by Tom Smerling, via ClimateBites

After watching this TEDx clip, you may never want to stand before an audience again without pausing, at least once, to utter these seven magic words:

“Let me tell you a little story.”

But most advice about the importance of narrative comes from psychologists and communication consultants, not storytellers.   So here is a master storyteller, Bill Harley, talking about his life’s work, and sharing what he’s learned about why storytelling is so central to human understanding.

A small sample:

It has a power nothing else has. . .

I’m not talking just about literature and English.   I’m talking about history and astrophysics and biochemistry and law and mathematics.

All of those things are best explained through story. Because “story” is how we are reminded, and how we remember.   If we want it to be memorable, it must be a story. . .

We are not built to memorize lists, or unrelated facts. We are built to remember narrative.So try this the next time you are giving a lecture or a talk or standing in front of a bunch of people:    Stop in the middle of your offering of facts or your closely-reasoned argument, and say “Let me tell you a little story.”

And watch what happens. You see the faces relax, you see people reseat themselves in their chairs, and get ready. . . to hear . . . a story.

Harley’s points apply not only to public speeches, but to all climate communication, from written articles to interviews, blogs, and even dinner-table conversation.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy Bill Harley’s anecdotes.

If you want to look further into the art of climate storytelling, below are some suggestions for where to start:

• There are two ways of thinking about climate storytelling

1) the overall narrative (aka storyline) you select to describe the problem and its solutions to a given audience.  There are many different approaches; ClimateBites has compiled 23 alternative ways to tell the climate story.

2) short, personal anecdotes used to draw the audience in and make your message stick.   For tips on becoming a better storyteller for any public cause, check out Andy Goodman’s work linked at “Numbers Numb, Jargon Jars.  And Nobody Ever Marched on Washington Because of a Pie Chart.“

• As role model for climate storytelling, nobody beats Dr. Richard Alley, host of PBS’s Earth: the Operators’ Manual.   That entire series is filled with great stories, and the book includes even more.   In this short clip Alley draws on his own life events to illustrate how ‘skeptics’ cherry-pick data, ala “The Escalator.”

– Tom Smerling is a climate communicator who formerly worked in the Special Projects Office of NOAA’s National Ocean Service. This piece was originally published at ClimateBites and was reprinted with permission.

Related Post:

• In Praise of Clint Eastwood’s Metaphorical “Halftime in America” Superbowl Ad
• Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate

Have climate campaigners learned the art of political communication too well?  We poll and focus group.  We segment audiences and target swings. We “go to people where they’re at” – activating live communication frames and salient issues. We move the dial. There is tactical merit in all this … but climate change is not a “message.” It’s an objective reality and an urgent crisis.

Deception about it will surely go down as history’s most egregious lie. Avoiding or hedging this reality isn’t as bad as denying it, but it reinforces the larger ecosystem of denial.  It’s tough to imagine how we begin to turn the tide until we stand tall – with both feet, whole hearts, and strong, explicit words – on the side of the truth.

Our sophisticated calibrations about whether, when, and with whom climate change is an effective “message” have a perverse effect:  they reinforce our opponents’ message that it’s just a stalking horse for a political agenda. When we bounce around from “jobs” to “clean air” to whatever we think will give us a bump in a swing-state poll, we undermine our own integrity and the moral urgency of climate change.

It is of course true that we sometimes gain tactical advantage this way. And no one wants to risk losing important battles just to make a rhetorical point. But overreliance on these maneuvers can limit our power and drain morale.  Climate advocates and organizers rightly wonder whether leaders who keep changing the subject have much confidence in our ultimate ability to prevail.

There are certainly hard-headed tactical reasons to downplay climate. But there is also, speaking from personal experience, an element of shame here. A disaster is unfolding on our watch. It’s embarrassing to feel so powerless, and talking about climate just shines a spotlight on our futility.

In political circles, it’s considered naïve and off-key to focus on climate, a sign of insufficient commitment to “winning,” the only coin of the political realm. Since it’s difficult to construct a politically plausible scenario in which we actually do what’s necessary to avert dangerous climate disruption, practical people find it somewhat rude to discuss. David Roberts memorably equated this to “flatulence at a cocktail party.”

But there is no strength in shame, and silence makes it worse. Unless and until we square up to climate per se, we’re going to keep losing the war even when we win battles. And we’re going into some key battles right now with our strong hand tied behind our back.

Here’s an immediate example of the problem: Peabody and Arch are trying to justify coal export to Asia by saying their coal is lower in sulfur and ash than Chinese coal.  How are we going to fight that if clean air and public health are – as the polls would have it – our top messages, and climate is a footnote? Why are we even in the position where using prospective SO2 reductions to justify feeding a global catastrophe doesn’t sound as lame to even our friends as it is? At least in part because we decide that clean air is tactically a better message, and avoid or pussy-foot around climate.

In the coal export battle, we often confront the question “Somebody’s going ship the coal to Asia, so why shouldn’t we get the [purported] economic benefits?”  We can’t definitively promise that if we stop a particular coal export terminal, the same coal won’t be shipped from somewhere else. But we can and should make the case that the whole damned business is wrong – not just environmentally costly but unconscionable – no matter what anyone else does.  And we can only make that case if we lean into the climate conversation. We can’t draw a credible moral line in the sand – let alone get more folks on the right side of it – if we avoid or minimize the climate implications.

Our experience at Climate Solutions suggests (and recent polling confirms) that the tactical risks of talking explicitly about climate are overblown. Yes, it can be a “loser” as a “message,” but generally only when we talk like losers – when we internalize and reiterate our opponents’ bad frames. We find that focusing on climate is generally a “winner” when we:

• Invoke a strong sense of human agency and responsibility. We’re causing it.  We should fix it.

• Foster engagement and efficacy. Futility is the enemy of responsibility, and it’s rampant in our political culture.  But people remain hungry for solutions, and eager to participate.  Pollyannish optimism?  No.  Can-do determination to build a better future?  Definitely.

• Embed (don’t bury) climate in the challenge of freeing ourselves from fossil fuel dependence. Almost everyone at least suspects that fossil fuel dependence is a dead end, and feels victimized by the forces that perpetuate it.  Climate solutions can free us!

We all still have a lot to learn about what works in climate communication, and I’m grateful that Climate Access is now on the beat full time.  But my primary point here is not:  “Talk more about climate because it’s not as bad of a message as you think.”  My point is:  Talk about climate because we must – because tackling it is a moral imperative, and we’ll never convince anyone of that if we keep dodging and weaving around it.

This is not a holier-than-thou thing. Climate Solutions is certainly “guilty” of tactical aversion to explicit climate conversations. Many passionate, strong, extremely smart people in the climate movement have chosen to de-emphasize climate because they believe it’s the best way to make real progress. Some of them think that to do otherwise – to emphasize climate when it is demonstrably not the most effective message – is sentimental and foolish. I respect that view.  And none of us will know for sure until we break through, so nobody has a high horse to ride. Nor is the answer black and white: “Lead with climate at all times” is clearly not the right strategy.

I do know, however, that I can only be effective if I speak the truth about the climate crisis – strategically, and with a clear understanding of the audience – but consistently and unapologetically. For my own advocacy, this rationale for focusing on climate in public messaging is sufficient. But it also loops back into a larger strategic consideration:  our moral standing.

Many of us share the view that we will never prevail at anything close to the necessary scale until climate action is understood as the moral watershed that it is. Yes, good numbers on jobs are vital.  Yes, air quality improvements are compelling, and potentially a useful bridge to climate awareness.  Yes, “co-benefits” abound and we should talk about them all.  But none of this is remotely sufficient to a challenge of this scale without the moral driver.

Our standing to pose this moral choice depends critically on our own strength and integrity. Climate leaders can and do simultaneously hold in their hearts the moral imperative for climate solutions and the tactical imperative to use the most effective message to secure substantive victories. But we can’t build a strong enough movement on a foundation of serial political indirection, tactically useful as it may be.  It is how the game is played, but we are far enough into this game now to conclude that we can’t win it just by playing it better.

And we certainly shouldn’t confuse our role in the game with the role of political candidates. I can almost forgive politicians who avoid talking about climate, but what’s our excuse?  We’re not running for office. We have to change the political game, so candidates can champion climate solutions and win.  And to do that, we need both moral power and a climate conversation that won’t quit.

We’d be fools to ignore what our communication research tells us. But we can’t develop the strength we need just by telling people what they want to hear.  We have to tell the truth, and act like we believe it.

KC Golden is policy director for Climate Solutions and author of the GRIP blog. This was first posted on Climate Access and is reprinted with permission.

Related Post:

• An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces

The New York Times keeps running opinion pieces and analyses that misstate the positions of the major environmental groups and even leading scientists.

A classic example is the Dot Earth post from Friday headlined, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Message of ‘Green Traditionalists’.” I will show that this critique is pure bunk. Indeed, this critique isn’t merely untrue, it is the exact opposite of the truth.

Amazingly, we will even see that the critique contains an utterly false attack on “a bunch of scientists” who just published a major report. But people just don’t click on links, I guess.

The New York Times post begins by stating that Keith Kloor “has an essay posted on Discover, titled ‘The Limits to Environmentalism,’ that is well worth reading.” The NY Times then reposts this introduction with a link to the rest:

If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.

Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.

