Sustainability In Your Ear: David Fenton on How to Win the Climate Debate

Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thank you for joining the conversation today. Let’s talk about how to win the fight for planet and people. We already know what to do about climate change. The clean energy solutions exist. They’re the cheapest form of power on Earth, and the warning signs, from fires and floods to the rising costs of food and insurers walking away from whole regions, are impossible to miss. And yet, after decades of effort, only about a quarter of Americans are deeply engaged with the urgency of climate action, and just half are even concerned. So here’s the puzzle that my guest today, David Fenton, has wrestled for more than 50 years. If the danger is this clear and the answers are this good, why has the movement failed to bring the public along?

Part of the answer is that we’re making the case in openly hostile territory. Federal climate policy has been rolled back. The fossil fuel industry has spent decades manufacturing doubt about global warming, and its allies are ready to blame wind and solar within hours of any grid emergency, whether or not the facts support it. The social platforms where most people get their news quietly bury anything labeled climate, showing it only to the people who already agree. And if you’re a climate-concerned person, the audiences that you most need to reach will never see those messages. As David puts it, we’re in a propaganda war with the fossil fuel industry, and we’re not even on the battlefield.

David Fenton has spent his life trying to change that. He started as a teenage high school dropout, shooting photographs of the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers for the underground press in the 1960s. He co-produced the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden, and in 1982 he founded Fenton Communications, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes.

Over four decades, his work has helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, and helped launch the fossil fuel divestment movement in partnership with the Rockefellers. In fact, the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers for the movement. And now he’s distilled it all into a book called The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator. And that includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. We’re going to explore how to speak to people’s hearts before their heads, and why “make polluters pay” travels farther than “net zero by 2050,” as well as how to fight disinformation when a lie outruns the truth, and how to win over conservatives without bending the facts. So, what does a lifetime of victories and hard-won failures teach us about protecting the planet and democracy itself in this pivotal moment? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.

David Fenton, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?

David Fenton 3:15
I’m feeling sustained. Thank you. How are you? Sustained.

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:17
Good. I’m doing well. It’s a beautiful day here in southern Oregon, and I know in Berkeley it’s probably a nice morning as well.

David Fenton 3:25
It’s a little foggy, and that’s good. We are avoiding the heat waves of the rest of the country.

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:30
Twain’s observation about San Francisco is always kind of a satisfying one when you get there, but you hear about it and you think, “Gosh, it must be cold.”

David Fenton 3:38
Yeah, well, colder is a little better right now, given what’s going on in our overheated world.

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:44
Absolutely. Hey, look, you’ve spent 50 years working on trying to change the world, to put it mildly. And in the book, you turn the lens on the movement itself, calling the climate crisis the biggest communication failure in the history of progressive advocacy. Why does so much of the fault lie on our side of the conversation?

David Fenton 4:04
Well, it’s not only on our side, but everybody talks correctly about the fault of the corporate polluting interests that have confused everybody and spread all this propaganda and intentional lying, the biggest criminals of all time, in my opinion, at least measured by impact, but our movement bears some responsibility also. You know, I mean, just look at the data. You know, only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything at all about climate change on social media, their main source of news increasingly. Only, let’s say, two thirds, according to the Yale research, say they rarely or never see or hear anything about climate change from their friends or in the media.

You know, the environmental groups do a lot of great things: policy, law, science. But they don’t communicate. They don’t spend money on communicating, by and large, even though they’re very wealthy. They have huge budgets. They don’t value that, you know. As we all know, they only go out to communicate with their members to raise money, not to educate or get people involved in action. When people say that they rarely or never see or hear anything about this, that’s a failure.

And at the same time, the fossil fuel industry is very focused on propaganda and communication. They’re building up all these online influencers. They’ve always had a natural focus on this, and we’re practicing what, in the main, I would call a unilateral disarmament in the information wars. And you know, you can’t decarbonize the economy at the speed we need to according to physics without the public being on board. You know, we saw this when Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act passed by only one vote, and when you win only by one vote, you’ve won nothing permanent. And in my opinion, it’s an indicator that you have not done enough to get the public on your side, and that’s why Trump was able to repeal most of it by one vote. So if we’re winning and losing by one vote, we’re losing.

Mitch Ratcliffe 6:22
But do you feel, because of the one vote that still separates the two sides of the country, so to speak, that there is a lot of opportunity for real permanent change still ahead?

