David Fenton on How to Win the Climate Debate

Yale researchers estimate that roughly 80 million Americans are alarmed about climate change. About 40 million of them say they want to be politically active on the issue. But only about 3 million actually are. When that 37 million-American group is asked why they aren’t active, researchers most often hear that nobody has asked them. That’s the focus of this week’s conversation on Sustainability In Your Ear. Only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything about climate change on social media, and two-thirds say they rarely or never hear about it from friends or in the media. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry treats persuasion as core business. David Fenton calls the situation unilateral disarmament at a moment when an information war is needed. The crowning result of climate action to date is the Inflation Reduction Act that passed by one vote and was repealed by one vote. A bill you win by a single vote, he says, is a bill you never really won. David founded Fenton Communications in 1982, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes. His campaigns helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, where Yoko Ono's "Imagine There's No Fracking" billboard went up along Governor Andrew Cuomo's commute, and helped launch fossil fuel divestment with the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers. His book, The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who we discuss at length in this thought-provoking interview. He places the blame on climate advocacy spending and, more importantly, the words used to frame the issue. The climate NGO and philanthropic world spends billions a year on policy, law, and science, and spends on communication mainly to raise money from people already on its lists. David traces that to what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong idea reproduces itself because it is correct, and to its corollary, that selling ideas is dirty work beneath serious people. The second is vocabulary. “Net Zero means almost nothing to most people. “Carbon” sounds like an abstraction. And “justice,” in cognitive research, evokes images of the police and courts, not of fairness and a shared mission. We need to pivot to simpler language, like “pollution,” when describing the source of global warming. Pollution is a word nobody defends, and a blanket of pollution trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space is a picture people can easily grasp and act on. Asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer Americans give is “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Earth911 has spent three decades on that vocabulary, and it holds up on its own terms as a materials strategy. Increased curbside recycling participation rates don’t necessarily lead to decarbonizing the grid or the truck fleets. David Fenton’s prescription for listeners is blunter than any campaign plan: talk about it, post about it, and press the funders you know to spend generating public demand for change rather than direct mail fundraising. Learn more about David's work at davidfentonactivist.com, and find his podcast at fentonforecast.com. Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube