tell them to oppose the bill, which could receive a vote as early as this Friday. It fails to note, moreover, Gingrich's own gigantic flip-flop on the climate issue (remember the Nancy and Newt ad?). (Update: Check out this fine "Gingrich vs. Gingrich" switcheroo chart on his changing philosophies from Media Matters.)

On the plus side, the Tacoma bridge footage is pretty cool. But the metaphor could use some reengineering—the message seems to be, “In these times when nothing is going right, it’s no time to start doing things differently.”

Watch the video:

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A Penny Saved Is…

How to make an energy plan more appetizing.The non-profit PR shop ecoAmerica finally released the findings of its public opinion research today, bringing a trove of information about how on-the-fence Americans respond to different messages about climate change and energy.

The firm conducted an impressive amount of research in February through March—focus groups, a phone survey, an online survey—all focused on finding better talking points for wooing folks who are undecided about this whole global warming/clean energy/green jobs business.

This was the report whose summary was accidently sent to a bunch of media outlets after a White House briefing from ecoAmerica in April, leading to a not-very-flattering story in the New York Times. The story suggested it’s cynical to try to sell the climate crisis the way you’d sell toothpaste, and it’s true that the report wholeheartedly embraces a public-relations way of looking at things:

The earnest English major in me is pitching a fit right now (“Gah! The truth doesn’t need talking points.”) Maybe you’ve got the same beef, but there’s fascinating stuff here. Think of it as “rhetoric” if that sits better than “PR.” For anyone who communicates about climate and energy, it’s worth reading the whole report, “Climate and Energy Truths: Our Common Future.” Here are a few highlights for starters:

OK, but the report doesn’t seem to acknowledge that most people have bull**** detectors that kick in at some point. Calling a cap-and-trade plan “clean energy cash back” makes it sound like you’re promising to create money out of thin air. You can call it a “free beer and hot wings” plan, but at some point, citizens are going to ask for more than spin.

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Forty-five million people go hungry or undernourished because of droughts and disasters wrought by climate change, according to a recent report by the Global Humanitarian Forum. Climate change leads to 300,000 deaths a year, the organization concludes, a toll that will reach 500,000 by 2030. Many of those who starve will be children. Of course, those numbers don’t begin to convey the human suffering that lies behind them. And so on and so forth.

Also, your family’s ski vacations could be completely ruined by climate change. If your taste leans tropical, your favorite beachside resort—the one with the awesome mojitos and coconut shrimp—could also be imperiled by rising sea levels and fiercer storms caused by climate change.

So which is more likely to prompt you to do something? What’s going to prompt the average American, or the average citizen in the developed world, to demand action?

Ski resorts or starving third-world babies—it’s a blunt and maybe crude way to put the question, but there’s a fundamental tension between these poles for how we tell the story of climate change. Whether they make their decision consciously or not, anyone who must communicate about climate—activists, politicians, journalists, anyone directly affected—must choose whether to appeal to altruism or to self interest.

I’ve been thinking about this after spending last Thursday and Friday at the Three Degrees conference on human rights and climate change, hosted by the University of Washington School of Law. If there was a central message from the diverse group of scholars, humanitarian aid workers, scientists and lawyers who spoke there, it was that climate change needs to be framed as a human rights problem.  The climate crisis is too big, the argument goes, to be viewed as a “nature” problem typecast as something for scientists and treehuggers to worry about. And it’s too morally significant to be a mere political issue.

Three Degrees speakers were squarely in the appeal-to-altruism camp. A panel of aid workers spoke of how climate change functions as a “stress multiplier,” worsening almost every problem they deal with. It heightens food and water insecurity, creates refugees, ramps up the potential for violent conflict, exacerbates tropical diseases, and leads to more disasters that demand urgent responses.

There was a lot of talk about future generations, who will bear the cost of our ecological behavior. I briefly mentioned Carolyn Raffensperger’s work to create formal guardians for future generations in the legal system, but it’s a fascinating idea that deserves real attention. (See guardiansofthefuture.org for more.) Several speakers argued this expands the appeal of a human rights approach to climate, as those who have trouble relating to coastal Bangladeshis or Somalis are more motivated to help their own grandchildren.