David Fenton 6:33
Absolutely. You know, I’m very optimistic because you know the data shows we can help people understand what this is simply, in ways that speak to their concerns about their health and their children and their property and their jobs and their prosperity and their security. But we don’t, by and large. I mean, first of all, we don’t reach people hardly at all, and then when we do, our language is an obstacle. We do not speak in terms that people can understand or that speak to their values and their everyday concerns. You know, like take the term net zero. Nobody knows what the hell that means. You know, people really do not know what carbon is, sorry. And so the whole, you know, and climate justice, that’s another one. You know, as I tell people, if you want climate justice, please don’t call it that, because nobody knows what it means. And you know, if you look at the science of cognition and linguistics, when you say the word justice, what comes into people’s head is the police and the court. So you’re confusing the hell out of people.

Now, when you talk about pollution, which is the cause of this, everybody knows what you’re talking about. And the other great thing about the word pollution is that no one will ever defend it. Pollution is never good. No one ever likes it. So, you know, we know from the research that the best language and imagery to explain what we’re doing to the Earth to people is that we have put a blanket of pollution around the Earth that’s trapping heat that used to go back out to space, and everybody can see that. That activates existing mental frames. People know what pollution is. They know what a blanket looks like. They know what a blanket does. It traps heat. So all that heat energy that used to go back out to space is now making it hotter, duh. So that’s how we need to talk about this, but we don’t.

So another thing, you know, stop me from rambling on here too much, is that people learn from influencers and characters and personalities, and we don’t build hardly any up. Al Gore has, you know, long faded from predominant view. Bless him, he did a great job. But where are influencers? You know, we have them in the wings, and we have no infrastructure to create more visibility for them, and we don’t think it’s important. So you know, I’ve written about, why is this? Why does the climate community, the vast NGO and philanthropic enterprise behind it, and it is vast, it’s very, you know, it’s many billions of dollars a year, why, excuse me, why doesn’t it value communicating and getting the public on board to demand change?

So, the best answer I’ve found comes from the great Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, and he says that people who study the humanities, the sciences, and the law (I’m talking to you, Bill Gates) have what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy.

That is the idea that a great piece of science or a great policy idea is going to magically reproduce itself because of its sheer intrinsic engineering brilliance, and this is a false view. The world does not work that way, and there is a corollary view to the Enlightenment fallacy, which is that selling ideas is dirty, manipulative, and beneath us, and we don’t do that even truthfully. So contrast that, Lakoff does, with the people who go to business school. That’s who we’re up against largely, who study cognitive and marketing science, and who, in most cases, except the finance guys, have to sell products and services to advance their careers, so they have a natural tendency and inclination to engage in public persuasion to succeed, and it’s very profitable for them. You know, do marketing and public confusion and propaganda, and you can avoid regulations on your industry, or get yourself a multibillion-dollar tax cut.

Mitch Ratcliffe 11:25
Thank you. That’s a great kickoff because you covered about half the questions I wanted to talk about. But let’s go back and unpack some of that stuff.

David Fenton 11:32
Sure.

Mitch Ratcliffe 11:33
Money was where you started, with money in politics, and you closed with business people earning a profit. So money is a theme here. Is the problem partly, and I find that I am consistently put off by the number of requests for money I get daily, is the problem money in politics in the first place? Should Citizens United be repealed?

David Fenton 11:59
Absolutely, of course. You know, we’re supposed to have a democracy, which means one person, one vote. But because of our very corrupt and very partisan, sadly, Supreme Court, they’ve turned it into one dollar, one vote. That is not what the founders intended, and that’s not a democracy. That’s a kleptocracy. So yes, this is a fundamental problem, but that’s a surmountable problem. You know, if you create a mass movement.

Mitch Ratcliffe 12:34
What would it look like to show up and create that mass movement?

David Fenton 12:37
Well, we’ve seen it many times before. You know, I’m very privileged. At age 74, I’ve seen and participated in a number of mass movements fighting the odds and winning. You know, we stopped the Vietnam War. We overcame segregation in the South. We got gay marriage. We got compassionate care to HIV victims. You know, on and on and on. There have been a lot of victories. We legalized marijuana. You know, we’ve certainly vastly improved the status of women and gays, and civil rights in our country. We have a long way to go, but it’s nothing like it was.

