You may think we have all the proof we need. More of it is in front of us right now, with heatwaves scorching through Europe, breaking records, wreaking havoc. In Athens, they closed the Acropolis on Friday as temperatures at the site headed towards 48C. In Lisbon, visitors expecting perfect blue skies have been disappointed to find them streaked with grey – not clouds, but smoke from forest fires. In Italy, there was no spring this year: floods gave way to unbearable heat with barely a pause.
It’s happening all over – biblical downpours in New York state, unquenchable fires in Canada – and yet humanity is not acting as if it is confronting a planetary emergency. Extreme weather is fast becoming the norm in the US, and yet Americans tell pollsters it is a low priority, ranking it 17th out of 21 national issues in a recent Pew survey. Even when the impact is personal, as it was for many Australians when bushfires raged through the country in 2019, opinions prove stubbornly hard to shift: one study found that among those “directly impacted” by the fires, around a third saw no connection to the climate. They were “unmoved.”
How can this be? How can we, like Nero, fiddle while the Earth burns? Some of the explanation lies in human nature. As a species, we tend to prioritise the urgent over the important: “Thanks to our evolutionary history, we’re programmed to deal with the lion coming from the woods, not to strategise how to save our civilisation over the next hundred years,” Jeff Goodell, author of an essential new book, The Heat Will Kill You First, tells me.
There is, too, the syndrome captured so well by the movie Don’t Look Up, namely the very human inability to contemplate our own destruction. We will find almost any excuse to look elsewhere, to find something immediate and diverting: in Britain this week, it was the alleged conduct of a BBC TV presenter. But there’s always something.
Those faults are in our stars; they are hard to change. And yet there are other explanations that are more susceptible to remedy. Most obvious is the fact that a vastly wealthy industry has spent billions to make people think the way they do. In just the three years following the Paris accords, five of the largest fossil fuel companies spent over $1bn on communications and lobbying.
But the effort goes back decades, centred on selling one commodity above all: doubt. Like the tobacco industry before it, oil and gas has sought to persuade the global public that they can’t be sure the climate crisis is real or human-made or that serious. It’s been hugely effective. To take just one number: only about one in seven Americans understand that there is a consensus among climate scientists, defined as more than 90% having “concluded that human-caused global warming is happening”.
This specific problem, like the climate crisis itself, is made by human beings – which is simultaneously enraging and encouraging. Enraging, because it is born of a greed that puts gargantuan profit ahead of a habitable planet. Encouraging, because most problems made by human beings can be fixed by them. Enter the climate movement – the scientists, the activists, the campaigners who have done so much for so long to combat this threat. Except, it turns out, they are part of the problem too.
The trouble is, they have not been communicating the threat loudly enough or in the right way. And some of the most committed fighters in this battle are saying so.
Start with the most basic terms. “Global warming” was rightly rejected by many some time ago, not least because, as Goodell writes, it “sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather”. But talk of heat is not much more apt: “In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new.”
Yet “climate change” doesn’t work either. Mere “change” is too gentle: it doesn’t indicate whether the change will be negative or positive. It is not immediate: it hints that its consequences will be felt only in the future, when we are feeling them right now. Which is why this newspaper is right to speak of a climate crisis or emergency.
But there are multiple other terms favoured by the climate cognoscenti that fall at a more basic hurdle: they are simply not understood by the wider public. Net zero, decarbonisation. 1.5C – when tested, they meet blank faces. People either don’t know what they mean or find them confusing. David Fenton, a longtime PR specialist for progressive causes, cites as one example the phrase “climate justice”. When most voters hear the word “justice”, he tells me, they think of courts or police; bolt it to “climate”, and people are not moved, just confused.
Of course, this connects to a perennial problem for the left – which so often makes its case using statistics and abstract concepts, rather than simple images and emotion. (Think of the remain campaign.) Fenton urges the climate community to speak of pollution – a word everyone gets – and to settle on the image of a “blanket of pollution trapping heat on Earth”. Every oil and gas emission makes that blanket thicker – and all that trapped heat helps cause floods and start fires, he says.
Once settled on, that metaphor has to be deployed again and again, repeated so often it becomes exhausted – and exhausting – to those using it. This too clashes with progressive habit, which tends to hold to the “enlightenment fallacy”: the belief that the facts will persuade all by themselves. They don’t need to be repeated or simplified or embedded in moral or emotional stories: their sheer truth will prevail.
Perhaps this is why the climate movement has devoted relatively few resources to reaching or persuading the public, outside of periodic fundraising drives – certainly nothing to compete with their polluting opponents, who hire ad men steeped in marketing science to push their message relentlessly. “We’re in a propaganda war, but only one side is on the battlefield,” says Fenton.
To enter the fight will require serious donors to dig deep, but also a change of mindset. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, who now hosts the aptly named Outrage + Optimism podcast, admits that the climate community has recoiled from marketing, which it regarded as “sort of tainted. It’s icky. You know, ‘We’re too good for marketing. We’re too righteous’… hopefully we’re getting over it.”
It needs to do that fast, deploying whatever tools work to push a double message: both fear and hope. Fear for all the beauty, life and lives that will be lost from a parched planet – and hope that we still have time to avert the worst.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