But does this approach accomplish anything? We already understand third-world health as a moral issue, but that hasn’t stopped millions of people from dying of preventable diseases, John Knox, a senior advisor to the Center of International Environmental Law and a Wake Forest University law professor, pointed out.

“If we’re not getting worked up about that, why are we going to care about the grandchildren of those same people,” he said on a panel on Friday. He went on to clarify: “I believe moral arguments have some purchase, otherwise I wouldn’t be working in human rights.”

The conference didn’t include a lot of talk about the strategic implications of telling the climate story as a human rights story, so here’s a stab at some:

Somewhere there’s a high school debate student calling me out for pitching a false dichotomy. Fair enough. You don’t have to choose only appeals to altruism or only appeals to self interest. And “selfish” reasons aren’t all as trivial as vacations. The first ways most Americans feel the effects of climate change may well include rising grocery prices because of droughts, rising home insurance rates because of increasingly severe and unpredictable weather, and other genuine day-to-day living concerns.

Still, framing a climate plan as a provider of, say, “America’s Clean Energy and Security” makes one sort of appeal. As a body of relief workers, legal scholars, wonks, and activists argued last week, it’s not the only method available -- and it may not be enough to spur the world to action.

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Courtesy of Three DegreesI’m spending this Thursday and Friday at the Three Degrees conference on climate change and human rights, hosted by the University of Washington School of Law. Some 40 speakers—mostly legal scholars, but also public health experts, NGO leaders, trial lawyers, and political organizers—are gathered to debate the future of the law as it applies to victims of climate change. The first day was thought-provoking, sobering, and occasionally bewildering. Oddly enough, the biggest moment of clarity for me was a story one of the speakers told about another conference.

Mary Robinson—former president of Ireland, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a generally with-it public leader on climate change—spoke about attending climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in March. Young activists there wore t-shirts with the question, “How old will you be in 2050?” International delegates, said Robinson, realized there was something to the message and asked for t-shirts of their own.

OK, it’s not much of a zen moment, but something about the personal nature of the question—“How old will you be…”—carries more intimacy than a broad, sweeping slogan. Something about posing it as a question carries more weight than a statement. Something about leaving climate change’s countless uncertain, messy, and mundane implications packed up for the moment—there’s more punch to it that way.

I suppose there’s a place for unpacking what’s going to change, and the speakers at Three Degrees did a lot of that. Robinson, in a lively talk, said human migration is likely to be “the single greatest impact” of a changing global climate. She said 150 million people are expected to be displaced by 2050, driven by a combination of desertification, water scarcity, and fiercer storms and floods.

She laid out a vision of “climate justice” as an orientation that keeps human rights at the forefront of climate work. To her, that involves acknowledging that people are already suffering because of climate change, listening to under-heard voices, and taking “responsibility for our past as well as our current emissions.”

“We must stop pointing fingers,” she said. “Blaming China, for example, for having a large population and being a poor country that wants to develop. That’s not going to produce meaningful progress.”

Robinson's talk was timely, given today's release of a new humanitarian report on the human toll of climate change. The Global Humanitarian Forum, a group created by former UN chief Kofi Annan, says global warming is killing 300,000 people a year, a number expected to rise to 500,000 by 2030.  Also timely, the New York Times reports that the International Migration Organization is predicting growing numbers of climate refugees (PDF).

Aside from Robinson’s keynote, there were other highlights:

* An argument that future generations should have guardians in the legal system today, from Carolyn Raffensperger of the Science and Environmental Health Network in Ames, Iowa. There’s plenty of precedent for this, she said. Children who need representation in court are appointed guardians ad litem. Small businesses have their own ombudsman in the Department of Justice. For seven years, Israel had a Commission for Future Generations. Raffensperger suggested UW become the nation’s first law school to develop a certificate program for such guardians.

“Future generations cannot speak for themselves, but we can appoint guardians for them,” she said.