So these were all the results of mass movements, and there will be a mass movement to save a livable Earth. That’s going to happen. The weather’s going to make it happen. The problem, of course, as you know from the physics, is that we wait too long to let it happen spontaneously instead of nurturing it. It could be too late. So I’m confident it’ll happen, but we’re not building the infrastructure and creating the demand for it to the degree that we could, and it would cost a fraction of the philanthropic and NGO spending on climate and the environment today if it was directed to that.

Mitch Ratcliffe 14:01
Well, so how do you win that business person over to the idea that there is more profit in a more sustainable, renewable energy-based economy?

David Fenton 14:09
Well, that’s happening more and more because, of course, as you know, almost all new investment in energy is going into clean energy and storage. So the market is doing that more than people know. Actually, you know, the industry, the renewable power industry, has done a very bad job of marketing. It’s kind of, you know, shell-shocked and browbeaten and keeping its head down. There is a new effort underway called Amped, amped.org, to have the industry do more sophisticated communications and to stop getting punched in the face so much.

You know, all this ridiculous stuff. Offshore wind kills whales, a meme brought to you by the people that don’t give a crap about whales. You know, or well, all the mining for solar panels and batteries, which of course is a tiny, tiny fraction of the drilling and mining for fossil fuels. I mean, these people are shameless, and they’re good at it, and we don’t counter them hardly at all.

Mitch Ratcliffe 15:21
One of the issues is sort of the preponderance of bad news, and I think back to Love Canal galvanized the environmental movement in there in the 80s.

David Fenton 15:31
Sure.

Mitch Ratcliffe 15:32
And now, you know, Altadena burns to the ground, Pacific Palisades burns to the ground, wildfires everywhere. I literally was evacuated because of a wildfire a couple of weeks ago.

David Fenton 15:42
Oh, wow, sorry.

Mitch Ratcliffe 15:43
And well, we made it. My house is here. When you mentioned Vietnam, for instance, I mean, we lost about 58,000 Americans in Vietnam. But because of pollution from oil and natural gas, about 91,000 people die every year in the United States, and an additional 15,000 because of the wildfire smoke and the particulates that people are inhaling. What do we do to focus the potential rage that would change things?

David Fenton 16:11
Yeah, well, again, only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change and clean energy on social media. Two thirds say that they rarely or never see or hear anything about it in the media or from their friends. It’s not an issue people talk about, and that’s all overcomeable. We have no infrastructure, no marketing campaign, no persuasion campaign, none, zero, zilch at any scale to do something about this, so you can’t expect people to mobilize and organize when you have one side of an information war confusing them and reaching them all the time, and the other side quiet, basically, and underfunded.

And it’s especially tragic because in the digital communication age, we know exactly how to reach people. It’s not expensive, really, compared to the money we’re spending on other things. We know how to do it. We have all the data. There’s a great group called Potential Energy Coalition, run by a former branding guy, corporate branding guy. They have all the data. They know exactly what messages work with which audiences, but nobody is deploying it. So this is the problem. You know, there are other problems, of course, in the digital age. People sometimes feel that clicking on something is the same thing as activism, which it isn’t. But you know, I mean, here’s another issue.

So according to the Yale research, the Yale Center on Climate Change Communication, there are approximately 80 million Americans who are in the category of alarmed about climate change, and half of them, 40 million people, say they want to be politically active on the issue, but only 3 million of them are politically active on it. And by the way, that’s about the combined mailing list of the environmental groups asking you for money. So then, when they ask the 37 million who want to be politically active and aren’t, why aren’t you? You know what the number one answer they get is: nobody has asked me.

Mitch Ratcliffe 18:23
They’ve only asked for money.

David Fenton 18:25
The 37 million, they even haven’t asked them for that. So, in other words, you have an infrastructure failure. We are not reaching our own base, and our own base, according to Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale, is the largest potential issue public in the country, other than abortion, much bigger than the NRA and guns. But it’s not being organized. I mean, ask yourself: if you wanted to go take effective climate action today, where would you go? What website would you go to? What social media channel would you go to? Where would you go?

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:06
Yeah, I have to say that in order to act, other than going to the website where I can send a note to my representative in Congress, not a lot of places come immediately to mind because everything is so diffuse.

