When Al Gore was actively promoting awareness of the Inconvenient truth of climate change, by 2008 nearly two thirds of Americans when polled on the question said they worried “a great deal or a fair amount” about the effects of climate change. Yet, since that time, many Democrats and green activists have taken the advice of Frank Luntz and other “advisers” played down tell the truth about climate change and the science that supports it. Instead they focused on how green tech would create jobs and reduce dependence on foreign oil. They neglected their core message that we have a serious crisis on our hands, one that requires immediate action.
For the last several years many of the biggest players in the climate movement have argued that to save the planet we need to purge the words “global warming” and “climate change” from our talking points and educational materials. Poll-oriented groups like the Breakthrough Institute and the Environmental Defense Fund argue that public opinion surveys prove Americans care most about jobs and lack the capacity to act on some distant threat.
They maintain that instead of being prophets of doom, climate protection advocates should gather around a “good news” agenda that limits our messaging to green jobs, national pride, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. “Forget about climate change” Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, explained to a gathering of environmentalists last year. Just ask people “Do you love America?””Guess what happened?
In 2009 the Environmental Defense Fund teamed up with Luntz ‘s firm The Word Doctors to figure out how to help marshal public support for a climate bill. Luntz’s advice? “The least important component of climate change is climate change… You’re fighting the wrong battle. What they want is an end to dependence on foreign oil.”
This is the same Frank Luntz who has long been advising the Republican party on how to grind climate policy to a halt. […]
So what was the effect of climate activists’ decision to stop talking about climate change? The enemies of the planet won. Climate legislation is dead. The US has not cut emissions, created millions of new climate-protecting green jobs, or reduced dependence on foreign oil. Not talking about climate change has failed to reap even modest wins for the climate movement — let alone save the planet.
And possibly the most damning of all: Public concern about climate has plummeted in direct correlation with the “stop talking about climate change” strategy. In 1998, before Al Gore tirelessly began traveling the country with his doom and gloom slideshow, only 50% if the country considered climate change a major worry.
By 2008, a year after Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize, two-thirds of Americans said they “worry a great deal or fair amount about climate change.” In 2009 Frank Luntz instructed environmentalists to stop talking about climate change, and by March 2011, the number of people concerned about the climate had dropped back down to 51%.
Because many major Environmentalist groups and Democrats remained silent about the actual threat, the Republicans, and their corporate financiers such as Exxon and the Koch Brothers, with their relentless disinformation campaign, have won the propaganda war and further delayed meaningful action to advance green technology, reduce greenhouse gases, and boosted the profits of Saudi Arabian princes and Big Oil CEO’s, despite the BP disaster, despite the rising gas prices, despite the extreme weather events, despite the truth.
Of course, the advice Luntz gave may have seemed “practical” and “pragmatic” just as most advice by political pollsters and message managers appears in the short term. Yet all it accomplished was failure. Why? Because it surrendered the field to those who deny the existence of climate change, that;’ why.
Is it easy to talk about the threat of global warming in the face of such a massive orchestrated campaign to convince people that climate change is a myth, despite the facts that the extreme droughts and floods, the extreme summer heat and winter storms, the melting ice caps and glaciers, etc, were all predicted to occur by climate scientists? Of course it is.
But that is no reason not to return to the core message that climate change is real and it is dangerous, and it will have consequences far beyond anything we hear for the liars and propaganda merchants of the right. The Pentagon is planning for climate change as it would plan for any national security threat. Yet many major environmental groups and influential politicians (including President Obama) continue to not talk about the reality that the climate change threat is real. They continue to assert that such talk is counterproductive. All too often they have taken the advice of people, like Frank Luntz, who have no vested interest in actually combating climate change.
Well, Leaders lead. They don’t cringe in the corner at every poll that comes out and try to shape their message to make it about something else they are told the public will buy. They tell the truth about the real and present danger as often as they can, and the truth in this instance is very badly in need of telling:
Beyond an ethical aversion to lying, there are hard-nosed political reasons why the forces of climate protection need to keep ringing the climate alarm bell.
- Whether or not they currently believe in climate change, people are going to experience the climate catastrophe. Disasters are coming — indeed they are already here — and that is going to drive the agenda. It is up to us to explain why the floods, hurricanes, droughts, and other catastrophes are happening and to lay out what to do.
- Even though people may initially curse the messenger and trigger despair, history shows that bad news can spur action and social change. It was the danger of nuclear fallout in America’s children’s milk that spurred the movement that led to a ban on nuclear testing and ultimately to the reduction of strategic arsenals by 80 percent. It was Rachel Carson’s revelation in Silent Spring that DDT was poisoning the songbirds that led the public to understand the ecological interaction of nature and therefore support environmental protection legislation.
- Success goes to those who change the polls, not those who follow them. Al Gore, climate scientists, and millions of climate activists reshaped public opinion on climate. A majority of Americans are still seriously concerned about climate. They — and others — need to know why they’re right. Dreadful events — interpreted truthfully — are unlikely to be ignored forever. But people will have little opportunity to connect the dots between devastating floods, catastrophic storms, and lethal heat waves on the one hand and the greenhouse gasses that cause them on the other unless they are persistently and consistently presented with the facts.
- The right wing, backed by the fossil fuel industry, have spent millions of dollars promoting this story: The climate crisis is an imaginary threat invented by liberals to justify government power over individuals and companies, destroying both liberty and jobs in the process. To remain silent about the reality of the climate change threat is to maximize the credibility and effectiveness of this argument. Conversely, spelling out the facts of climate change is the way to expose the climate denialist argument for the hoax it is.
- As the climate crisis deepens, many people are likely to pass directly from denial to despair. Fear can make people hopeless and immobilized. If they don’t hear realistic explanations of what the climate crisis is all about, combined with rational proposals for what to do about it, they are made vulnerable to fantasy-based explanations and irrational solutions. Climate change is indeed scary, but it is a threat that affects all of us, so it provides an opportunity to cooperate in new ways at every level from the local to the global.
- The right wing is talking about climate change all the time. They have the initiative in framing the debate. And people will make ignorant decisions in the face of a one-sided debate. Without forceful articulation of the truth, the proportion of the public who grasp the seriousness of climate change could fall even further.
The right wing climate denialists and the fossil fuel companies that support them are not going to stop talking about Cklimate change. If their message is the only one that is being voices over and over, we all lose. Time for the big environmental groups and the Democratic party, at both the local and national levels to return to the core message that climate change is real, and that that the right is telling sweet little lies that in the end will harm all of us, now and in the future.
And ps. Never again take the advice of conservative spinmeisters like Luntz or pollsters who can’t see beyond the next week’s polling results. Once upon a time the “public” was against granting women the right to vote. Once upon a time a majority of Americans believed that the civil rights movement was moving to fast and too soon. Yet the leaders of those movements didn’t let that stop them from standing firm until they convinced the American people that they were right. The Environmental lobbyists and the Democratic Party should take a page out of their books. Toning down your message never works. You must pound it continually into the minds of those who are confuse, ignorant or who have swallowed the lies because they have not heard the truth often enough.
