Should we even bother talking about climate change?

It’s a question you hear muttered more and more in environmental circles and even more brashly from those focused on clean energy: given the shift in public priorities and the state of politics, should climate advocates just stop talking about climate change?

Maybe focus instead on the shiny solar panels and tantalizing economic prospects in clean tech? Or the savings from going electric? Perhaps, the return of pipelines to national headlines, the urgency of affordability and the orange menace call for a reframe toward energy abundance and long-term security through an energy transition?

“It’s a question we’re getting a lot,” Jessica Lu told me this week. “And it’s definitely been a question top of mind for us.” 

I was particularly keen to speak with Lu, in her role at the Potential Energy Coalition. For one thing, Potential Energy is headquartered in the U.S., right in the thick of the world’s most vicious climate backlash. But, more importantly, her outfit has amassed some of the most comprehensive data about the public’s response to various frames and messages. They’ve repurposed the marketing methods of big business — the science of selling widgets — to the project of a safer world.

According to Potential Energy’s own tracking, the group has served over three billion ads, and measured responses to them. On top of that, they’ve conducted 170 surveys and run 2,900 hours of focus groups across 23 countries which collectively make up 70 per cent of the world’s population. So, it’s worth hearing what they have to say.

The ‘Big Why’

There’s no point in trying to sneak through the side door and focus on other benefits of climate action, Lu says. In fact, there’s a danger in overthinking the messaging. Big changes require a “big why,” and the most motivating reason remains the prospect of harming people and losing places we love. 

The “big why” — whether for government policies or boosting clean energy — isn’t jobs or economic growth, it’s grounded in love for the next generation and the urgency of acting to protect their future, be it from extreme weather or the other knock-on effects of climate change.

“Those messages are two to three times more effective than when we talk about jobs or economic growth,” Lu says. “So, our advice of going through the front door still holds.”

“We've continued to do testing frequently across a number of climate and energy issues,” she says. “And we continue to find that talking about climate change, the consequences, extreme weather, how it's impacting you and your community and your kids is the most effective way to raise climate change as a priority.”

That’s grounded in a basic understanding of the world, accessible to anyone, not just those with an MBA or a PhD.

“It doesn't require anyone to be a scientist to see that the world is very different from how it was 20 or 30 years ago,” Lu said. “Seeing that and knowing what the future is going to be — later, is too late to act. That's why we have to take action today to protect the next generation.”

During last weekend’s Super Bowl, the Potential Energy Coalition placed a TV ad for the group, Science Moms. The ad is centred on people — a montage of young girls growing from infants to toddlers into young adults — with a voiceover from a real scientist Mom. She describes the nine billion more tonnes of carbon pollution that will be in the air by the time the baby takes her first breath. “By the time she takes her first step, wildfires will have burned millions more acres she could have explored.”

"By the time a child born today goes to college, it may be too late to leave them the world we promised," the mother’s voiceover continues. "Our window to act on climate change is like watching them grow up. We blink, and we miss it." 

Relevant vs not-relevant

The climate movement has long debated whether to lead with hope or fear, optimism or doom. But according to the research, that's not actually the key question we should be asking.

"We think of the dimension more as ‘relevant versus not relevant,’" explains Lu. "All the ways we can increase relevancy for people is where we'll have much more success."

According to all that testing across multiple countries, it's the possibility of losing things we care about that creates relevancy. This "loss frame" consistently outperforms other messages. Perhaps surprisingly, even optimistic messages about clean-energy progress and technological solutions show "very little" ability to move public opinion, Lu says.

There are, of course, situations where cost curves become relevant. An audience of energy executives or clean-tech enthusiasts will chew on the costs per kilowatt hour. But Potential Energy is focused on the broad swath of the public (perhaps 70 per cent) that is neither seized with the urgency of acting on climate change, nor dismissive of it.

"When we try to tell people that clean energy is cheap, we just don't get a lot of movement," Lu notes. "It's not very believable to people."

"Clean energy needs the 'why,'" she explains. "Climate brings the ‘why’ and the urgency to clean energy solutions."

Fossil fuel pollution

A key problem for climate advocates is that people really don’t like limitations. Bans, and caps, and taxes are inherently unpleasant, and Canadians have seen firsthand how vulnerable they are to three-word Poilievrery. But there is an exception: “The word ‘pollution’ helps people get into the right mindset of what we're trying to tackle,” Lu says. 

“Everyone can get behind less air pollution, less water pollution. And this is just one much more all- encompassing form of it. People think: ‘Oh, I understand what we're trying to do and how we need to solve the problem — we have to end the pollution.’”

"Carbon pollution" tests better than more jargony terms like "emissions" or "greenhouse gases." And Lu says that Potential Energy’s more recent findings suggest that climate advocates should make the connection to “fossil fuel pollution” directly, since oil, gas and coal are the tangible products driving climate change.

Focus on the fundamentals

The conversation with Jessica Lu left me with a nagging doubt: it feels like the world is careening in new directions, but Potential Energy’s data points to messages that are very familiar. Defending the people and places we love sounds vaguely old-fashioned. But Lu reminds us that most people don’t read climate newsletters and live immersed in daily concerns.

“Climate advocates have been in this world so long. They're at a different point in the journey,” says Lu. “It feels like old news.”

But the vast majority of people have been battered by contradictory messages for decades, and it’s crucial to keep the fundamentals of human motivation in the foreground. “There is value in sticking to a message and continuing to deliver that, even if it might feel old to us,” Lu emphasized. “Coming back to the ‘why’ is always important for the broad swath of people who are not steeped in it 52 weeks a year.”