For example, you may have heard that a bunch of scientists produced a landmark report that concludes the earth is destined for ecological collapse, unless global population and consumption rates are restrained. No, I’m not talking about the UK’s just-published Royal Society report, which, among other things, recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth. I’m talking about that other landmark report from 1972, the one that became a totem of the environmental movement. [Read the rest.]

No and no.

This analysis, which would have been relevant 20 years ago, is simply the opposite of the truth today.

Indeed, anyone who follows the history of the environmental movement knows that the most serious complaint offered against it these days is that it has become too corporatist and too focused on the techno-fix. I’m not saying I agree with that critique 100%, but it has far more truth to it than this critique.

If you look at the major environmental groups — the ones with the power and money that this analysis purports to be about — they all work closely with industrial corporations, generally take lots of industry money, and they aggressively supported a climate bill that was absurdly pro-technology and pro-industry, that was business friendly and market oriented.

The climate bill was entirely about pushing any low carbon technology into the marketplace — including nuclear power. The bill had staggeringly generous subsidies for pretty much every industry, including many billions for the coal industry to help it develop technology to save its ass.

And the broken-record New York Times simply seems unable to acknowledge that the tens of millions of dollars spent to promote the climate bill was done by focusing on the pro-technology message and utterly downplaying the threat of climate change. The primary focus of the messaging was on clean energy jobs, along with energy security and the threat of international competition — industrial competition.

While the NY Times is oblivious to this, it did not escape the attention of the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who wrote about it in his 2010 article, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked in this post “Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate” (excerpted at the end).

To see what message they are pushing, please visit the front page of the websites of The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council — and of the enviro groups with the really big revenues — the World Wildlife Fund, and National Wildlife Federation, National Audobon Society, the Nature Conservancy. Apocalypse not!

UPDATE: Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, author of two books and some 20 refereed articles on the U.S. environmental movement – whom the NY Times has called “an expert on environmental communications” — emailed me after reading my post:

This opinion piece by Mr. Kloor and Mr. Revkin is, generously speaking, highly problematic. It ignores a vast amount of scholarship on the environmental movement. It seems very difficult to me to understand how Mr. Revkin can maintain his argument that his opinion blog is “science based”and run something like this. There is apparently a double standard in operation, where the physical sciences are taken into account, but the social sciences are not. I would expect more fidelity to the empirical research on this topic from the NY Times. Perhaps a good start on becoming conversant with this material might be the books of two previous NY Times environmental reporters –Mark Dowie’s Losing Ground and Philip Shabecoff’s A Fierce Green Fire.

As an aside, the notion that being anti-nuclear is somehow a litmus test for proving environmental groups are “Green Traditionalists” stuck in the 1970s is particularly absurd.  The Economist just published a 14-page report, “Nuclear energy: The dream that failed, A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety.” Is there a more pro-corporation, pro-technology mainstream global publication than The Economist?

And then we come to the utter misrepresentation of the “just-published Royal Society report,” People and the Planet. Reading the NY Times, you’d get the impression that this is somehow a doom and gloom report about how “the earth is destined for ecological collapse” if we don’t reverse course. And you’d also believe that a “bunch of scientists” have written a jeremiad that “recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth.”

Not. And not.

Anyone who knows the Royal Society – the UK’s national academy of science, founded in 1660 — knows that like most big scientific bodies, it tends to be pretty staid and conservative. The Royal Society’s motto is apt:  Nullius in verba — Latin for “On the words of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it.”  It is “an expression of its enduring commitment to empirical evidence as the basis of knowledge about the natural world.”

So when someone attacks the Royal Society scientists, it’s a pretty good idea not to take their word for it. And in fact the report is pretty darn mild given the dire nature of our situation. More important, it most certainly does not recommend developed countries put a brake on economic growth.

If you go to the link the New York Times provided, here’s what the Royal Society has to say about our situation:

This project was a major study investigating the links between global population and consumption, and the implications for a finite planet.

The final report People and the Planet was published on 26 April 2012.

Rapid and widespread changes in the world’s human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption present profound challenges to human health and wellbeing, and the natural environment.

The combination of these factors is likely to have far reaching and long-lasting consequences for our finite planet and will impact on future generations as well as our own. These impacts raise serious concerns and challenge us to consider the relationship between people and the planet. It is not surprising then, that debates about population have tended to inspire controversy.

This report is offered, not as a definitive statement on these complex topics, but as an overview of the impacts of human population and consumption on the planet. It raises questions about how best to seize the opportunities that changes in population could bring – and how to avoid the most harmful impacts.

This is about as alarmist as a clock radio set to Muzak.

“Profound challenges” and “far reaching and long-lasting consequences.” Yeah, that is stuff right out of Old Testament prophets.

You can go to the overview page, still no Apocalypse. Go to the Executive Summary, still no Apocalypse. Read the full report — but only if you want a relatively straightforward discussion of the demographic challenge we face discussed in non-apocalyptic terms.

But what about the claim the report demands the developed countries stop growth?

Here are the key recommendations:

1. The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
2. The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
3. Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
4. Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.

Yes, the developed countries must stabilize and then reduce material consumption — through investments in technologies that allow us to “systematically decouple economic activity from environmental impact.”

Not exactly a hair shirt.

To be clear, the Royal Society is arguing for policies that allow the economy to keep growing but without environmentally damaging consumption — using a technology-based strategy.

Seriously, who could possibly object to these recommendations — except perhaps someone who doesn’t think we have to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at levels that would avoid, say,  4°C or higher warming? Of course, the New York Times opinion writer steadfastly refuses to explain where he thinks we need to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, but even so, what is the objection to these recommendations?

Ironically, this NYT opinion writer is rather famous for arguing that population ought to  be part of the discussion of how we respond to climate change. But now he is praising a critique that dismisses a report that advances a rather sensible, science-based approach to thinking about the issue (not that this report focuses on climate — it does not).

The report itself is quite pro-technology and in the full report it states again as a main finding:

A priority for the most developed and the emerging economies must be to stabilise, and eventually reduce, material consumption and to adopt sustainable technologies.

The entire dichotomy put forward by the New York Times and the critique it cites is simply an oversimplistic conterfactual. The critique puts it this way:

The way I see it, [Gus] Speth is a green traditionalist, the kind who demonizes economic growth based on faulty reasoning and perhaps an ideology that associates growth with environmental plunder. [Robert] Reich is a green modernist (though I’m not sure he’d call himself a green), the kind who recognizes that irresponsible resource extraction “isn’t an indictment of growth itself. Growth doesn’t depend on plunder. Rich nations have the capacity to extract resources responsibly.”

The thing is, the scientific and economic literature says we can avert catastrophic climate change while continuing to grow. Now, not everyone buys that, for sure, and you certainly will find pockets of anti-technology people in the environmental community (and elsewhere). But in its definitive 2007 synthesis report of the scientific and economic literature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded:

In 2050, global average macro-economic costs for mitigation towards stabilisation between 710 and 445ppm CO2-eq are between a 1% gain and 5.5% decrease of global GDP. This corresponds to slowing average annual global GDP growth by less than 0.12 percentage points.

Not exactly a braking of growth — more like the regenerative braking you experience in a good hybrid vehicle. Overall GDP would continue its steady march year after year.

I myself probably have written as much as anybody on the dangers of  unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, which would supposedly make me a “green traditionalist” (see An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces).  But I have also written as much as anyone on how a technology-based strategy (including nuclear) can avert the worst case (see The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm), which would supposedly make me a “green modernist.”

But that supposes these distinctions have any reality in this world. They don’t.

As but one example, a major source of this phony distinction is, of course, The Breakthrough Institute, which you can tell by reading the links in the original critique. But BTI opposed the climate bill! Why? It supposedly had too many industry-friendly components. So the alleged green traditionalists supported a technology- and industry-friendly bill (without pushing a climate message) while the alleged green modernists opposed it!

Finally, this notion that there is a broken-record message from “green traditionalists” at a national level has become, well, a broken record.  It simply isn’t true.

To repeat what I wrote in February on Oscar night, Here are the key points about what repeated messages the American public is exposed to:

1. The broad American public is exposed to virtually no doomsday messages, let alone constant ones, on climate change in popular culture (TV and the movies and even online). There is not one single TV show on any network devoted to this subject, which is, arguably, more consequential than any other preventable issue we face.
2. The same goes for the news media, whose coverage of climate change has collapsed (see “Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011“). When the media do cover climate change in recent years, the overwhelming majority of coverage is devoid of any doomsday messages — and many outlets still feature hard-core deniers. Just imagine what the public’s view of climate would be if it got the same coverage as, say, unemployment, the housing crisis or even the deficit? When was the last time you saw an “employment denier” quoted on TV or in a newspaper?
3. The public is exposed to constant messages promoting business as usual and indeed idolizing conspicuous consumption. See, for instance, “Breaking: The earth is breaking … but how about that Royal Wedding?
4. Our political elite and intelligentsia, including MSM pundits and the supposedly “liberal media” like, say, MSNBC, hardly even talk about climate change and when they do, it isn’t doomsday. Indeed, there isn’t even a single national columnist for a major media outlet who writes primarily on climate. Most “liberal” columnists rarely mention it.
5. At least a quarter of the public chooses media that devote a vast amount of time to the notion that global warming is a hoax and that environmentalists are extremists and that clean energy is a joke. In the MSM, conservative pundits routinely trash climate science and mock clean energy. Just listen to, say, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe mock clean energy sometime.
6. The major energy companies bombard the airwaves with millions and millions of dollars of repetitious pro-fossil-fuel ads. The environmentalists spend far, far less money. As noted above, the one time they did run a major campaign to push a climate bill, they and their political allies including the president explicitly did NOT talk much about climate change, particularly doomsday messaging
7. Environmentalists when they do appear in popular culture, especially TV, are routinely mocked.
8. There is very little mass communication of doomsday messages online. Check out the most popular websites. General silence on the subject, and again, what coverage there is ain’t doomsday messaging. Go to the front page of the (moderately trafficked) environmental websites. Where is the doomsday?

