Last week Barack Obama’s campaign arm, Organizing for America, sent this video around to their campaign list.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biUc0D6_UPA&w=560&h=315]
I was quite happy to see this e-mail land in my inbox. It said to me that after a presidential campaign where climate change was hardly mentioned, the Obama Administration may actually be committed to doing something about it. I’m not convinced yet that this isn’t just talk, but I would certainly prefer talk to what we’ve had over the past couple of years. What’s depressing though is that to put climate on the agenda Obama still has to focus on climate denial. It feels like the movement is still stuck at the base level.
When reflecting on this though, I couldn’t help but think that whilst this approach makes sense in the US, I’m not sure it does elsewhere. In the US denialism is a significant problem. Whilst numbers seem to have increased in recent months (possibly due to last year’s intense summer followed by Hurricane Sandy) belief in climate change in the US has been dropping significantly since 2007. The latest poll (which had an uptick) found that only 50 per cent of people believed the climate was certainly getting warmer (the poll however did show people were in favour of regulation of greenhouse gasses). More importantly though, politics in the US is dominated by denialists – in particular in the Republican Party. It has gotten to a point where it is believed that it is almost impossible to both believe in climate change and have the chance to win a GOP Presidential nomination.
However, I don’t think the same trend holds up in Australia. For example research conducted by Ross Gaurnaut in 2010 (it’s a bit harder to get decent stats from Australia) showed that across a range of different surveys belief in climate change averaged in the mid 70 per cent range (it may have dropped since). Research conducted by the Australian Beaureu of Statistics between 2011 – 2012 found that 57% of people considered climate change to be a concerning issue. Whilst climate change numbers have dropped, most Australians still believe it is an issue, and one of concern.
This opens up a question to me about our focus when campaigning on climate change. Whilst I think combating denialism plays an important role, I think we may be wasting a bit too much energy on it.
Combating climate denialism is something that has taken a lot of effort within the climate movement. For example, last year, in one of the most publicised events of the climate movement, former Directory of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), Anna Rose, published her book Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of Climate Sceptic. The book and film that went with it got lots of coverage. One of the most popular (and my favourite) climate websites in the country Sceptical Science tackles climate denial head on. Whenever Lord Monkton visits Australia he gets huge coverage, particularly from climate movement and take a look at Twitter and Facebook on any given day and fights about climate science are more than common – denial is the question of the moment, and we seem obsessed with it.
Now, I’m not saying that these efforts are a bad thing – and I congratulate Rose and John Cook (who manages Sceptical Science) for the work they do (although as I’ve noted in my blog in the past, we need to be careful about our approaches to denial). I think we should be trying to get everyone on board. But, I think there is a question of resource allocation here that needs to be addressed.
Because in Australia, whilst we may not find ourselves in a major problem of denial, we certainly find ourselves in a problem of action. For example, the 2012 Lowy Poll found that a staggering 63% of Australians continue to be opposed to the Government’s carbon legislation. The same poll (different links) found that after peaking at 68% in 2006, only 36% of people now agreed with the statement “Global Warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves serious cost.”
What does this show? People still believe in climate change, but are now significantly less likely to want to take action on it. That says to me that we may have our focus wrong.
We can think about this using a crude matrix like this. I think we can identify three broad groups of people around climate change – ‘active supporters’ who really want action (that 36%), ‘believers’ who believe in climate change, but it is isn’t a vote/action changer, and complete deniers. Of course the categories are bigger than this, but this makes for a simple illustration.
If we were to run a really effective action strategy, I believe we would focus on the first two groups. We would get the active supporters effectively mobilised so they are taking action, and we would we then work on the ‘believers’ to get them into the active supporter camp. In Australia however, the deniers we would largely ignore. This is for a few reasons. Firstly with our limited resources we are better placed to get those who are already closer to being mobilised to get there. Even if that is only 60% of the population, an active 60% is going to be much more powerful than a non-active 40%. Secondly, talking to deniers can have an opposite reaction – it can get them active in an opposite direction, leaving us worse off.
Of course this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about the science. But we need to be clear about who we are talking to. Our chat about science should be targeted at that middle (and by far the largest group). This is not to bring them into belief about climate change, but to ensure they don’t fall into the denial box. It is not about denial, but about affirmation of what they already believe, and to push them to action.
Of course I’m not saying this should be our complete strategy, and I see the strong desire to get everyone on board with the climate science. But, we have limited resources and limited capacity in the movement, and a need for fast action. Given this, we need to think about where to put our resources and energy. We have spent a lot of energy focused on that last group – trying to convince everyone to believe in climate change, and getting outraged when they don’t. In doing this however I think we could be ignoring the real task at hand – to get those who already believe to want to take action on the issue. I think that is where our energy could be best spent.