* Blunt assessment of the current legal system. “Our system is embarrassingly and unacceptably inaccessible” to those who need it most, said Bill Neukom, immediate past president of the American Bar Association. He led a panel that roundly agreed existing law isn’t up to the task of addressing climate change effects. Steve Berman, a trial lawyer who worked with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, gave an update from the Kivalina case, a suit against 24 oil, coal, and power companies by an Alaskan village under threat from climate change-driven coastal erosion.

The village, with Berman’s representation, filed not just a public nuisance claim but also a conspiracy claim, alleging the companies actively concealed information to avoid having to change their behavior. He likened it to a successful suit against tobacco companies who worked to conceal the health risks of using tobacco.

“Our claim is that they avoided regulation, they avoided being called on to reduce emissions, by creating the fiction that there was a debate in the scientific community,” said Berman, managing partner at the Seattle firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro.

The case is awaiting a decision from a federal judge in California. If the defendents' motions to dismiss are denied, it would the first case of its kind to make it to that point.

* Finally, on a completely different note, my biggest mistake of the day might have been arriving too late to hear the morning performance of Climbing Poetree, a spoken-word/artists-of-many-stripes duo. They were listed as “conference inspiration,” which I figured was an oxymoron. But I’m told they floored the 200 or so attendees. You just don’t hear many stories of people moved to tears at law school conferences.

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Mark Mellman, a leading pollster for progressives since 1982, has written a must-read op-ed slamming the latest dubious messaging advice:

Some progressives seem unwilling to take yes for an answer.

Just as the long battle for public opinion on global warming is being won, along comes a well-meaning Bob Perkowitz and his ecoAmerica with a politically naïve, methodologically flawed and factually inaccurate study, which he apparently interprets as telling us that voters do not care about global warming.

He could hardly be more wrong.

In fact, most Americans believe global warming is real, is happening now and constitutes a serious threat, particularly to future generations.

Last week, I was very critical of ecoAmerica’s advice on climate messaging after sitting through the full two-hour presentation (see “Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica’s phrase ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’ isn’t going to replace ‘global warming’ — and that’s a good thing“).

Perkowitz, in the comments, questioned “What background do you have in the cognitive sciences or marketing?“ Although it is my full-time job — and has been my part-time job for nearly two decades — and although I have followed all the polling and messaging reports closely, I’m just a lowly messaging amateur.

On the other hand, Robert J. Brulle, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science, Department of Culture and Communications, Drexel University — and a widely published expert on environmental messaging — emailed me about my analysis:

I liked your blog post today.   I think we agree at about the 95% level across the board.

And now we have Mark Mellman, president of The Mellman Group, whose “current clients include the majority leaders of both the House and Senate.”  Mellman is one of the most respected pollsters and messaging gurus in the progressive world.  Here’s his take on the public view of global warming based on all the recent polling, including his own:

A survey we completed in March reveals that nearly eight in 10 voters believe global warming is either happening now or will happen in the future, with 53 percent seeing evidence that it is happening right now. Gallup uncovered similar attitudes, as 53 percent told them global warming has already begun, while just 16 percent are deniers, expecting it will never happe.

Over two-thirds of the electorate believes global warming constitutes a serious threat. In response to a different question, posed by researchers from Yale and George Mason universities, a similar number said they “worry” about global warming. A third believes it will harm them, while 61 percent foresee harm to future generations.

Perhaps more importantly, voters are demanding action to reduce the carbon pollution that causes global warming. In the Yale/George Mason poll, two-thirds urge Congress to do more on the issue, and in our survey, 77 percent favor action to reduce carbon emissions. In an April ABC/Washington Post poll, 75 percent supported federal regulations on the release of greenhouse gases.

In short, a strong public consensus has emerged on the reality and severity of global warming, as well as on the need for federal action.

Put another way, most of the public gets this — and in particular they understand things are going to get much worse on our current emissions path.  That’s why it is so crucial we keep messaging on climate science and impacts, and keep warning people about what is to come — although we can definitely do it better and smarter, as I’ll discuss in future posts.