David Fenton 19:19
That’s right. So no one’s building up a trusted brand, a trusted organization to do that. We could, of course, we could, and you know that speaks to a whole other issue, which is, I think we’re past peak crazy wokeness in the progressive nonprofit world, but we still have a lot of it.

You know, the language problem is big, as I mentioned, but there’s also a dogmatic problem and an ideological problem. You know, if you are stressing racial and gender divisions in your communication, you’re not going to unite people against a common enemy, so not that those subjects aren’t important. Everybody’s identity is important, but we’re not going to win by appealing to subgroups. We’re going to win by assembling majorities.

Mitch Ratcliffe 20:18
We have to think of a big tent.

David Fenton 20:20
That’s right, and we need, and look, you know, we could win conservatives too. No one has a program to do that at any scale. Now, I’ve conducted experiments where I’ve bought videos on climate change into the social media feeds of conservatives, and the videos feature conservatives explaining how global warming threatens conservative values, and they’re very effective, but no one does it.

So if you’re a conservative or Republican in your filter bubble, all you ever see is that climate change is a hoax. So what do you think you’re going to believe if that’s the only information that ever reaches you? Okay, so we could disrupt that. You can buy advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you know all these platforms. The Russians do it, but we don’t.

Mitch Ratcliffe 21:18
David, you’ve ignited a great conversation. I want to take a quick commercial break, and we’re going to be right back to continue the conversation. Stay tuned, folks.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with author and progressive activist David Fenton, whose new book, The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, is a guide for multi-generational campaigns for a rational climate response. David, you mentioned social media and buying advertising there, but one of the problems, and not just for advertising, but just individual posts, is that when you use the word climate, it ends up being routed to the people who already care about climate. How do you communicate when the name of the problem that you’re addressing is buried?

David Fenton 22:07
Well, first of all, you can buy access to people who aren’t in that bubble. You can just pay for it, and it’s not expensive. And of course, with digital communications, you can test your messages and content to see what really works before you pay to scale it. So it’s not an excuse, you know.

And there is something else, which is, I think that we need to put more pressure on the tech platforms and companies, and by the way, also on the television networks, which are not irrelevant as people may think. You know, I mean, the TV networks are big on TikTok as sources of news, and they don’t ever, hardly ever, link extreme weather to pollution from fossil fuels. So, you know, these people can be pressured. The problem is, the only people that pressure them are the right. We don’t, because again, our community doesn’t think you need to sell ideas. We think that’s dirty and manipulative.

But by the way, you know, thanks for mentioning my book. You know, I also have a podcast now called The Fenton Forecast on all platforms, and we’re looking at the future of climate and AI and health and democracy and all these issues.

Mitch Ratcliffe 23:27
You’ve got a rule: fight falsehood immediately, and that’s because a lie will harden into a truth the more times it’s seen. But now a lie outruns the truth by a pretty wide margin, largely because the other side pays for it to do so. What’s your playbook for fighting disinformation? How’s it changed, particularly as a result of AI and the ability to amplify everything?

David Fenton 23:48
Well, it’s not only that they pay for it; they’re unified, and we’re the Tower of Babel. So you know, the Koch-funded conservative infrastructure of all their think tanks and influencers and podcasts and you know all of it. You know, they speak to the same topics and messages on a daily and weekly basis. They meet. They coordinate. They’re in lockstep, and that’s very important because the cognitive science is very clear. The way people learn is from significant amounts of repetition of simple messages. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Simple, simple, simple, simple, simple.

And by the way, most people in our community hate that. We hate simplifying things. We’re not rewarded for it, and we hate repeating ourselves. But that’s what works, and they understand it, so they organize their field to do that. And we’re, you know, everybody on their own doing their thing. So that’s one big problem. I mean, even in our scientific community, there’s no unity of discourse or language or imagery that would help a lot. Nobody organizes it, so, and we could pay for it also.

Now AI is a whole other thing, of course, and you know I don’t have all the answers to that, but I do think that eventually we are going to have to have laws in this country that demand that AI-generated content is labeled as such, and we also should have laws that to be on a social media platform, you have to prove you are a human, not a Russian bot. We’re going to go through a lot of hard times, and eventually we’re going to end up regulating these platforms. You know, you see the difference. Look at why are the Europeans so much more focused on appropriate levels of regulation of social media, and they have some rules about media in general. It’s because they went through fascism and the Holocaust, and they saw how unchecked demagoguery can kill millions. So they’re focused on this, and we’re still in a frontier, false idea of freedom model. And but it’s not going to last.