The New York Times should stop pushing this myth.

Those are two key themes of the wildly popular YA trilogy that begins with The Hunger Games, whose movie version comes out this week. The trailer gives the key plot points:

After what seems to be a climate-driven apocalypse, Panem, “the country that rose up out of the ashes of the place it was once called North America,” is divided into a Capitol and 12 districts, who launched a failed revolution many decades earlier.

The annual Hunger Games are televised and the rules are simple:

In punishment for the uprising, each of the 12 districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes to participate. The twenty-four tributes  will be imprisoned in the vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.

The winner “receives a life of ease back home, and their district will be showered with prizes, largely consisting of food,” all year round.

This is “Bread and Circuses” combined — by design — since that famous phrase comes from the Latin panem et circenses (also “bread and games”).

The books have sold some 10 million copies globally — and the author, Suzanne Collins, is the “best-selling Kindle author of all time.” They are a shrewd combination of standard YA fare — another love triangle between a girl and two boys … really? — and pop-culture riffs.  You have the extreme version of reality shows like American Idol and Survivor.  You have the young girl who reluctantly grows into a ferocious killer, which started with Buffy and Nikita (if you have to ask…) and now seems to be found in almost every other movie.

The books also had some fortunate timing for the author in terms of catching the zeitgeist, since perhaps the core theme is the 99% (the 12 districts) vs. the 1% (Capitol), the poor and underfed vs. the rich and overfed.

I try to stay on top of the latest in post-apocalypse pop culture, mainly because there has been so little of it in recent years — see Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate. And when I heard the most popular new YA book series was built around food insecurity, I couldn’t resist. After all, as I’ve written in the journal Nature, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

The Hunger Games makes that challenge a literal and hyper-violent one. But like much (though not all) post-apocalyptic fiction, the book spends exceedingly little time actually explaining to anyone how we got in this mess.

Indeed, after reading all 3 books, I find only one sentence devoted to explaining what caused the apocalypse:

[The mayor]  tells of the history of Panem. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts…”

Sounds a lot like global warming, though the books do not flesh out what happened.

Clearly this is the distant future, given that this is the 74th Hunger Games and some of the technology is well beyond anything we could imagine today.

Somewhat oddly, though, as one fan site explains, Everdeen’s home is the “coal mining” district:

Coal Mining – This district is described as being in the area formerly known as Appalachia. The district is also pretty compact compared to some others with a population of just 8,000 people. There is one big clue to where district 12 might be, that we don’t get from reading the book, but from listening to Suzanne Collins read it. She reads Katniss with a southern accent.

Only 8,000 in Appalachia. The 99% ain’t what they used to be. Still, you’d think we’d be off of coal in the 22nd century!

Here’s one fan map:

Okay, well, the underwater parts don’t quite match up to plausible realities, even with melting out all the Earth’s ice and the subsequent 250-foot sea level rise. But hey, this ain’t hard science fiction.

Interestingly, the UK Telegraph wrote last week that there is a new trend in YA fiction:

The Hunger Games and the teenage craze for dystopian fiction

Wizards and vampires are out. The market in teen fiction is dominated now by societies in breakdown. And it’s girls who are lapping them up.

Many parents might feel worried on finding their teenage children addicted to grim visions of a future in which global warming has made the seas rise, the earth dry up, genetically engineered plants run riot and humans fight over the last available scraps of food. Yet with the arrival of the film of the first book of Suzanne Collins’s best-selling trilogy The Hunger Games this month, dystopia for teenagers has hit an all-time high in public consciousness.

Well, as I’ve said, there is precious little global warming in this book. Not that a book centered around global warming would be easy to make work as fiction, since climate change plays out relatively slowly from a narrative perspective.

In the Telegraph piece, Amanda Craig, “novelist and children’s fiction critic,” works to explain the popularity:

… the new wave of dystopian fiction gives the perfect excuse for why, despite being desperately in love, the protagonists can’t have sex: as Meg Rosoff says, “in a survivalist love affair, you don’t have to worry about having a boyfriend or what clothes you’re wearing, because you’re saving the world”…. Imagining that you’re living in a place in which millions have starved to death (The Hunger Games), been drowned by melting ice-caps (Julie Bertagna’s Exodus), been killed off as surplus because eternal youth has been discovered (Gemma Malley’s The Declaration) or been dried up due to climate change (Moira Young’s Blood Red Road) does tend to make fears about having spots and tests less terrifying….

Katniss pretends to be in love with her fellow contestant Peeta in order to manipulate the millions watching them on TV. She fights back against the expectations of Panem’s totalitarian regime by pretending to conform. Again, my daughter and her friends find this appealing in an age in which boys’ attitudes to them have been warped by internet pornography.

“Katniss is the kind of strong teenage heroine we were all waiting for,” one put it. “We had Hermione in Harry Potter and Lyra in His Dark Materials as children. If you’ve got a brain, vampires suck.” “Girls aren’t waiting to be saved any more,” Malley says. “They have strong moral compasses, and unlike male protagonists, they have insight into why they are as they are. If you go into schools now, you see teenage girls who are sparky and who think for themselves. Dystopia enables them to have big adventures but it’s also about creating strong characters whom readers care about.”

Warning to parents of tweens: These book are entertaining for sure, with a well-drawn heroine, Katniss Everdeen, who grows during the course of the books, fights against injustice, and ultimately triumphs. On the other hand, they are hyperviolent and by the end Everdeen has become a super-jaded and cold-blooded killer. Yes, Everdeen has “catness,” the 9 lives of the survivor, since she survives more attempts on her life than Jack Bauer or Jason Bourne or James Bond have. But she becomes every bit the killer that the JBs do.

Supposedly the movie will be true to the violence of the books, since they are “co-written and co-produced by Collins herself,” which means they will be quite intense. I’ll let you know.

These myths are so deeply ingrained in the environmental and progressive political community that when we finally had a serious shot at a climate bill, the powers that be decided not to focus on the threat posed by climate change in any serious fashion in their $200 million communications effort (see my 6/10 post “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“). These myths are so deeply ingrained in the mainstream media that such messaging, when it is tried, is routinely attacked and denounced — and the flimsiest studies are interpreted exactly backwards to drive the erroneous message home (see “Dire straits: Media blows the story of UC Berkeley study on climate messaging“)

The only time anything approximating this kind of messaging — not “doomsday” but what I’d call blunt, science-based messaging that also makes clear the problem is solvable — was in 2006 and 2007 with the release of An Inconvenient Truth (and the 4 assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and media coverage like the April 2006 cover of Time). The data suggest that strategy measurably moved the public to become more concerned about the threat posed by global warming (see recent study here).

You’d think it would be pretty obvious that the public is not going to be concerned about an issue unless one explains why they should be concerned about an issue. And the social science literature, including the vast literature on advertising and marketing, could not be clearer that only repeated messages have any chance of sinking in and moving the needle.

Because I doubt any serious movement of public opinion or mobilization of political action could possibly occur until these myths are shattered, I’ll do a multipart series on this subject, featuring public opinion analysis, quotes by leading experts, and the latest social science research.

Since this is Oscar night, though, it seems appropriate to start by looking at what messages the public are exposed to in popular culture and the media. It ain’t doomsday. Quite the reverse, climate change has been mostly an invisible issue for several years and the message of conspicuous consumption and business-as-usual reigns supreme.

The motivation for this post actually came up because I received an e-mail from a journalist commenting that the “constant repetition of doomsday messages” doesn’t work as a messaging strategy. I had to demur, for the reasons noted above.

But it did get me thinking about what messages the public are exposed to, especially as I’ve been rushing to see the movies nominated for Best Picture this year. I am a huge movie buff, but as parents of 5-year-olds know, it isn’t easy to stay up with the latest movies.

That said, good luck finding a popular movie in recent years that even touches on climate change, let alone one a popular one that would pass for doomsday messaging.  Best Picture nominee The Tree of Life has been billed as an environmental movie —  and even shown at environmental film festivals — but while it is certainly depressing, climate-related it ain’t. In fact, if that is truly someone’s idea of environmental movie, count me out.

The closest to a genuine popular climate movie was the dreadfully unscientific The Day After Tomorrow, which is from 2004 (and arguably set back the messaging effort by putting the absurd “global cooling” notion in people’s heads! Even Avatar, the most successful movie of all time and “the most epic piece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid,” as one producer put it, omits the climate doomsday message. One of my favorite eco-movies, “Wall-E, is an eco-dystopian gem and an anti-consumption movie,” but it isn’t a climate movie.