Mr. Perkowitz devalues that consensus, suggesting Republicans stand outside it because they express less concern about the problem than Democrats and independents. That is true and lamentable, but Republicans are also less concerned about jobs and we have not shied away from trying to create them, nor started calling them “income generating opportunities” in a desperate attempt to solicit GOP support. Republicans also care less about healthcare than other Americans, but no one is using that as an excuse to avoid action.

Indeed, part of the Republicans’ problem with the majority of America is their failure to take seriously voters’ real concerns on issues ranging from jobs to healthcare to energy and global warming.

While some Republican leaders, like John McCain and John Warner, have been forthright in recognizing the need to reduce global warming, others, who deny the problem and discourage solutions, are out of touch with their own base.

Yes, Democrats are more concerned about the problem than are Republicans, but that does not mean Republicans are unconcerned. Far from it — as Mr. Perkowitz’s own data conclusively demonstrate. While 90 percent of Democrats believe global warming is happening, so does a 54 percent majority of Republicans. While 84 percent of Democrats believe global warming is harmful to people, so do 56 percent of Republicans. While 87 percent of Democrats call it their “duty” to stop global warming, 60 percent of Republicans also feels duty-bound to join the battle.

When 84 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents and 56 percent of Republicans think global warming is harmful to people; when 86 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 62 percent of Republicans favor action to reduce the carbon pollution that causes global warming — it is time to take yes for an answer; it is time for elected officials to recognize the consensus and act, instead of heeding those who, inexplicably, regard a nearly unprecedented level of public unanimity as a prerequisite for legislative accomplishment.

Hear!  Hear!

If you wonder why I keep blogging on this, consider that the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d), reported on Tuesday:

Seeking to bolster public support for climate legislation, the Obama administration is consulting pollsters who advocate avoiding phrases such as “cap-and-trade” and “global warming.” On Monday, the White House Council on Environmental Quality was scheduled to meet with Robert Perkowitz, president of ecoAmerica, a Washington-based nonprofit that uses “psychographic research” to “shift personal and civic choices of environmentally agnostic Americans,” according to its Web site.

“We’re trying to give them phrases that work,” Mr. Perkowitz said in an interview. He said that in a survey of some 2,000 Americans conducted by his group in March and April, less than half of the respondents said they would support a “cap-and-trade” policy, and that only 24% said they knew what the phrase means. “If you call it ‘clean energy dividend’…almost anything other than ‘cap and trade,’ you’ll get people responding a lot more favorably,” he said.

Now E&E News PM (subs. req’d) did report later that day:

Veteran Democratic pollster Mark Mellman will meet tonight with the entire House Democratic caucus to outline strategies for how the party should engage with the public on energy and climate change issues….

Mellman’s presentation comes a day after a White House Council on Environmental Quality official met for the second time with Washington-based nonprofit ecoAmerica to discuss communication strategies on climate change. CEQ spokeswoman Christine Glunz said the meeting was one of many with outside groups, adding, “The administration is not making any changes in the way it communicates about climate change.”

Mellman also met this morning with Senate Democratic leaders to present polling work on climate and energy.

I will add that I have credible sources who tell me that some White House political types have been urging progressives politicians not to talk about climate science.  So far, Obama has ignored them, and hopefully Mellman will prove persuasive with Congressional leaders.

Now is not the time to be back on our heels.

Now is not the time to be self-censoring — the status quo media does enough of that for us!

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In early April, the excellent investigative journalism show NOW on PBS ran an episode called "Can Coal be Earth-Friendly?"

In conjunction with the episode, NOW hosted an online debate between me and Joe Lucas, spokesflack for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). We were given a series of five questions. We each answered the questions, and were each given an opportunity to rebut the other's answers.

When I received Lucas's answers, I responded to them. When he received mine, he ... ran off like a pansy. I don't think he likes arguing with people who know what they're talking about and have more than a 30 second soundbite with which to respond.

The debate is reprinted below, with NOW's kind permission.

-----

Joe Lucas: Of course there is. Our opponents like to claim that we invented the term, when in fact clean coal (which is short for clean coal technology) has been an accepted term-of-art for several decades now.