Mitch Ratcliffe 26:17
When you say that people on the left don’t like to repeat themselves, it really comes home for me because I hate repeating myself. And George Lakoff, who wrote the foreword to your book, in addition to being somebody you talk about, has argued that there are two kinds of minds politically, or two moral worldviews, that are based on different models of the family. One’s the strict father; the other is the nurturing parent. And Lakoff’s work on metaphor and how it informed our relationship with the world, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, is a brilliant, brilliant book. And his book on mathematics just blew my mind 20, 30 years ago. But I’ve never really agreed with that bicameral mind idea. How does that framework change the way you think about talking to people about climate?

David Fenton 27:03
Okay, so you left out a third category from Lakoff, which are the biconceptuals, he calls them. So Trump’s the conservative strict father. The father’s always right. White people on top. Man on top. That’s conservative morality, and the nurturing parent, that’s, you know, we kumbaya feel-good liberals. But the swing voters are the people who have both neural networks, and they either can be activated depending on the language and personalities they are exposed to.

For example, in an election campaign, so take for example James Talarico in Texas, who’s running for Senate. So he’s attracting lots of swing and independent voters and some Trump voters because he’s activating the nurturing, caring, love thy neighbor, actual Christian side of their brains. So I think that the job here is to activate and mobilize the base and win over a significant number of the biconceptuals, and then you have an enduring majority. So I think that’s how I use his framework.

You know, of course, the reason we don’t like repetition and simplicity is in academia, you’re not rewarded for that. You’re rewarded for specialization. Yeah. You know, the smaller the better. So yeah, it’s bad training. It really is.

Mitch Ratcliffe 28:41
Two of your signature wins turned on the messenger who delivered the message, not just the message. One was the Rockefellers divesting from fossil fuels, and the other was Yoko Ono put up a billboard on Governor Cuomo’s commute that said, “Imagine there’s no fracking.” And as I read about that in the book, I was thinking of McLuhan and his argument that the medium is the message, but it sounds like we’ve moved to the messenger is the message. Is that the case?

David Fenton 29:08
More, yeah, because as trust in institutions has declined, including traditional media institutions, what trust remains is in people, is in individual influencers online, including some celebrities like take Taylor Swift or people like that. So yes, whereas the media used to be the message, it’s increasingly what we call parasocial influencers, people that you trust and who you follow.

So the fossil fuel industry is building up a bunch of these people. You can see it. In fact, right now there is a torrent of horrible disinformation on climate on Elon Musk’s racist platform. It’s unbelievable. The worse the fires get, the hotter it gets, the more torrent of bullshit is on X. And a lot of it comes through, “Well, I used to be a climate activist, and I’ve seen the light. Fossil fuels are the greatest thing ever.” We have nobody like, so we have some incredible talent. Like, have you ever heard of Dr. Katharine Hayhoe?

Mitch Ratcliffe 30:25
Oh, sure. Yeah.

David Fenton 30:26
Okay. So she’s a Christian evangelical climate scientist at Texas Tech University. Her husband’s an evangelical preacher. She’s amazingly talented, and she has no help online, none. She has no video team, no social media team, no PR firm, no strategist. She does it all by herself. And because she’s so good, she has a million followers. She’d have 15 or 20 million, in my opinion, if she had help.

And here’s a comment on the philanthropic community and its prioritizing communication. Here we have this proven talent, and she can’t raise hardly any money to get a team because we don’t value this work.

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:13
What you’re describing is this talk of authenticity. That person represents the real, and I buy into it. What makes a messenger land, and how do you find the right one?

David Fenton 31:23
Well, she lands. We’ve proven it. I’ve done focus groups with her videos and online dial testing, and there are, you know, there are TV meteorologists who are really, really good at this. You know, former Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, he’s terrific at the clean energy side of this. The founder of Amped, Steve McBee, is really a terrific spokesperson. You know, Michael Mann, the climate scientist, he’s very talented. There’s a young scientist, Marcius Extavour, who’s really effective. There’s a number of them, but they have no help. Let’s get them some help.

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:04
The other issue that seems to be activating everyone, left and right, is concerns about the state of our democracy. And in fact, it ranks right up there with climate change. How do you see the fight for climate and democracy potentially merging in some way in order to make this into one struggle for a major change in the way we do things?

