Save. Our. Spaceship
The video call ended and I had to instantly re-read my notes to make sure I had the numbers right. The lead on a small research team had just given us a progress update on how they were using AI to help minimize carbon emissions in our cities. They have worked out how to use historical traffic data to optimise traffic light sequences to minimize the amount of time that cars are stationary at traffic lights (where they emit up to 40% more CO2). The results in their first pilot city were in and they were good. Really good. Multiplied out to thousands of cities and billions of cars the potential impact was incredible.
Whether it’s using AI for traffic light optimization, creating a single virtualized view of the electrical grid or finding ways to default billions of commuters to low carbon routes, the more time I spend with some of the best engineering minds working on this, the more optimistic I am about human ingenuity to take on the biggest collective challenge our species has ever faced. I’m pretty late to the party though.
“The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.” - Greta Thurnberg (2017)
So the question isn’t what do we need to do to address this but how do we “wake up” to ensure we do the things we now know need to be done before it’s too late?
With COP26 now upon us, our collective hopes are in the hands of a few leaders and their negotiating teams in Glasgow this week. And even if they get to a framework that charts a path for us to avoid runaway climate change, it’s going to then take billions of us to embrace the implications of this in our day to day lives to bring this about. Both of these things need to happen for us to have a chance to avoid pushing through the critical 1.5C warming target. Neither of them is possible unless we start by agreeing on the right set of words.
The ability to share ideas and persuade others is our collective superpower as a species. Every single one of us has a unique worldview made up of a different set of needs, wants and beliefs completely distinct to any other individual. Our proven ability to successfully bridge these worlds is the greatest hope we have. In fact, no other moment in our history has required more of us to be able to find common ground with each other than our collective approach to this truly existential crisis. So how to find this hallowed ground?
Frank Luntz, the infamous Republican comms strategist, provided a glimpse of what this brand of pragmatic empathy should look like to the Democratic Special Senate Committee on Climate Crisis:
“If I were advising you, I’d be talking about clean air and safe water. It is something that people care about immediately. And it’s something that no one can dismiss. And I want to communicate it from a parent to a child. Because it’s what parents are concerned about more than anything else. When you ask parents what matters most, it’s that their children grow up healthy. So if we are doing anything that contributes to an unhealthy world, that’ll connect to them more than getting into the science” - Frank Luntz (2018)
The latest IPCC report is painfully clear. We have to halve our global emissions as a planet in the next ten years. Anything short of that will not get it done yet all we hear about are different permutations of a “net zero plan for 2050” or “negative emission strategies”. This language fails to both explain what these things mean let alone acknowledge the fundamental truth that humans are great at solving small, urgent and annoying problems (how long do any of us put up with our wifi when it’s down?) but terrible long term actors. Our track record of making tradeoffs today for the sake of an outcome 30 years down the line is pretty poor (see low pension opt in rates everywhere). In the way that no internet access focuses the mind, we need to rally around something for the climate that creates convenience based urgency right now.
While climate negotiations are front and center of global news coverage we cannot miss this opportunity to clearly establish a shared understanding about what the core problem is. We all have to get comfortable with unapologetically naming the burning of fossil fuels as not only the future threat to climate change but the root cause of things like air pollution that have a visible effect on the health of our families today. Wherever possible we need to be able to individualize and humanize these stories. We’re going to need stories that feel more urgent, more vivid and more culturally aligned to the way we see the world than the stories we have now.
What do we want to change and why?
What will you get when you behave a certain way?
What will it cost you when you don't?
How can you talk about your new behaviours in a way that reinforces your identity and ladders up to the things your friends, family, customers or political constituents care about?
Marketing 101.
Drive electric. Eat less meat. Don’t use plastic bags. Fly less. Plant trees. Switch to clean energy. Buy local. Offset your emissions. Take shorter showers. Recycle. Retrain... No successful brand marketer would ever overwhelm you with so many competing messages at the same time. How do we separate the signal from the noise? What is it that we really need people to do and what are the different ways to repeat the same simple thing over and over again in a way that makes it impossible to misunderstand or ignore?
This doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a single and globally coherent brand campaign for how 8bn of us tackle climate change. There doesn’t need to be. Someone will tell a good story that resonates with the people it’s trying to reach and others will remix it along the way and adapt as necessary. The best memes are things we put our collective faith in that can travel the world and help others attribute their own value and meaning to. Whether it's about better air quality in London, new energy jobs in Appalachia or lower utility bills in Istanbul, the right words need to clearly point to the burning of coal, oil and gas as the core problem underlying all of these. It’s universally understood, easy to identify and its effects are increasingly experienced by all of us. Also, it happens to be true.
1119 words into this feels like the right time to make clear that I don’t have THE magic words myself (sincere apologies if you got to this point hoping for that salve). This is hopefully instead a call to arms to all of us who can to spend as much time focused on the language we use as we do on building the next piece of technology to suck carbon out of the air or lock it in the blockchain. The right stories will buy us the time we need to get the tactics right before it’s too late.
Hope is eternal, time is not.