The facts are simple. To date, we have used advanced emissions control technologies (i.e. clean coal technologies) to reduce emissions currently regulated under federal clean air act laws. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other emissions have been dramatically reduced over the past several decades. This type of reduction didn't just happen—especially given that our use of coal for generating electricity nearly tripled during this same period. It happened because of the use of technologies.

And like other technologies, clean coal technologies are truly evolutionary. Going forward, this same type of technological innovation will lead to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

David Roberts: No. When coal is mined, it destroys the land and surrounding communities. When coal is washed, it produces millions of tons a year of toxic, water-polluting slurry. When coal is burned, it produces millions of tons a year of toxic ash and periodic disasters like the December spill in Tennessee. Coal combustion produces mercury and particulate pollution that leads to some 24,000 premature deaths a year and billions in healthcare costs, with pregnant mothers and young children particularly at risk.

All these problems would go unaddressed by so-called "clean coal," which would reduce just one pollutant, carbon dioxide. And even that promise is a phantom: Not a single commercial coal power plant in America captures or otherwise prevents CO2 emissions.

"Clean coal" is a PR gimmick.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Mr. Lucas is right about one thing: reductions in conventional air pollutants from coal plants "didn't just happen." They were forced on the industry by federal law. The industry fought those laws tooth and nail for years and has been fined and sued hundreds of times for breaking them. Hardly something to boast about.

Incidentally, those air pollutants scrubbed out of smoke stacks? They end up in toxic coal ash waste—the kind that flooded Kingston, Tennessee last December. Now the industry's fighting efforts to regulate waste ash. And fighting off efforts to clean up its Appalachia-destroying mining operations.

For a "clean" industry, Big Coal sure does seem averse to getting cleaner.

Joe Lucas: Coal is a fuel that is uniquely positioned to meet the needs for base load (constant, steady, on-demand) power. It is domestically abundant—we have more energy in the form of coal than the Middle East has oil. It is an affordable fuel and is getting cleaner everyday.

We support the use of all domestic fuels to meet America's growing energy needs. However, energy sources are more likely to be compliments to one another than competitors. Take wind and solar for example. They do not displace coal or other base load fuels because wind and solar are intermittent power sources - only producing electricity under certain optimum environmental conditions. To add these intermittent energy resources to the transmission grid, they have to be backed-up with a non-intermittent resource—like coal. What's more, it would take a one-mile band of windmills spanning across the entire equator (around 25,000 miles) just to generate enough power to meet 20% of America's electricity needs.

David Roberts: Yes. Putting aside the health and environmental effects above, coal is increasingly uneconomic. For one thing, a whole array of new studies suggests that U.S. coal reserves could begin declining within 20 years (not quite the "300 year supply" the industry touts).

As this fact and the inevitability of greenhouse-pollution restrictions become more widely understood, new coal plants are being exposed as risky and unsound investments, which is why nearly 100 proposed plants have been canceled in the past two years. States dependent on coal are already seeing their electrical rates skyrocket, and coal utilities are requesting further rate hikes.

Despite coal industry claims, U.S. coal power is neither "abundant" nor "cheap." It's a sinking ship.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Here's a detailed plan to meet America's energy needs without new coal plants, using a combination of efficiency and clean renewable power. Here's another, another, another, another, and more. Just last week the Department of Interior released a study showing that offshore wind alone could satisfy U.S. electricity needs.

The pressure to build new coal plants is political—a result of the $40 million PR campaign Mr. Lucas is running—not technological.

The message that there's "no alternative" to coal's enormous health and environmental costs is fear mongering. It's a vote against American ingenuity and resourcefulness.

Joe Lucas: We support a mandatory federal carbon management program. In order for such a program to achieve its goals, it must 1) achieve emissions reductions, 2) promote greater energy independence by maintaining fuel diversity, and 3) ensure that businesses and families are not paying higher than necessary energy costs.

In that regard, technology is the key. Recently, more and more policy makers have adopted the notion that a federal climate policy necessitates developing and deploying carbon capture and storage technologies as the foundation for such a policy. President Obama has talked about this as a part of his strategy. Other distinguished academic, governmental, and non-governmental organizations have indicated that CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology is essential to meeting the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.

