Against the Climate Pornographers
    By Simon Retallack
    TomPaine.com

    Tuesday 15 August 2006

    Imagine if the country's senior-most political leaders declared global warming to be the most significant problem facing humanity this century. Imagine if both main political parties competed with each other to appear the most determined to act to prevent it and national targets were put in place to cut greenhouse gas emissions from industry.

    Sound like an environmentalist's fantasy? Not in the United Kingdom, where these things are now a reality. In contrast to the United States, the debate on global warming in the U.K. has moved on to such an extent that the government is now turning its attention towards mobilizing the public to take action to reduce its contribution to global warming.

    Engaging the public matters because the choices made by individuals are responsible for a large proportion of national carbon dioxide emissions. In the U.K. it amounts to 44 percent of the total. Putting effective policies in place to help stimulate climate-friendly behavior is essential, but so too is deploying effective communications.

    Every country is different and will require its own approach. But a starting point must be an understanding of how global warming is already being communicated and whether this is helping or hindering efforts to achieve behavior change.

    Research just published by Britain's leading progressive think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, into how the U.K. media, environmental organizations and government agencies communicate on global warming, reaches similar conclusions to the FrameWorks Institute's 2001 analysis of climate communications in the United States.

    From the perspective of achieving behavior change, both sets of research conclude that existing approaches to discussing global warming may be counterproductive, leaving the public feeling disempowered and uncompelled to act.

    The research by IPPR found that global warming is most commonly constructed in the U.K. through the "alarmist" repertoire - as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. It is typified by an inflated or extreme lexicon, employs a quasi-religious register of death and doom, and uses language of acceleration and irreversibility.

    The difficulty with this approach is that the scale of the problem as it is shown excludes the possibility of real action by the reader or viewer. It contains an implicit counsel of despair - "the problem is just too big for us to take on." Its connection with the unreality of Hollywood films is also likely to distance people from the issue. As the IPPR report says, "In this awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling - effectively a form of 'climate porn'."

    The FrameWorks Institute went a step further and tested its conclusions about U.S. global warming coverage with the public. It found that the more people are bombarded with words or images of devastating, quasi-Biblical effects of global warming, the more likely they are to tune out and switch instead into "adaptationist" mode, focusing on protecting themselves and their families, such as by buying large SUVs to secure their safety.

    FrameWorks also found that depicting global warming as being about "scary weather" evokes the weather frame which sets up a highly pernicious set of reactions, as weather is something outside human control. We do not prevent or change it, we prepare for it, adjust to it or move away from it. Also, focusing on the long timelines and scale of global warming further encourages people to merely adapt, as people think "it won't happen in my lifetime" and "there's nothing an individual can do."

    Both U.K. and U.S. research found that another problematic approach to discussing global warming is one which stresses the large scale of global warming and then tells people they can solve it through small actions like changing a light bulb. It is typified by headlines like "20 things you can do to save the planet from destruction." One problem with this is that it easily lapses into "wallpaper" - the domestic, the routine, the boring and the too-easily ignorable.

    Worse, bringing together these two approaches without reconciling them, juxtaposing the apocalyptic and the mundane, seems likely to feed an asymmetry in human action regarding climate change and highlight the unspoken but obvious question: How can small actions really make a difference to things happening on this epic scale?

    So if we are interested in stimulating climate-friendly behavior, how should we be discussing or communicating on global warming?

    One important conclusion from this new research is that we can no longer continue to maximize the problem while minimizing the solution. If the problem is discussed, we should steer clear of using inflated or extreme language, particularly if it gives the impression "we are all doomed," and we should put humans at the center, so that the effects cited fit with personal experience and involve shorter timelines - 20 years, not 200.

    The British research also recommends, at least in regards to U.K. media, that less time be spent trying to convince people that climate change is real. The problem is real, of course, but to address the sense likely to be derived from the contested nature of the discourse that "nobody really knows," the basic facts need to be treated as beyond argument, or so taken-for-granted that they need barely be spoken.

    As importantly, we need to place the solutions upfront and inject communications about them with the energy and sense of scale that they currently lack. That may mean shifting the focus away from small actions towards the big ones that people can take to address climate change, like switching to a hybrid car, fitting a wind turbine or solar panels, or installing cavity wall insulation, which are more likely to make people feel they could actually make a difference. It may also involve using language which appeals to our collective sense of heroic common endeavor, familiar from times of war.

    Above all, it is not enough to produce yet more messages to convince people of the reality of climate change and urge them to act. We need to work in more sophisticated ways, including by harnessing tools used by brand advertisers, to make it not dutiful or obedient to be climate-friendly, but desirable. That perhaps is the greatest challenge.

    Ultimately, we need to work within the cultural norms, value systems and communication contexts that are meaningful to large sections of the population so that climate-friendly behaviors can be made to feel like "the kinds of things that people like us do" to large groups of people - attractive and compelling in terms that make sense to people today.

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    Simon Retallack is head of the climate change team at the Institute for Public Policy Research.