How do we communicate about climate without shaming audiences?

I’m at BU today for a conference hosted by MISI – the Center for Media Innovation & Social Impact at BU, a new center led by my friend Eric Gordon. The topic of the day is “Communicating Climate”, a topic that feels pressing given not only the climate skepticism of the Trump administration, but also the recent essay from Bill Gates pushing for resources for health and development over resources to help with climate change.

Eric Gordon suggests that the challenge of communicating about climate is a trust crisis. Citing a range of research, he notes that public trust in media is very low (8% of Republicans say they trust the media), as is trust in government and in each other. The trust crisis becomes a communication crisis: “If you don’t trust the government, you’re not going to trust its messaging.”

Michael Grunwald and Cass Sunstein at MISI: Communicating Climate

Cass Sunstein, scholar of policy, law and behavioral economics, offers insights on the climate around morality, behavioral economics and sociology. He suggests that the most important question about climate in the US is how we price the damage done by carbon emissions. One set of estimates – which considers the global damage of carbon – prices a ton of emissions between $75 and $200. Another set of estimates, which looks only at US domestic harms, prices carbon at $6-7 a ton. Democratic administrations tend to use the first figure, and Republicans use the latter. Cass tells us that there’s a moral imperative to use the global figure: “Human beings around the world are equal in their claim to our attention.” Furthermore, if we use the domestic number, other countries will do so as well, and things will be really bad for us as well.

On the front of behavioral economics, Cass explains “solution aversion”. If you think the implications of a piece of information are impossible to live with, you’ll avoid believing in it. If a doctor tells you that you’ve got a heart condition and are going to live the next years in misery, you’re likely to disbelieve her. If she tells you about changes you can make that will give you a wonderful quality of life, you’ll thank her. If we think of climate change as requiring sacrifice and difficult life changes, we will tend to believe it’s a hoax. If the consequences are an exciting new entrepreneurial economy with innovative tech, cool new cars, and economic growth, people get on board even across political lines.

Finally, Cass invokes Moral Foundations Theory, which suggests that both liberals and conservatives tend to care about harms and fairness, but conservatives care much more than liberals about authority, loyalty and purity. Trump has “rung those three bells” to an extent that no other candidate in recent years have. Most democratic candidates have ignored these values entirely. Climate should be easy to connect to loyalty, authority and purity, and communication strategies need to make moral claims to protect the vulnerable, be on the alert for solution aversion and play to values that activate the right as well as the left.

Michael Grunwald, journalist and author of the recent book We Are Eating the Earth, suggests that we might want to communicate _less_ about climate. He suggests that the two bills that have benefitted the climate the most didn’t mention climate explicitly. Obama’s economic stimulus bill jumpstarted solar and wind development in the US, and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act had massive climate benefits. Neither bill was advertised as a climate bill, and that’s probably for the best. The democrats who won big in recent elections weren’t focused on the climate, and the best thing we can do for the climate, statistically speaking, is to elect democrats.

In addition to hiding the ball, Grunwald suggests that we need to tell stories, rather than trying to explain complex ideas like “lifecycle accounting of indirect land use change”. It’s better to tell the story behind the impossible burger. But Grunwald’s new book focuses on food and climate, which tends to be an intensely personal and uncomfortable issue, and he urges people to think about climate in terms of personal decisions – our choices to eat meat – not just in terms fo power generation or data centers. While there’s a strong tendency for dialog like this to scold, he believes that what’s interesting to readers is solutions, more than problems.

In a wide-ranging conversation about the media ecosystem and climate communication, Cass references an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast with country singer Miranda Lambert. Lambert talks bow hunting with her father, and how the intimacy of harvesting deer close up was a bonding experience for them as father and daughter. She ended up adopting a fawn which now follows her around like a dog. Her father came to visit, saw the pet deer and said,
“It’s over, right?” She said, “This deer is in my heart. I’m done.” It wasn’t an accusatory or scolding story – it was simply about a change of heart. Cass wonders whether we can do storytelling like this, talking about the decisions we made in a way that doesn’t scold or demand, simply shares the emotions behind our choices.

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