David Roberts: Asked whether human greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change, coal pitchman Joe Lucas famously said, "I don't know. I'm not a scientist." Happily, non-scientists can use Google to find out what scientists think, and they overwhelmingly agree: climate change is urgent and potentially catastrophic. In the face of this kind of problem, "containing" coal's emissions—which equal those of the entire transportation sector—is unambitious at best. Those emissions need to be phased out, as quickly as possible.

It's simple: the industry should be forbidden from building new coal plants unless they meet stringent CO2 emissions standards. And over time, all existing coal plants should be required to meet those standards as well, or shut down. If coal can compete in a carbon-constrained world, good. If not, it should move out of the way for solutions that can.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Big Coal sure has a funny way of "supporting" a plan to reduce climate pollution. It has sponsored, with its allies in Big Oil, a decades-long effort to confuse and deceive the public about global warming. It is still funding groups and politicians that work to block mandatory pollution reductions. Mr. Lucas even linked to such a politician in his response!

With public pressure building, the industry has shifted from battling to co-opting energy/climate legislation, attempting to transform it into a corporate welfare slush fund. An easy tip for spotting subsidy seekers: they repeat the word "technology" a lot! (As Mr. Lucas does several times.)

David Roberts: Put it this way: there is no other way forward for the U.S. coal industry. Coal is effectively made of carbon, so there's no way to use it without producing millions of tons of CO2. The best case scenario for the industry, then, is to be able to capture the stuff and bury it back underground.

But despite the misleading PR from industry, experts agree that CCS is at least 10-15 years out and will be extremely expensive when it finally arrives. Sequestration is arguably important for the developing world, and worth researching for that reason, but it's unlikely to save the U.S. coal industry.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: CCS may well be needed for meeting global carbon reduction targets, though there is considerable debate on that point. (It's a genuine dilemma what to do about the spread of dirty coal in China and India.) But it is crystal clear that America can meet its carbon-reduction goals without CCS.

More to the point: Mr. Lucas's group is fronting an effort to smuggle dirty coal plants into the U.S. under the 10-15-years-off promise of CCS. The industry calls such plants "CCS-ready," much like my driveway is Ferrari-ready.

Watch for the shell game.

Joe Lucas: Recently, the President said that if the cost of a federal carbon management program were too high, people wouldn't do it. Similarly, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that if you make a country choose between growing their economy or reducing emissions—they'll choose their economy every time. So we need to find a solution that allows us to have both—and President Obama and other policy makers realize that.

By deploying CCS technology we can preserve access to affordable energy. This protects and hopefully creates jobs in the manufacturing sector and helps families balance household budgets. Additionally, a study done with several of the nation's leading industrial unions showed that deploying CCS technologies will create over one million job years—and as one of the union representatives said in describing these jobs, these are jobs that pay enough so that you can afford to raise a family.

So investing in clean coal technologies for carbon capture and storage is clearly a part of the President's energy goals. Doing so meets his three primary objectives of 1) creating jobs, 2) promoting greater energy independence, and 3) increasing environmental protection.

David Roberts: Obama supports "clean coal" for a simple reason: coal-state legislators wield a great deal of power in Congress. No national politician can afford to directly confront the network of industry lobby groups and legislators that defends coal's interests.

Obama will direct considerable federal money toward research and deployment for CCS; it's part of the price he has to pay to bring coal-state legislators on board for serious climate change legislation.

The key issue is whether Obama will allow the coal industry to build new dirty coal plants—plants without CCS. He said on the campaign trail that he will not. We'll see if he keeps that promise.

David Roberts' Rebuttal: Mr. Lucas's first paragraph is absolutely correct, but the second is a head-smacking non sequitur. If we want the transition to a clean, green economy to produce jobs and prosperity, why would we focus on the most costly path forward?

International consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has produced the definitive cost curve comparing various emission reduction strategies. CCS is at the far right—among the two or three most expensive out of dozens of alternatives. The smart strategy is to focus on those at the left, the ones that save rather than cost money. (They also generate more jobs.) That's Economics 101!

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things

Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books for Clean Energy

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As readers know, I try to stay up-to-date on messaging, which is why I have a whole category devoted to rhetoric.