I will be interested to see The Hunger Games, but I’ve read all 3 of the bestselling post-apocalyptic young adult novels — hey, that’s my job! — and they don’t qualify as climate change doomsday messaging (more on that later).  So, no, the movies certainly don’t expose the public to constant doomsday messages on climate.

Here are the key points about what repeated messages the American public is exposed to:

1. The broad American public is exposed to virtually no doomsday messages, let alone constant ones, on climate change in popular culture (TV and the movies and even online). There is not one single TV show on any network devoted to this subject, which is, arguably, more consequential than any other preventable issue we face.
2. The same goes for the news media, whose coverage of climate change has collapsed (see “Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011“). When the media do cover climate change in recent years, the overwhelming majority of coverage is devoid of any doomsday messages — and many outlets still feature hard-core deniers. Just imagine what the public’s view of climate would be if it got the same coverage as, say, unemployment, the housing crisis or even the deficit? When was the last time you saw an “employment denier” quoted on TV or in a newspaper?
3. The public is exposed to constant messages promoting business as usual and indeed idolizing conspicuous consumption. See, for instance, “Breaking: The earth is breaking … but how about that Royal Wedding?
4. Our political elite and intelligentsia, including MSM pundits and the supposedly “liberal media” like, say, MSNBC, hardly even talk about climate change and when they do, it isn’t doomsday. Indeed, there isn’t even a single national columnist for a major media outlet who writes primarily on climate. Most “liberal” columnists rarely mention it.
5. At least a quarter of the public chooses media that devote a vast amount of time to the notion that global warming is a hoax and that environmentalists are extremists and that clean energy is a joke. In the MSM, conservative pundits routinely trash climate science and mock clean energy. Just listen to, say, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe mock clean energy sometime.
6. The major energy companies bombard the airwaves with millions and millions of dollars of repetitious pro-fossil-fuel ads. The environmentalists spend far, far less money. As noted above, the one time they did run a major campaign to push a climate bill, they and their political allies including the president explicitly did NOT talk much about climate change, particularly doomsday messaging
7. Environmentalists when they do appear in popular culture, especially TV, are routinely mocked.
8. There is very little mass communication of doomsday messages online. Check out the most popular websites. General silence on the subject, and again, what coverage there is ain’t doomsday messaging. Go to the front page of the (moderately trafficked) environmental websites. Where is the doomsday?

If you want to find anything approximating even modest, blunt, science-based messaging built around the scientific literature, interviews  with actual climate scientists and a clear statement that we can solve this problem — well, you’ve all found it, of course, but the only people who see it are those who go looking for it.

Of course, this blog is not even aimed at the general public. Probably 99% of Americans haven’t even seen one of my headlines and 99.7% haven’t read one of my climate science posts. And Climate Progress is probably the most widely read, quoted, and reposted climate science blog in the world.

Anyone dropping into America from another country or another planet who started following popular culture and the news the way the overwhelming majority of Americans do would get the distinct impression that nobody who matters is terribly worried about climate change. And, of course, they’d be right — see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2.”

It is total BS that somehow the American public has been scared and overwhelmed by repeated doomsday messaging into some sort of climate fatigue. If the public’s concern has dropped — and public opinion analysis suggests it has dropped several percent (though is bouncing back a tad) — that is primarily due to the conservative media’s disinformation campaign impact on Tea Party conservatives and to the treatment of this as a nonissue by most of the rest of the media, intelligentsia and popular culture.

What’s amazing to me is not the public’s supposed lack of concerned about global warming — another myth, debunked here — but that the public is as knowledgable and concerned as it is given the realities discussed above!

In Part 2, I’ll discuss how we know that this works — blunt, science-based messages that lay out the realistic threat posed by our inaction and the myriad cost-effective solutions available now, repeated as often  as possible from multiple sources.

I think science has mostly told us what it can about the urgent need to act swiftly and strongly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid destroying the planet’s livability for the next several hundred years (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Yes, more observations and more analysis are valuable — and I will keep reporting on the ever-worsening climate outlook — but right now we need much more persuasiveness (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1). As James Hansen says, we are still waiting for our climate Churchill.

One of Churchill’s defining characteristics was his mastery of rhetoric. Indeed, at the age of 22 he wrote a brilliant, unpublished essay, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric so.” But this is the day we remember Lincoln, so I’m going to rerun Part 1 of my series on Lincoln’s mastery of rhetoric, the 25-century-old art of influencing both the hearts and minds of listeners with the figures of speech. If you have any doubt about the importance of the figures to Lincoln, consider this:

In a famous 1858 speech, Lincoln paraphrased Jesus, saying “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and he extended the house metaphor throughout the speech. His law partner, William Herndon, later wrote that Lincoln had told him he wanted to use “some universally known figure [of speech] expressed in simple language “¦ that may strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times.”

The best textbook on the figures of speech in the English language, other than the King James Bible, is the complete works of Shakespeare.

The Bard and his audience knew and used over two hundred figures of speech. The figures-the catalog of the different, effective ways that we talk-turn out to “constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world,” as one psychologist put it.

Elizabethans like Shakespeare learned the figures the hard way. William likely attended the town grammar school from age seven to at least age thirteen. Grammar schools got their name because they taught grammar-Latin grammar. The schooling was intensive: ten hours a day, six days a week, thirty-six weeks a year.

The amount of repetition was staggering: Every single hour of instruction required, according to one sixteenth-century schoolmaster, six or more hours of exercises to apply the lesson to both speaking and writing. Much of the curriculum was rhetoric since the Elizabethans saw eloquence as the greatest skill to be acquired and rhetoric as the key to the Bible and literature. The teaching strategy was systematic: “First learn the figures, secondly identify them in whatever you read, thirdly use them yourself.” Hour after hour after hour, identifying every figure in Ovid or Cicero, then creating your own versions.

How did students respond to such rigorous teaching? C. S. Lewis says we must imagine the following mindset of would-be Elizabethan poets: “Your father, your grown-up brother, your admired elder school fellow all loved rhetoric. Therefore you loved it, too. You adored sweet Tully [Marcus Tullius Cicero] and were as concerned about asyndeton and chiasmus [figures of speech] as a modern schoolboy is about county cricketers or types of aeroplanes.”

Nineteenth-century America lacked the rigorous teaching of the rhetoric of Shakespeare’s day, but orators were widely admired, entertaining large audiences-and larger readerships-with speeches that lasted over two hours and that might be printed in a local newspaper, the text often filling the entire front page. This was the golden age of American oratory, the age of Daniel Webster, of Henry Clay, of Stephen Douglas, and of Abraham Lincoln.

In modern times, with multiple media to entertain ourselves with-television, movies, radio, the Internet, video games, iPods-we can hardly imagine what it was like to live at a time when public speeches and debates were a primary form of entertainment. One 1858 audience, after sitting through three hours of Lincoln and Douglas debating, actually went out to hear another speech. Lincoln himself, after his first debate with Douglas that year, headed off to hear another speech.

Lincoln, a master orator, debater, and rhetorician, was the most consciously rhetorical of our presidents. He once incisively attacked an opponent for employing a particular metaphor-using a metaphor of his own: “I wish gentlemen on the other side to understand that the use of degrading figures [of speech] is a game at which they may not find themselves able to take all the winnings.”

In Lincoln’s day, aspiring preachers, lawyers, and politicians were taught some rhetoric in college, though they would have learned much just from their study of the Bible. Lincoln worked hard to teach himself elocution and grammar.

Lincoln studied the great speechmakers of his time, like Daniel Webster, as well the great Elizabethan speechmaker. At an early age, he appears to have studied William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, which ends with forty-nine speeches from life and art, nineteen from Shakespeare, including a number that he memorized, such as the soliloquy by King Claudius on the guilt he feels for having murdered Hamlet’s father. At the age of twenty-three, Lincoln walked six miles to get a copy of Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar, which ends with a several-page discussion of the figures of speech.

Lincoln continued his passion for poetry and Shakespeare throughout his entire life. He spent hours reading passages from Shakespeare to his personal secretary John Hay and the artist F. B. Carpenter. After seeing one performance of Henry IV Part One, Lincoln debated Hay on the meaning and emphasis of a single phrase of Falstaff’s. During the painting of “Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Carpenter describes Lincoln reciting Claudius’s 36-line speech in Hamlet “from memory, with a feeling and appreciation unsurpassed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.”

The one figure of speech discussed in both Kirkham’s book (briefly) and Scott’s book (with three full pages of examples) is antithesis-placing words or ideas in contrast or opposition, such as Lord Chesterfield’s quip, “The manner of speaking is as important as the matter,” or Shakespeare’s

Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.”

This became one of Lincoln’s favorite figures, in unforgettable lines such as “the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here” and “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”

Part 2 looks at Lincoln’s use of the figure of irony, Part 3 at his use of metaphor, and Part 4 at how he framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address with extended metaphor.

Related Post:

• Brulle: “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”

• Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?
• The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2

Seriously, though, I’m not going to spend much time on the rather absurd issue of whether Clint’s gritty optimism means he is channeling Obama’s gritty optimism, as the Washington Post and conservative commentators claim:

An an ad touting the resurgence of the American auto industry, Clint Eastwood declared that it’s “halftime in America and our second half’s about to begin,” which could be interpreted as a reference to Obama’s second term.

