Thread by @DoctorVive

Out today, a new piece: "Climate Communication in the Era of 'Blah Blah Blah'."

In a special Climate Change and Energy edition of @IA_Forum. Pg 21, here👇

ia-forum.org/Files/IFAUYO.p…

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"We have left the decades of [science] doubt and denial behind, and we have entered the era of 'blah blah blah,' as Greta Thunberg so succinctly puts it.

Climate communication must evolve to adapt to this new era."

2/n

"First, it should seek to inspire the majority who are concerned and alarmed about the climate crisis to adopt the kind of committed, even revolutionary fervor that can lead people collectively to replace our current stakeholders with leaders who will transform our systems."

3/n

"Second, it should attempt to give those people the communications tools that can help undermine the ideologies that sustain and justify those stakeholders’ power."

4/n

"And finally, climate communication should attempt to introduce new codes and assumptions into political discourse."

5/n

Right now our political discourse implicitly and sometimes explicitly reproduces "a narrative that goes largely uncontested by stakeholders on both the right and the left."

6/n

This narrative constellates around a core of seven key terms: alarmist, cost, freedom, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience.

7/n

"It goes something like this: 'Yes climate change is real, but to say it threatens human survival is *alarmist*—and anyway the monetary and cultural costs of ending the general use of fossil fuels is greater than the *cost* of climate change itself."

8/n

"The health of American families, and human welfare around the world, relies on the economic *growth* enabled by fossil fuels, so..."

9/n

"We need to keep using [fossil fuels] at least while the global south develops, decarbonizing them with *innovation* while facing climate impacts by increasing communities’ *resilience*"

10/n

"We should be wary of creating international institutions to plan the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy lest they cancel our *freedom*. At the same time, America cannot act unilaterally on the climate crisis because *India and China* something something."

11/n

"What gives this narrative its stranglehold on our politics is that it is invoked not only by oil and gas interests, but also by centrist politicians, corporate executives, and bankers, as well as by..."

12/n

"...journalists, scientists, economists, researchers in politics and energy— and sometimes even climate activists themselves—all of whom to some degree sincerely intend to advance climate solutions."

13/n

"This unified discourse of climate politics amplifies fossil-fuel disinformation and itself reproduces the ideologies that justify the power of the system’s biggest stakeholders."

14/n

"Climate communicators must work to expose and neuter the false assumptions of those ideologies and introduce new ways of talking about climate, energy, and the economy that can bring new practices, and new justifications for those practices into view."

15/n

(NB: I've framed my argument with an (obligatory) #DontLookUp lede, a nod to Dan Kahan's influence over #scicomm, and the essential research of @YaleClimateComm.)

16/n

I hope you find the argument helpful, or at least provocative, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

fin/