I have now sat through a couple of extended presentations about clean energy and climate messaging from people who definitely know how to do this sort of thing.  I will present some of the results in a series of posts.

One general theme emerges, I think, which is really Messaging 101:  Be specific.

“Green jobs” is not specific and requires people to fill in the blank depending on what the word “green” means to them.  For some, this apparently means “environmental jobs” as opposed to real jobs for regular folks.

“Clean energy jobs” is much better (according to multiple sources).  People have a much better notion of what clean energy is.

The same goes for “renewable energy” or “renewables.”  Interestingly, for different reasons, I had blogged a year ago that it was Time to stop using the phrase “renewable energy.”

At the time, I was mostly making that proposal because people tend to lump renewables altogether as one solution.  The term “renewable energy” is often used by the media and conservatives to give lip service to clean energy sources — by shoving them all together like sardines in order to trivialize them or diminish their individual potential. For instance, the “bunch of bland old guys” (aka U.S. Chamber of Commerce) had just one bullet for renewables (and one for efficiency), thereby making them equivalent to expanded domestic oil and gas production, expanded nuclear production, and “clean coal”.

But the messaging gurus say that renewable energy — or even worse, the meaningless “alternative energy” — are a no go.  They like the phrase “clean, safe sources of energy that never run out,” which certainly has the benefit of being a bunch of short words with clear meaning.

They also suggest being specific, saying “wind and solar energy” or “wind and solar and geothermal.”  I’d recommend the whole kit and caboodle, “wind and solar and geothermal and biomass and hydro power,” if not  “wind and solar photovoltaics and concentrated solar thermal and geothermal and biomass and hydro power.”

The point is, we have multiple clean, safe sources of energy that never run out.  The other side doesn’t have one.

Let me end with the big caveat:  None of this is scientifically rigorous.  Is there any controlled study on whether a phrase that gets a positive response in a “dial group” is actually more persuasive or more memorable than a phrase that gets a negative response?  In fact, I’ve been told that some phrases people give a negative response to actually turn out to be very effective messaging strategies.  That said, Frank Luntz proved that poll-tested replacement phrases like “death tax” work when repeated to death.

You can decide for yourself how much — if any — of this stuff you use.

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I've spent a lot of time in the last week strolling around Paris, eating long meals at cafes, stopping in little shops, wandering through cathedrals, sitting on park benches, and generally enjoying the aesthetic pleasures of the world's most beautiful day-to-day culture.

So it was a shock to the system to enter the cavernous Palais des Congress, with its blank-faced modernity, and sit in conference rooms listening to functionaries from government and business recite PowerPoint presentations on their five-phase action plans, three-part performance contracts, and seven-stage technology development strategies. It's great, mind you, to see this kind of work, but the proceedings are so divorced from the city and culture around them, so devoid of poetry or vision or joy. So bloodless.

This, it seems to me, is the great shortcoming in the push for efficiency. The word itself reeks of sterile technocracy. It envisions communal life as a business process, purely a practical matter, to be stripped of ornamentation, trimmed and tucked, standardized and expedited. It's no wonder advocates have such a hard time getting it the prominence it deserves on the public agenda, no wonder it hasn't captured the public imagination.

Several speakers noted the fact in different ways, lamenting that efficiency is "boring," pleading with the attendees to be "passionate." One, EU parliamentarian Claude Turmes, spoke plaintively of the need to make energy efficiency "sexy."

But efficiency and sex are antithetical. Sex is voluptuous and beautiful, virile and messy -- anything but efficient. If sexiness is not efficient, why should the converse be true?

What's needed is not just a new term (please lord, not another "climate change" vs. "global warming"). What's needed is a new vision, a new way of thinking about what efficiency advocates are really after.

Architect William McDonough, who frequently makes a similar point, has suggested "energy effectiveness." Unless you have 10 minutes for McDonough to explain what that means, though, I doubt it's going to do much for you; the connotations aren't much better.

In passing, Turmes himself suggested what struck me as a promising alternative: "resource intelligence."