The ad’s themes seem to echo Obama’s own argument that his administration brought the auto industry back from the brink of disaster.

“They almost lost everything,” Eastwood says of Detroit. “But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again.”

Oh, no, we all pulled together to save Detroit.  And it worked.  I guess Eastwood is a socialist, too, albeit one of those socialists who is tough and successful.  I wonder if he was born in Kenya.

Obviously, anything that offends Karl Rove, “Bush’s brain,” can’t be all bad.  But the reason I’m highlighting the ad is because it is an extended metaphor — arguably the single most effective kind of advertising possible.

I’ll be publishing my book on messaging and persuasion later in the year.  It focuses on the figures of the speech.  As Aristotle said, “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” (see “How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, Part 3.”  So I’ll be focusing more on the use of rhetoric in  politics and popular culture this year.

Extended metaphor is, for me, the most important rhetorical device. This figure is at the heart of some of Lincoln’s greatest speeches and Shakespeare’s greatest plays (see “How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address“).

The Elizabethan era book The Garden of Eloquence by Henry Peacham explains the potency of this figure: It “serves most aptly to ingrain the lively images of things, and to present them under deep shadows to the contemplation of the mind, wherein wit and judgement take pleasure, and the remembrance receives a longer lasting impression.”

Using an extended metaphor himself, Peacham explains that while a simple metaphor “may be compared to a star in respect of beauty, brightness and direction,” an extended metaphor may be “fully likened to a figure compounded of many stars … which we may call a constellation.” No wonder this figure is so widely used. Who wouldn’t want to have their words achieve the impact and longevity of heavenly images like the Big Dipper or Orion?

Winning political campaigns use extended metaphors.  And this ad is certainly reminiscent of one considered to be among the most effective a political ads of all time:

This ad was a perfect metaphor for Reagan’s optimism.  As I discuss in the book, Reagan himself loved to use metaphors, and the use of metaphors make presidents appear more visionary.

One of Obama’s great failings as a speechmaker is that he doesn’t use many metaphors.  That’s one of the ways you can tell this that wasn’t put together by his dreadful and overly literal-minded messaging team.

Any candidate, indeed anyone seeking to be memorable and persuasive, would do well to learn the message from these two ads:  Extended metaphors work.

Consider King’s powerful words about the civil rights struggle, which echo today in the climate battle:

We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’

Note how King repeatedly uses key figures of speech — alliteration, metaphor — and extends the metaphor of another master of rhetoric, Shakespeare (Julius Caeser), all of which are classic oratorical strategies (see “How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, Part 1: Study the figures of speech and Shakespeare“).

Science has mostly told us what it can about the fiercely urgent need to act swiftly to avoid adding the bleached bones and jumbled residues of our civilization to the pile (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“). Our urgent need now is for much more persuasiveness (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1 and Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”).

I have a dream that progressives will some day have the winning words to match their vital ideas.  After two decades of research and writing and rewriting, I will finally be publishing my book on rhetoric this summer!

King’s most famous speech illustrates the rhetorical principle of foreshadowing, as I discuss in the book, excerpted below:

As a theatrical device, the essence of foreshadowing can be found in Anton Chekhov’s advice to a novice playwright: “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.” Create anticipation and then fulfill the listener’s desire.

Foreshadowing is related to the figure of speech ominatio (Latin for omen), which, one Renaissance rhetoric text explains is “when we do show & foretell what shall hereafter come to pass, which we gather by some likely sign, and in ill things we foretell it, to the intent that heed may be paid, and the danger of avoided; and in good things to stir up expectation and hope.”

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has a soothsayer famously and futilely warn Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March”-a foreshadowing ominatio that Caesar famously and fatally ignores: “He is a dreamer,” shrugs Caesar. “Let us leave him.”

Bob Dylan’s tragic “Like a Rolling Stone” heroine is similarly warned, and by many: “People’d call, say, ‘Beware doll, you’re bound to fall’ “-which she also unwisely pays no heed to: “You thought they were all kiddin’ you.”

Dramatic foreshadowing has an even more important rhetorical counterpart. The golden rule of speechmaking is “Tell ‘em what what you’re going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” The first part of that triptych is the rhetorical foreshadowing of the main idea of your speech, the introduction of the dominant theme of your remarks.

I HAVE A DREAM
I can think of no more remarkable combination of dramatic and rhetorical foreshadowing in a modern public address than the opening lines of Martin Luther King’s keynote address at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (video above and text here).

The speech is often presented without his introductory sentence, which is unfortunate since it is an essential element of his message. King began, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” This opening line foreshadows that the intellectual focus of the speech will be “freedom,” a word that, with its partner “free,” King repeats twenty-four times in his 1500-word oration. As we will soon see, it also anticipates his optimistic message.

King uses the word “history” twice in this simple prefatory line, foreshadowing that he will be taking a historical perspective, which he does from the start.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

Echoing Lincoln’s famous formulation, “fourscore and seven years ago,” in the literal shadow of the Lincoln monument, King here combines the verbal with the visual to turn Lincoln’s two great 1863 acts of communication-the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg address-into a symbolic foreshadowing of his own remarks 100 years later. In doubling this historical connection, he underscores what will be his main theme: Emancipation has not yet been realized:

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

We hear again King’s favorite rhetorical device in this speech, anaphora, in the repetition of “one hundred years later” to help him refine the central idea that “the Negro is still not free.” King’s speech makes the words “Emancipation Proclamation” cruelly ironic: The Negro was proclaimed free, but still is not.

The body of the speech lays out King’s nonviolent approach to fulfilling the “quest for freedom” and restates again and again both his dream and his demand for freedom. He says that “in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream “¦ a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” An essential goal of the speech is to instill hope, optimism, and faith in the listeners that the dream of freedom will be achieved, to urge with a powerful metaphor that they “not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” He describes his stirring dreams, which are themselves ominatio, foretelling a future without racism, a future of freedom for all. He builds to the climax using the phrase “Let freedom ring” a dozen times and ends with the final repetitions of the key word as he says we can “speed up that day when all of God’s children “… will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

Now we see what was powerfully foreshadowed in the opening line: “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” He is foreshadowing-prophesying-the success of this demonstration and the realization of his dreams. Through the figure of ominatio King did “show & foretell what shall hereafter come to pass ” … in good things to stir up expectation and hope.”

That King would be a master of rhetoric and foreshadowing is not unexpected since he was, after all, a Reverend, a preacher, a student of the Bible. Foreshadowing and ominatio are the foundation upon which the Bible’s scaffolding of rhetoric was built-and the power of dreams to foretell the future is a Biblical truism. For Christians, the words in the Old Testament foreshadow the coming of the Messiah in the New Testament. The gospels are clearly written to echo the prophecies and promises and proverbs in the Old Testament. If you are a believer, that is because Jesus is the Messiah, the fulfillment of the words in the Old Testament. If you are not a believer, that is because the writers of the New Testament were trying to portray Jesus as the Messiah. Either way, by God’s design or man’s, the Old Testament foreshadows the New Testament again and again.

Jesus himself makes many prophecies that show and foretell what shall hereafter come to pass. He foretells events that happen very soon, such as when he tells Peter, “Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.” He foretells events a long time off: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” And he foretells events that have not yet come to pass-his return.

Foreshadowing and ominatio are key elements of poetic justice. Consider the story of Joseph. His brothers hated him because their father loved him the most, which the gift of the coat of many colors showed only too clearly. Joseph dreamt that he and his brothers were collecting stalks of grain, and when his own grain stalk stood up, those of his brothers bowed down before him. “Shalt thou indeed reign over us?” his brothers said. The text goes on, “And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words.” Dreams are classic foreshadowing in the Bible as well as many other holy books.

One day, when Joseph’s brothers saw him in the field, “they said one to another, ‘Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit “… and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’ ” This is best labeled ironic foreshadowing, a favorite device also of Shakespeare’s and other great writers. The final line is intended as sarcasm, that the dreams will be dashed in death, but it soon becomes dramatic irony.

Instead of killing him, his brothers sold him into slavery. Joseph ended up in the Egyptian prison, but using his power to interpret dreams, he not only won his freedom but soon became Pharaoh’s right hand man, after predicting that Pharaoh’s dream of seven lean cows eating seven fat cows meant there would be seven good harvests followed by seven years of famine, and thus, during the good years, Pharaoh would need to store up the grain. Every single thing Joseph said comes true. Then, during the famine, Jacob sent his sons to Egypt for grain so the family would not starve. Joseph thus gained power over his brothers, whom he put through various trials. But instead of seeking revenge, he saved his family from starvation.

This is poetic justice, that Joseph’s dreams of having power over his brothers came true precisely because they abandoned him, making their words dramatic irony that foreshadowed the end of the story. This is irony of fate.

The enduring power and poignancy of this story can be found in the words on a plaque at the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination (with a slightly different translation than the King James): “Behold the dreamer. Let us slay him, and we will see what will become of his dream.”

King’s dream did survive him, and, some might argue, in the election of Barack Obama, witnessed its apotheosis, though not its completion.

Whereas the civil rights movement was trying to undo a terrible multi-century-long moral wrong, the challenge for climate science activists (the future-generations rights movement?) is that we are trying to prevent a terrible multi-century-long moral wrong. That mission will require even more eloquence, even more commitment.

