Do we need to talk about ‘climate change’ more or less?

Does our communications strategy need to talk about 'climate change' more or less?

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, has written an inspiring call to arms over at TomDispatch.com.  He argues that we need to build a much more active movement, and also that we need to change our communications strategy.  It is this latter point that I want to discuss here, as it is so fundamental to our long-term strategy. Bill McKibben wants us to start talking more about climate change, instead of avoiding the issue.

Step one involves actually talking about global warming.  For years now, the accepted wisdom in the best green circles was: talk about anything else — energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology. I was at a session convened by the White House early in the Obama administration where some polling guru solemnly explained that “green jobs” polled better than “cutting carbon.”

No, really?  In the end, though, all these focus-group favorites are secondary.  The task at hand is keeping the planet from melting. We need everyone — beginning with the president — to start explaining that basic fact at every turn.

In the circles that I move in, people seem to be heading the opposite direction. After Copenhagen and Climate-gate, campaigners started talking about climate change less, not more.  We have The Great Power Race, the Energy Action Coalition, and the 10:10 campaign, which are all great projects, but aren’t built around the concept of talking about climate change.

I think that people have been focusing on changing strategy since Copenhagen, and so for groups that I’m involved in like the UK Youth Climate Coalition and the International Youth Climate Movement who have been talking climate change for a while, this means moving away from ‘climate change’ and towards ‘clean energy futures’.  Is this the right direction to be moving, or should the UKYCC be holding its ground and sticking with climate-related messaging? Could it even be argued that we youth groups are switching to a tried-and-failed tactic that was used before our time?

It’s clear that we need a movement, and that will have to be made up of groups that talk about climate change, and groups that don’t.  It must be made up of groups campaigning for high-speed rail, against road and airport expansion, for energy security, against wars for oil, as well as for cutting carbon emissions and against climate change. We need to make better links with diverse groups and ask not what these groups can do for the climate movement, but rather that the climate movement can do for them.  To do this we don’t need to stop talking about climate change, if anything we need to talk about it more and show how it relates to all of these other issues.

Let’s keep climate change as a common theme through all of our messaging, and make a better effort to reach out to diverse groups and help them out with their campaigns.