I'll have to think about it more, but at first blush I like it -- at least it has a spark of humanity. "Intelligence" carries connotations not only of adeptness but of sophistication and even elegance. After all, there's something marvelous about how a mind like, say, Einstein's took what seemed like a jumble of parts and derived compact, holistic explanations out of them. Intelligence doesn't imply less, like efficiency, but better. And that's what people want -- not less, but better.

Consider McDonough's frequent example: is a tree "efficient"? No, it grows far more leaves/acorns/branches than it needs and scatters them everywhere. But the tree itself is an intelligent integration of a system into a larger system. There is no waste. When you understand the elegance and intelligence behind the beauty, there's real resonance, even, dare I say, a kind of passion.

Now, imagine you live in a house that gathers rainwater and captures, cleans, and recycles 100% of the water used in it. In that house, you do not need to use less water; the house's design provides you with an abundance! The water is not used in a miserly way, but in an intelligent way.

Efficiency implies scrimping and trimming and subjecting every move to a cold cost-benefit analysis. Intelligence, like nature, leaves room for beauty and abundance and progress.

I realize the ship has sailed. I won't be able to single-handedly engineer a change in usage. But for my part, I'm going to try to talk less about efficiency and more about intelligence, because that's what this evolution is really about: substituting intelligence for brute force.

Only an economist could wish for Paris to be more efficient. But a Paris that uses its resources more wisely, that allows for guilt-free abundance, is something even a wine-guzzling aesthete like me can support.

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In an otherwise solid post, David said something that made me cringe:

Poorly paraphrasing James Joyce: no and my heart was beating like mad and no I said no I NO.

That's not at all what cap-and-trade does. If you got pissed off when the Bush administration stuck "Clear Skies" labels on their environmental programs, you should be no less fidgety when the phrase "cap-and-trade" is being comparably misused. The phrase has been twisted and muddled to a degree that has adversely affected our public discourse. And clarity is critical in this conversation.

Some background:

Cap-and-trade emerged from intellectual ideas in the 1980s and 1990s, when environmental economics was a nascent field, seeking to provide a market alternative to the top-down, command-and-control models that had dominated environmental policy prior to that point. Economists came to realize that there were three broad ways you could drive markets to address externalities:

Economists generally (and correctly, in my opinion) argued that this third option was the optimal one, as it uniquely ensured that the lowest-cost form of pollution control was always deployed, without being limited by the imagination or price of the original regulator. It is from this framework that cap-and-trade derives.

But you'd never know that from the bills going around D.C. with "Cap & Trade" in their headline today. Do any actually fit this definition? The idea that pollution sources and sinks might meet up in a market and agree on a price to transfer an emissions permit is central to the whole cap-and-trade model, and yet is an after thought to most cap-and-trade bills (along with the economic efficiency that drove us to this model). Speaker Pelosi sees cap-and-trade as a source of federal revenue. Much of Congress anticipates a states-rights challenge once C&T is passed from those states that are now using RGGI as a source of revenue.

Somewhere, lost in the noise is a core truth: if cap-and-trade is providing significant revenue to the state, it ain't cap-and-trade. It's a tax. And while I take significant issue with those economists who argue that cap-and-trade models and carbon tax models can be designed to be functionally equivalent, the reality of C&T (as framed by the Congress) is that it really is about the same thing as a tax.

The semantics of this alone are troubling. The term "carbon tax" is an accurate descriptor of itself, even if it is politically toxic. "Cap-and-trade" doesn't have the political baggage, but it bears increasingly little relation to the things being recommended as carbon policy tools in Washington under that heading.

But the economic and environmental consequences are much more problematic. Our carbon policy discussion is providing a choice between a series of crappy options, all of which will favor the preferential deployment of high-cost GHG mitigation measures. And since no one is infinitely wealthy, that's the same as preferentially favoring less total GHG reduction. That's a lousy outcome on every possible measure. To a large degree, we don't even notice, thanks to the co-option of language that used to mean something.

Remember the beginning of Rattle & Hum when Bono said "this is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We're stealin' it back," and then kicked into Helter Skelter? Let's steal cap-and-trade back too. (OK, Edge, play the blues.)

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