David Fenton 32:22
Yeah, I think that will happen. You know, we have fossil fuel industry evil billionaires, and now, unfortunately, we have Silicon Valley fascist evil billionaires, and these people are corrupting the democracy, and they’re also threatening people’s health and homes and livelihoods and prosperity and children and their lungs, so and their ability to get insurance. And you know, it’s like the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said in the 1940s. He said, you know, you could either have a democracy or you can have great concentrations of wealth, but you can’t have both.

So I think that this is all going to merge into a movement to have checks and balances on private power, which we’ve had before. Teddy Roosevelt broke up the monopolies and the trusts. You know, the top marginal tax rate in this country used to be functionally 70% under Eisenhower. It was 90, but functionally it was 70. That made owners of companies invest in their workers and businesses rather than give all the money to the government.

So actually, the whole ideology about taxes is backwards, so yeah, you know, there’s this tax on billionaires on the ballot in California this November. I think it’s very likely to pass, and it’s kind of sad to watch some of these billionaires. They’re so upset. It’s 1% a year for five years, guys. You know, this is half what you pay your hedge fund managers, and you pay them that even if they lose money. So it’s, you know, the wealth inequality is corrupting, and there are some good billionaires, you know, who fund a lot of great things, but this is distorted, and you can’t have a functioning democracy with this degree of disparity.

So yeah, I think it’s all going to change. I’m really confident it’s all going to change. History shows that periods of great income concentration lead to rebellion, and periods of less income concentration, just like periods of fascism and repression, never last. They lead to rebellions and it collapses. But the real problem, as you know, is we are running out of time to save a livable Earth and climate because the carbon dioxide stays up there for millennia, and this is the worry. Will this happen in time? And that’s up to us.

Mitch Ratcliffe 35:03
That’s the nail we have to figure out how to drive home. And Franklin Roosevelt, the other one, there’s an apocryphal story about him after coming to office. The Depression was underway. He brought the richest people in the world, in the country, to the White House and said, “Look, we have to do something about this, or they’re going to kill you. What is it going to take to …”

David Fenton 35:26
I want. There’s another meeting that Franklin Roosevelt had when he first took office. He brought in all these progressive and labor leaders, and they all laid out what they wanted him to do. And Roosevelt looked at them and said, “I agree with you on everything. Now go out and make me do it.” So that’s the job.

Mitch Ratcliffe 35:49
Well, okay, but what event catalyzes that moment here in the United States? Do we have to wait for the ultimate disaster?

David Fenton 35:55
You know, the disasters are happening all around us.

Mitch Ratcliffe 35:58
That’s the problem. It’s just, it’s …

David Fenton 36:02
Okay, but back to, there’s nothing on social media. There’s almost nothing in the regular media about this at all. But there’s certainly nothing simply linking the pollution from oil, coal, and gas to these weather disasters. So this is not something that people really know at a deep enough level.

You know, When you ask Americans what causes climate change, you know the number one answer you get: it’s caused by the ozone hole, which it isn’t. And when you ask them how to solve it, the number one answer you get, 40%, is reduce, reuse, and recycle, which won’t solve it. So you have climate illiteracy, which we could fix, and until we do, we won’t get action.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:52
For someone listening right now, what is the one thing you would urge them to do?

David Fenton 36:56
Talk about it. Talk about it. Talk about it. Post about it. Get everybody to talk about it. We have an emergency that people aren’t talking about. That’s not good.

And I think that, pressure any philanthropies, philanthropists, and NGOs that you know to devote more of their resources to creating public demand. Public knowledge and public demand is what we lack. We don’t lack solutions; we lack demand.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:30
David, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can people follow your work and tune into the podcast?

David Fenton 37:35
So The Fenton Forecast is on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and all the major platforms. The website’s fentonforecast.com. The website for my book is davidfentonactivist.com. Davidfentonactivist.com. And if anybody wants to write to me, it’s hello at fentonforecast.com. Hello at fentonforecast.com.

Mitch Ratcliffe 38:01
David, I hope you get a lot of mail. Thanks so much for your time today.

David Fenton 38:05
All right, thank you. Let’s stay in touch.

Mitch Ratcliffe 38:07
I’d love to.

David Fenton 38:07
Okay, bye.