I have a dream of clean air and clean water for my daughter and all the children of the world. I have a dream of clean energy jobs for millions of Americans and tens of millions of people around the globe. I have a dream we saved this garden of Eden for generations to come, saved it from the greed and myopia of the 1%.

Related Posts:

• How to be as persuasive as Abe Lincoln, Part 2: Use irony, the twist we can’t resist
• “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor”: How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, 3
• How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address, 4: Extended metaphor

The reason I’m bringing this old news up is that just before I went on vacation, Politico Playbook — a must read for political junkies — explained “HOW THE WHITE HOUSE POUNDED ITS MESSAGE.”

I’m excerpting the Friday, December 23 piece below so you can see how the White House uses the bully pulpit when it actually cares a great deal about an issue, which it obviously — and nonsensically — doesn’t about climate change:

“–Monday: WH Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer did an hour of satellite TV time into the following markets: Palm Beach, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland and Seattle. … The regional communications team did a press call with their top regional reporters with Josh Earnest and Brian Deese … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio throughout the day … Administration Officials held a call with Hispanic media … Administration Officials were on African American and Hispanic radio and TV …

“–Tuesday: Office of Digital Strategy launched What 40 Dollars Means to You, an online effort to get the American people to lend their voice to this debate. We launched #40dollars on twitter, the webpage www.whitehouse.gov/40dollars and sent an email from David Plouffe to the White House list … Deese and Earnest convened a conference call with regional political reporters. … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio [and] African American and Hispanic radio and TV …

“–Wednesday: The White House featured responses that we received from Americans who’ve written to the White House to say what $40 means for them. These responses will be featured on whitehouse.gov , White House Twitter and Facebook accounts … [Council of Economic Advisers] Chair Alan Krueger delivered a speech on the economy and economic certainty in Charlotte, NC, in which he made … economic case for the payroll tax cut. … Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, [Labor] Secretary [Hilda] Solis and [Domestic Policy Council] Director Melody Barnes participated in interviews on African American radio to amplify our payroll tax cut message. Senior Admin officials also did Hispanic media outlets including radio … Barnes hosted a roundtable with African American reporters. … Gene Sperling and Secretary Solis hosted a conference call on the importance of extending UI benefits for regional and specialty outlets … The President tweeted on [@WhiteHouse] Twitter feed … Deese convened a conference call with Americans who Tweeted on #40dollars … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio [and] African American and Hispanic radio and TV …

“Thursday: The President delivered a statement payroll tax cut … joined on-stage and in the audience by people who [would] be impacted by the tax increase … The White House released a map on WhiteHouse.gov … with over 10,000 points throughout the U.S. of citizens responding to the question: ‘What does $40 dollars mean to you?’ … Administration Officials were on national and regional TV and radio [and] African American and Hispanic radio and TV.”

Impressive.

Contrast that with climate change, where the administration won’t even use the word (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

Back in June 2010, Eric Pooley, former managing editor of Fortune, emailed me about his book on the story of the climate bill, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth:

When it comes to a cap on carbon, the White House’s strategy for 18 months has been to speak softly and … nothing more. Now the oil spill has forced Obama to ramp up his rhetoric. Does he mean it this time? Either he starts fighting or he doesn’t. The “stealth strategy” is inoperative. The White House can’t fake it any more.

We all know what happened.  They faked it, and they failed.

The notion that you win major political battles like these behind-the-scenes is laughable.  Silence equals surrender.

What’s particularly sad about all this is that the polling and public opinion analysis makes crystal clear that both global warming and clean energy are wedge issues — aggressive messaging on either divides the Tea Party from pretty much everyone else in the entire country:

• Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?“
• Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent
• Polling Reveals That Being Anti-Clean Energy is Bad Politics
• Independents Support Federal Investment in “Green Jobs” 2-to-1 Despite Solyndra Media Storm (9/29/11):

“In dozens of focus groups we have conducted this month across the country on a wide variety of subjects, when voters are asked where they would like new jobs in their state to come from, the first words out of their mouths are almost always the same – clean energy and related technology.  Voters believe that the clean energy economy is here and is growing, and they want their state to have a part of it.“

Some day some smart politician will figure all this out.

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

So just as he did with his infamous 2003 global warming warming memo –  which taught conservatives how to sound like they care about the issue while opposing all action — Luntz has some key advice for Republicans on how to pretend to care about regular people while continuing to screw them over.

Amazingly, “Yahoo News sat in on the session,” where Luntz went through his spin at the Republican Governor’s Association on “How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?”

Here are key do’s and don’ts from Luntz:

• Don’t say ‘capitalism.’
• Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’
• Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.’
• Don’t say ‘government spending.’ Call it ‘waste.’
• Don’t ever say you’re willing to ‘compromise.’
• The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: ‘I get it.’
• Out: ‘Entrepreneur.’ In: ‘Job creator.’
• “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”
• Don’t ever ask anyone you want them to ‘sacrifice.’
• Always blame Washington.

Yes, and some in the media still try to apportion blame equally between Democrats and Republicans for the toxic state  of American politics.

George Orwell, in his famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” wrote that

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.  Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Democrats do sometimes misuse the language and create euphemisms.  All politicians do.  But it is Luntz and his legion of conservative followers who have twisted the English language beyond recognition.  They are the true Orwellians.  The GOP parrot him as if they were reciting lessons in grammar school (see, for instance, Luntz’s memo, “The Language of Healthcare 2009,” which became the GOP playbook for attacking reform).

Is there any nonsense phrase that has been repeated to death this year more than “job creator” — in spite of the fact that for all of the wealth GOP policies have showered on the wealthy they didn’t actually create any net jobs under President Bush?

And yes, I put “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming” into the list above even though it is from Luntz’s 2003 climate memo.  I included it because conservatives continue trying to blame “the left” for supposedly changing the name from “global warming” to “climate change” (see Debunking the dumbest denier myth: ‘Climate Change’ vs. ‘Global Warming’).  For the record, while I would normally be inclined to recommend progressives say the exact opposite of whatever Luntz recommends for conservatives, there is way too much conflicting analysis to suggest that one of those terms is somehow more effective than the other. Feel free to use both.

How powerful are Luntz’s memos in the energy/climate debate (he wrote one on energy in 2005)?  Just think how many people who want to sound like they care about the issue follow his advice and talk about breakthrough technology as the only answer — see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah.” As Business Week noted at the time “what’s most striking about Bush’s Apr. 27 speech is how closely it follows the script written by Luntz earlier this year.”

Returning to Luntz’s Occupy Wall Street advice, his comments on capitalism are the most revealing and important for progressives.

The fact that Luntz  doesn’t like the word “capitalism” isn’t new.  It has long been on his “Republican Playbook” list of “words never to use” along with things like “drilling for oil.” Yes, GOP parrots are instructed to say “Exploring for energy” because “drilling for oil” paints a bad picture in people’s minds of “an old-fashioned oilrig that gushes up black goop.”  Go figure!

And so Luntz wrote back in 2005:

Capitalism reminds people of harsh economic competition that yields losers as well as winners. Conversely, the free market economy provides opportunity to all and allows everyone to succeed.

See how easy it is.  Simply change the words you use, and everybody wins.  Except, of course, 99% of the people have figured out that everybody doesn’t win when the game is rigged.

But I was certainly surprised Luntz admitted the following with the media present Wednesday:

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism”….

1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’

“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

Wow!

So the public thinks capitalism is immoral.  The thing to understand about Luntz is he never makes such pronouncements without having done extensive polling and focus groups.

Capitalism is, in theory, amoral, but it has become immoral in practice because many of its most successful practitioners are immoral (like the Kochs) and because the 1% can buy influence with governments to rig the rules in their favor.

I certainly believe that our current form of capitalism will be humanity’s ruin if conservatives keep blocking any serious carbon price and carbon-mitigation effort (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?” and “The Other 99% of Us Can’t Buy Our Way Out of the Impending Global Ponzi Scheme Collapse“).

The fact that Luntz says the public thinks capitalism is immoral suggests that message is a powerful one, which is no doubt why Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent are striking a chord with so many people.

How more blatant could Luntz be about his crass manipulation: “I’m trying to get that word removed.” Luntz is the embodiment of Orwell’s thought police.

In this case, I don’t think he can get conservatives to stop saying “capitalism,” since that is the altar many of them worship at.  In any case, progressives must not let Luntz win on this one.

Luntz’s manipulation knows no bounds:

7. The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: ‘I get it.’

“First off, here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ . . . ‘I get that you’re….  I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.”

Then, he instructed, offer Republican solutions to the problem.

Seriously.

What Luntz and the conservatives figured out is that since the media are not acting as referees anymore, but mostly as play-by-play commentators or simply stenographers, politicians can say whatever they want and then do whatever they want.  So, sure, say you “get it” to the Occupy crowd and then keep pushing “solutions” like tax cuts for the rich job creators, that will only worsen income inequality.

Rather than decrying these tactics, it remains critical for progressives to learn that words matter.  I have written a great deal about rhetoric over the years — see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive” — and do intend to publish my book on that subject next year.  So I’ll end with some old advice of Luntz’s:

There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

Capitalism.  Capitalism. Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism.  Capitalism. Capitalism.  Capitalism.

I think people are finally hearing it.

President Obama used some of the harshest rhetoric of his term today in denouncing the Republican jobs plan, saying the GOP’s emphasis on less regulations would harm the environment, undercut health care and fail to produce necessary jobs in the short term.

