It’s Getting Hot In Here

By Massimo LoBuglio and Sabrina Mondschein

Without an ace closer, what are the chances that your favorite baseball team will succeed? What happens to the football team whose key running back fumbles the ball ten yards short of the goal line? Without the finishing touches any plan falls short. Can we find a better way to explain the current state of sustainability than through analogy?

Participants at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit and a small band of social scientists are quickly learning to argue no.

Mayors and business leaders from forty of the world’s largest cities convened in the world’s foremost polluting country last month to do what this site has been attempting from the outset: putting climate change on the menu and making it palatable – and dare we say a delectable staple – for the public.
After all, global warming is no longer about facts, but perceptions. What does sustainability really mean to the person who falls within the six out of ten Americans who can’t name one solution to global warming? According to a recent study by advertising firm Landor Associates, most people consider themselves green minded, but remain disconnected to even simple solutions.
Global warming warnings are being trumpeted for all to hear, but the latest studies find that might be the last way to get people to listen. According to an unpublished handbook from the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University (CRED), the most common ways for communicating environmental problems are often the most ineffective.

Part of our research verifies an old truth: newborn babies cannot eat gourmet food no matter how well prepared, and the average American cannot process information on climate change as is, in its highest academic jargon-ridden form.
Claims like “twenty thousand tons of carbon emissions can be reduced by cogeneration of energy” will make a lot more sense to most voters and the public if explained through the illuminating power of metaphor, analogy, vivid imagery, and comparison. These are persuasion devices that hit us in the heart, make us feel and connect what we see to our own story, our past. Ultimately, we base most of our decisions on what we feel, according to the research of CRED’s Tony Leiserowitz and his colleagues.
The common “gloom and doom” alarmism is not sustainable. Humans have a finite pool of worry, and the mind can only handle so much “gloom and doom” before it learns to move on. In the case of global warming, most people take one action – donate to a green fund or start recycling – and then they take the problem off the radar.

How do we put global warming back on the radar? Firstly the message needs to be local.
Among the most notable participants at the C40 were those with the gift of gab, and when they speak it puts into practice another important find: Just as important as the way we send the message is who sends the message.
The closer to home the advice hits, the more likely people are going to think about their decisions for two reasons. One, because it is easier to listen to your neighbor than a national government campaign. Two, because anyone in a room brimming with policy makers and money pushers will assuredly think a little harder about the decisions they are about to make as they will be called to account.

With usual tongue-in-cheek and even scintillating wit, politicians and businessmen embarked on a solutions-based thinking path, and brought the message home. Metaphors and analogies abound. In that spirit, the remainder of this article is an ode to the C40, in vivid words from actual C40 conversations and panel presentations.

Starting where Bill Clinton ended his keynote at the C40: “dragging our heels on climate change is no longer an option”.

Our pursuit of the technological revolution was a bizarre romance that spun out of control, with unintended consequences that are now endangering the earth. We are testing her limits.

We can’t put new wine into old bottles; mixing new solutions and old policies is not working.

“Cogeneration of energy is to centralized energy what the mobile phone is to a landline and what the laptop is to the computer,” a KeySpan representative noted.

There is no silver bullet to climate change. Its effects are already happening, went the chorus of NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosensweig “adaptation is as critical as mitigation”.

Climate scientists are doing their part. It is time for the movement to forge an alliance with social scientists and learn from creative geniuses like Simon Doonan and Julie Gilhart of Barneys New York who plan to unveil their Green Christmas later this year, starring none other than Rudolf “the Recycling” Reindeer.

“Major global cities, the world’s tastemakers, are now leading by example, being head and shoulders above federal governments, taking charge” announced New York City Mayor Bloomberg at the launch of the Clinton Climate Initiative’s green buildings plan.

London’s Mayor Livingston said of congestion pricing, “if it can happen in New York, it can happen anywhere.” We think he gets the idea.

Massimo LoBuglio and Sabrina Mondschein are from Green Insight Strategy Consultancy, a sustainability design, research and communications firm launching the Be Carbon Neutral Campaign in July..

Massimo LoBuglio is co-authoring a forthcoming manual entitled “Talking Climate Change: CRED’s Social Science Approach”