Mitch Ratcliffe 38:14
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with David Fenton, the founder of Fenton Communications, author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, and host of The Fenton Forecast. You can learn more about David’s work at davidfentonactivist.com. David Fenton Activist is all one word, no space, no dash. DavidFentonActivist.com, and you can find the podcast at fentonforecast.com, which is also all one word, no spaces, no dash. Fentonforecast.com.

So, 50 years of campaigning from No Nukes to the fight over fracking in New York, and here’s the verdict that David brings back: the climate movement is losing an information war because it showed up for the fight with ideas, not effective messaging. 12% of Americans say that they ever see anything about climate change on social media. Of the roughly 40 million Americans who say they want to be politically active on climate, only about 3 million follow through with action. And when researchers ask the other 37 million why they aren’t involved, the top answer is that nobody has asked them. Well, that’s not a public opinion problem. It’s an organizing failure based on overreliance on mailing-list-based fundraising. You’ve got to give people something to do, not just ask them for money to do something for them.

So let’s start with where the money goes. Climate philanthropy and the NGOs that it funds are very good at policy, law, and science, and they spend almost nothing on persuading the public that any of that matters. David traced that to what George Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong policy argument will spread on its own just because it’s correct, in addition to the corollary that selling ideas is beneath serious people. I hear a version of this every week on the show. We are not short of solutions. We cover them constantly: heat pumps, geothermal networks, sorting technology that can pull a specific polymer out of a mixed stream. What we are short of is the 40 million voices that make any of it politically survivable. The Inflation Reduction Act passed by one vote and was gutted by one vote. And David’s read is that a bill that you win by one vote is a bill that you never really won. And so far, that’s proven to be true.

Now another point cuts closer to home for those of us who care about this. When Americans are asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer is reduce, reuse, and recycle, and bully for them. I believe that that is part of the solution. Earth911 has spent three decades on exactly that vocabulary, and I’m not going to pretend that it has succeeded. Recycling is a material strategy. It’s a big one because most of what we call consumption is really extraction, processing, and transportation, as well as the emissions embedded in the goods we buy, and they’re a bigger share of the national footprint than most people assume. But no rate of curbside recycling participation decarbonizes the grid or the fleet that delivers the products to us and takes it away, including for recycling.

David’s fix is to stop leading with the words that failed to gain cognitive traction. Net zero means almost nothing to most listeners. Carbon, which is the basis for life, is a mystery to most people. Pollution, however, is a word nobody defends, and David’s description of a blanket of pollution around the Earth that traps heat is a picture people already have in their heads. That’s worth borrowing and worth testing in conversations with your friends and family.

And finally, it’s time to look closely at the messenger economics that are involved in this new communications conflict. Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals, some of them pretty shady, and the fossil fuel side is investing in individuals. They’re hiring them, while our side leaves the best communicators to fend for themselves. David’s example of Katharine Hayhoe, the evangelical climate scientist with about a million followers who has no video team, no social team, and no strategist, is an example of that. Meanwhile, the clean energy industry, after years of taking punches over whales and mining, has launched another advocacy platform, Amped, in May of this year. Take a listen to my recent conversation with GoodPower’s Leah Qusba, who is working the same strategy from the tools end of the equation. That is, with AI-assisted tools for spotting anti-renewables messaging and responding to them.

And to David’s caution, I would add another: attention purchased is not the same as earned trust. Industry-funded persuasion carries a credibility discount, and the parasocial channel can cut both ways. The influencer who tells you that they gave up being a climate activist after seeing the light is using the exact same machinery in our minds. Money buys reach, but it doesn’t necessarily buy a message or messenger people will continue to believe. So here’s the number that I’m going to be watching for this year, and it’s not the number of gigatons of carbon or the gigawatts of energy, but whether a single large climate funder moves serious money into permanent communications infrastructures. And by the way, I am hearing rumors that there is one big one out there looking at a $300 million campaign. The 37 million wannabe climate advocates are still waiting to be asked, and they need to be equipped with messages and tools they can use to take action. So we’re going to continue to watch this story and share progress as it develops.

Hey, if this conversation gave you something to argue with, send it to somebody who will argue back and leave us a review while you’re there, folks. You’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste, and there are more than 560 episodes in the Sustainability In Your Ear archive to share with your friends, your family, and coworkers. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, and any other purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Thanks for your support. We really appreciate you spreading the word.

I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. In fact, let’s advocate for it. Have a Green Day.