“You got their plan, which is let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, (and) less people with health insurance,” Obama said in kicking off a three-day bus tour at the airport in Asheville, N.C.

So he has the simple language and some repetition (“dirty”) here — though “less people with health insurance” doesn’t flow.  I might have said, “dirtier air, dirtier water, sicker people — and just when people need health insurance the most, the GOP wants to cut 30 million of them off.”

But let’s give him the props.  Now he just needs to repeat this a hundred times or so.

Here’s the video:

Related Posts:

• Relax, climate hawks, it’s not about the science. The White House is just lousy at messaging in general
• Is Obama’s call for more drilling bad messaging masquerading as cynical policy — or vice versa?

Stanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick and his colleagues analyzed the 2008 presidential election and the 2010 congressional election.  They found:

“Democrats who took ‘green’ positions on climate change won much more often than did Democrats who remained silent,” Krosnick said. “Republicans who took ‘not-green’ positions won less often than Republicans who remained silent.”

I asked Krosnick by email about the implications of his research for the President who has all but dropped “climate change” from his vocabulary.  Krosnick answered:

Our research suggests that it would be wise for the President and for all other elected officials who believe that climate change is a problem and merits government attention to say this publicly and vigorously, because most Americans share these views.  Expressing and pursuing green goals on climate change will gain votes on election day and seem likely to increase the President’s and the Congress’s approval ratings.

I’ve talked to senior officials from the Administration as well as journalists who cover them — and both groups report that team Obama has bought into the nonsensical and ultimately self-destructive view that climate change is not a winning issue politically (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

And it is nonsense.  Prof. Edward Maibach, Director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, made the exact same point in a Climate Progress guest post last month: “Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?”

At the end, I repost yet again the umpteen polls that support this painfully obvious conclusion.  This new election analysis supports earlier polling analysis by Krosnick, which found:

“Political candidates get more votes by taking a “green” position on climate change – acknowledging that global warming is occurring, recognizing that human activities are at least partially to blame and advocating the need for action – according to a June 2011 study by researchers at Stanford University.”

Krosnick’s new study, “The Impact of Candidates’ Statements about Climate Change on Electoral Success in 2008 and 2010: Evidence Using Three Methodologies” here.  Let’s look at some more of its findings,  particularly at the presidential level:

A political candidate’s electoral victory or defeat is influenced by his or her stance on climate change policy, according to new Stanford University studies of the most recent presidential and congressional elections.

“These studies are a coordinated effort looking at whether candidates’ statements on climate change translated into real votes,” said Jon Krosnick, professor of communication and of political science at Stanford, who led two new studies – one of the 2008 presidential election and one of the 2010 congressional elections. “All this suggests that votes can be gained by taking ‘green’ positions on climate change and votes will be lost by taking ‘not-green’ positions.”

The findings are consistent with Krosnick’s previous research on voters’ preferences in a hypothetical election. Taken together, the studies make a strong case that for candidates of any party, saying climate change is real and supporting policies aimed at tackling the issue is a good way to woo voters, said Krosnick, a senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

“Recently, we’ve seen many politicians choose to say nothing about climate change or to take aggressive skeptical stances,” Krosnick said. “If the public is perceived as being increasingly skeptical about climate change, these strategies would be understandable, but our surveys have suggested something different.”

Voters preferred “greener” President

In the presidential election study, Krosnick and his colleagues asked voters for their opinions about climate and politics before and after the 2008 election. The research team conducted online surveys to reach a nationwide sample of voters.

Before the election, the researchers asked voters whether they supported or opposed government policies to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions. The survey also asked what voters thought of Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s positions on climate change. After the election, the voters reported if and for whom they had voted.

Not surprisingly, more people who said their own views on climate change were closer to Obama’s position than to McCain’s voted for Obama. This tendency was especially true among voters who cared a lot about climate change and persisted regardless of the voter’s ideology, party affiliation, preferred size of government and opinion about President Bush’s job performance.

Of course, since the election, Obama’s messaging has become truly dreadful.  And in a world where you turn the triumph on healthcare reform into a political liability, where you buy into and repeat the pernicious right-wing frame on issues from the debt ceiling to clean air for kids (!), then perhaps whatever you talk about will turn out to be a political loser.

But the fact remains that the public strongly supports climate action and aggressive clean energy policies even during the depths of the recession, even in the face of an unprecedented fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign during the climate bill debate — even without the White House using its bully pulpit to tip the scales further (see “Memo to policymakers: Public STILL favors the transition to clean energy” and links below):

Related Posts:

• Public support for action on global warming has grown since January (6/09)
• Opinion polls underestimate Americans’ concern about the environment and global warming (5/09)

• Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1 (9/09)
• New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade (10/09)
• Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming (11/09)
• Overwhelming US Public Support for Global Warming Action (12/09)
• Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks (12/09)
• It’s all about Independents — and Independence (1/10)
• Yale:  When asked whether they “support or oppose regulation carbon dioxide” as a pollutant, 73 percent said yes, with only 27 percent opposed, including 61 percent of Republicans (2/10)
• Washington Post Labels Global Warming a ‘Wedge Issue’ — But Doesn’t Seem to Know What That Term Means

Economic Stagnation. Recession. According to Paul Krugman and George Soros, we face now perhaps even Depression.

Hard Times is the American story, now and for the next several years at least. How we find the way back to jobs and growth is the only question. And we have the answer, because changing the energy system is the way back to economic growth. According to some economists, it’s perhaps the ONLY way back. The only new engine of growth, as there is no great new wave of technology, pharmaceuticals, housing, consumer spending and certainly no credit bubble on the horizon.

Saving the climate is the path out of the economic mess. The great waves of growth set off by the intercontinental railroads, the interstate highways, the internet, production for WWII — energy transformation is the next wave.

This should be our message for these hard times.

Here are some examples of how to talk about this.

As Bill Clinton so eloquently explains, deploying armies of workers to insulate every building in America will bring immediate and guaranteed cash flow at high rates of return from the energy savings. Better returns for bank and other capital than the stock market by far. It will put 1.5 million Americans back to work right away. And it will keep saving money for decades. Why aren’t we doing this? Who is in the way?

In California today, solar energy is now beating — that’s right, beating — the price of new natural gas power plants. It’s far cheaper than new nuclear, and now competitive with filthy coal. Solar’s price has dropped 70% in only three years, and like cell phones and dvd players, will drop more as demand soars till in just a few years it will be competitive in the rest of the nation.

Like with cell phones, you can now get solar on your roof even in New Jersey and Maryland for free when you sign a contract. No cost to you. With immediate utility bill reductions, and a guaranteed level price for 20 years. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s a fact. Believe me people are attracted to prices that can never go up and power that can’t run out. Shouldn’t we tell people?

Solar creates 7 times the jobs per dollar as fossil fuel investments. Building a smart grid with fuel-free renewable power sources will mean more affordable electric bills, with zero price volatility. Isn’t it time we told people, and seized the economic high ground?

Driving an electric car already costs no more than the equivalent of 75 cents a gallon or less. Now there’s a great bumper sticker — I PAY 75 CENTS A GALLON. In time, car batteries will also get cheaper and store power from the grid.

Energy transformation — and along the way preserving civilization from burning up — is the way back to sound growth. Not only to jobs, but to prosperity.

This is a winning message, and it’s the truth. It is also a message that will cross the political divide we face, where so many Republicans oppose climate action. It will attract business and split Republicans, which is essential. How will they look standing in the way of economic growth as the recession or worse continues to smolder?

Meanwhile, to continue the narrative, energy business as usual will cause accelerating economic decline as we keep sending ever greater sums out of the country for oil rather than using the money to employ our own people. Energy business as usual will guarantee higher fuel prices as world demand grows — why don’t we tell people? Instead the environmentalists are branded as the folks who will raise energy costs. This is truly upside down.

Storms, fires, floods and droughts will also get increasingly costly, along with the price of food, not to mention the vast sums that will be needed for insurance losses, or to build sea walls and levies in Miami, New York and along the Potomac and the Mississippi as water levels rise. Or the massive cost of trying to save irrigation for agriculture in California’s Central Valley as San Francisco Bay rises to saltify the Sacramento and San Joaquin river deltas, making crops ungrowable. Are sea walls productive investments? What rate of return do they create?

We need to stop allowing ourselves to be depicted as the forces that will hurt the economy by the greedy and ignorant few who will cripple it. Enough.

We know from cognitive science that people learn best from moral metaphors and stories. Meanwhile, everything in human affairs can be found in the stories of Shakespeare. Talk about a dramatic moral narrative! Here’s today’s production. The greedy CEOs of less than a dozen unpopular oil and coal companies — and their agents in Washington and the media — are blocking America’s recovery to jobs and a prosperous future. So greedy — like one of Shakespeare’s tragic characters — that they would literally bring down the Kingdom and everyone else along with them. Only this time the Kingdom is the whole planet.

For those of us in this room, who know the urgent and harrowing science of what the climate will soon bring, the story is literally Peabody Coal, Exxon, Koch Industries, Halliburton, Chevron, BP, Massie coal and a few others versus the survival of civilization. It’s a tiny few, paralyzing democracy and polluting the media with propaganda. This is a dramatic story indeed, accurate, and hopefully not the final act.

What great Shakespearean characters are the oil and coal CEOs who would be Shylock while the world burns? It is time to feature them — by name — as the villains in the story. Every story needs heroes and villains. We have both. CEO Rex Tillerson of Exxon is pulling the strings for John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, in order to protect the biggest profits ever made by any company in history. He is as un-American as Rush Limbaugh, standing in the way of recovery and American jobs. They are in the way of restoring the American Dream.

So our message should be prosperity, jobs and economic recovery from energy modernization. Our target audience should be business and those honest Republicans not on oil and coal’s payroll. Our narrative is that both the economy and the climate can be saved but for the corruption of a tiny few. Will they get away with it? Stay tuned.

– David Fenton is the CEO of FENTON, the public-interest communications firm in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and soon London. This post is based on remarks by the author at EcoAmerica’s “Change of Atmosphere” conference, October 4, 2011.

Related Post:

• William Shakespeare special: Why deniers out-debate smart talkers

And as we’ve pointed out again and again on Climate Progress, federal and state programs have created and saved hundreds of thousands of good jobs. In some cases, however, jobs haven’t been created as quickly as hoped — opening the entire concept of clean energy investments to political criticism.

But these criticisms ignore all the other value that clean energy projects bring to communities.

John Williams, an expert on sustainable communities and clean energy with HDR, believes we need to get back to the basics on messaging. Speaking to Climate Progress at the Greenbuild Conference in Toronto, Williams argues that we need to get beyond the “campaign” stage of promoting green jobs, and back into the “transformational” stage of talking about the immense economic, environmental and societal value through a business lens.

Here’s the video interview:

Williams: We really need to be asking a lot of questions, and certainly the jobs question is an important one. How does one project provide greater benefit than another project from a jobs point of view. But I’m for asking even more questions: Tell me about the jobs, tell me about the social benefits, the environmental benefits, the economic benefits. Tell me about resiliency benefits, and tell me about how that investment will enhance competition….  The more questions we answer, the better off we’ll all be.

CP: So if folks can better communicate the economic, social and environmental value rather than talk about specific job numbers necessarily, do you think you neutralize much of the political debate around this sector?

Williams: The reality is, we need jobs now. There’s no doubt about it. So we can’t overlook that conversation. But if you can translate the value of those jobs along with the other benefits, I think you’ve got to win.

Williams has certainly walked the walk. In order to give a better framework for evaluating all these benefits, he created a “Sustainable Return on Investment” model, which has helped leverage billions of dollars in capital from financial institutions for clean energy projects.

This is something I’ve argued for a lot in the past. Obviously, the high-level messaging on green jobs is important. But by talking about clean energy investments from a business perspective — clearly articulating how specific technologies and projects can create different types of value along with job creation — the political “argument” against green jobs becomes moot.

A recent EPA study estimated that just one law — the Clean Air Act — prevented 230,000 deaths, 3.2 million lost school days, and 13 million lost work days a year in 2010. The benefits of this act, including savings in medical expenses and increased worker productivity, are 30 times greater than its cost of implementation, and the benefits of regulation, more generally, also have been shown to exceed costs [PDF].

The right-wing noise machine has mastered the art of repeating a few key nonsensical messages over and over again until some people actually believe them.  It has much in common with the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who repeat the pigs’ perversion of the original principles:  “Four legs good, two legs better!” or “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And so in the Orwellian world of the right-wing, the word “rich” is out and “job creators” is in.  There simply are no more rich people in the Tea Party fantasyland.  Of course, no jobs are being created, and the rich are simply sitting on their billions, accumulating a staggeringly disproportionate amount of the wealth to shame the Gilded Age — the richest “400 people have more wealth than half of the more than 100 million U.S. households,” Politifact was grudgingly forced to agree that Michael Moore’s statement was correct.  So one would have to be a sheep to keep calling them job creators.

Oh, but wait, say the sheep,  the reason the job creators aren’t creating jobs is because of the “job-destroying EPA,” a phrase repeated as often as “job creator” is.  In a sane world — I know, I know, another counterfactual, but bear with me — everyone would call it the “life-saving EPA.”  But that would require a president with coherent principles and messaging skills to lead the way, as opposed to one who caved on the life-saving ozone rule — even though a National Bureau of Economic Research study found “robust evidence that ozone levels well below federal air quality standards have a significant impact on productivity:  a 10 ppb decrease in ozone concentrations increases worker productivity by 4.2 percent.”

In the interest of continuing to set the record straight, what follows is a post by Elizabeth A. Stanton, a senior economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute-U.S. Center, via TripleCrisis (and Grist).

Don’t buy the job-killing hype: Regulations create jobs, save lives

Elizabeth A Stanton

What’s good for job growth, good for the environment, and good for public health? No, it’s not a trick question, but it is a reassessment of what passes for conventional wisdom in Washington these days. The answer is the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other enormously popular environmental regulations enacted in the 1960s, 70s and 80s with strong bipartisan support.

Let’s start with the conventional wisdom. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recently called for the repeal of ten “job-destroying” regulations, calling them “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business people who want to create jobs.” On the list are regulations that limit air pollution, maintain the ozone layer, curtail greenhouse gas emissions, and prevent contaminants from entering ground water. (Also on the chopping block: labor standards and health benefits.) The rationale behind the proposed repeal of these important environmental regulations is somewhat baffling, but here’s an example to try to sort it out.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new regulation of space-heating boilers would, according to Cantor, impose, “billions of dollars in capital and compliance costs.” The question is, where do those billions of dollars go? If we are to believe the Majority Leader, this money is flushed down the proverbial toilet. Its only impacts are to raise the costs of goods and services, and to put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk (presumably, employers – cash strapped after flushing all that money – would have to fire workers to make ends meet). Environmental regulation, we are told, is nothing but a burden both to business and labor.

This strange and clearly disingenuous characterization of the impacts of environmental regulation has taken center stage in today’s national policy debate. A few fuzzy points in this logic, however, could benefit from some closer examination. Three questions come to mind.

What happens to the billions spent in capital and compliance costs? Far from being thrown away, this money supports jobs in sectors that manufacture capital goods and provide support services for compliance. Often called “green jobs,” the employment generated spans from the blue-color assembly line to white-color scientific research. Installing new equipment to prevent pollutants from leaching into our air and water also brings work to electricians, plumbers, and other more specialized technicians. Money spent for environmental regulation is spent productively, and the result is job creation.

When facing these new costs, will employers cut their workforce? This old supply-side war horse gets dragged out every time regulations need to be cast in a negative light. When the cost of doing business goes up – and especially when those cost increases are just a small share of revenues, as they are with almost every environmental regulation – firms don’t start cutting production and, consequentially, their workforce. Instead, they pass the costs on to their costumers and keep production and employment steady. (At present, with profits relatively high and demand low, it’s not even clear that prices would increase – it could be a pure Keynesian stimulus, forcing a small share of profits to be spent on goods and services, without any price changes.) Whether higher costs will dampen customers’ demand, and producers will respond by cutting back, is a separate, more complicated question. For many of the goods and services most affected by environmental regulations – electricity generation, for example – demand is extremely insensitive to small changes in the price. Studies have shown that environmental regulations very often create more jobs than are lost from reduced demand for the regulated, and therefore more expensive, goods and services.

What about the benefits of environmental policy, and the cost of allowing pollution to continue? Missing from the call to repeal key regulations is any mention of these policies’ benefits for environmental and public health. A recent EPA study estimated that just one law– the Clean Air Act – was preventing 230,000 deaths, 3,200,000 lost school days, and 13,000,000 lost work days a year in 2010. The benefits of this act, including savings in medical expenses and increased worker productivity, are 30 times greater than its cost of implementation, and the benefits of regulation, more generally, also have been shown to exceed costs. Not inconsequentially, clean air (and other) regulations also provide us with a cleaner, healthier natural environment.

It may be hard to believe after watching a little too much cable news but environmental regulations prevent senseless deaths and improve our standard of living, often while creating new jobs. Yes, they make the goods and services that pollute our neighbors’ air and water more costly – and any economist should be willing to admit that correcting these sorts of “market failures” is all for the good – but their job-killing powers have been greatly exaggerated. The jobs-environment trade-off is a scary story, but it’s not based in fact. When we are asked to choose between jobs or clean air, the answer should be, “Both.”

– Elizabeth A. Stanton is a senior economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute-U.S. Center, and is a member of the Climate Task Force of Economics for Equity and the Environment, a project of Ecotrust.

I’ve talked to senior officials from the Administration as well as journalists who cover them — and both groups report that team Obama has bought into the nonsensical and ultimately self-destructive view that talking about climate is not a political winner (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

Now I suppose it is perversely true that if your messaging is as dreadful as the Administration’s — where you turn the triumph on healthcare reform into a political liability, where you buy into and repeat the pernicious right-wing frame on issues from the debt ceiling to clean air for kids (!) — then whatever you talk about will turn out to be a political loser.

But the fact remains that the public strongly supports climate action and aggressive clean energy policies even during the deep recession, even in the face of an unprecedented fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign during the climate bill debate — even without the White House using its bully pulpit to tip the scales further (see “Memo to policymakers: Public STILL favors the transition to clean energy” and links below):

This confusion about public opinion and messaging extends far beyond politicians to many in the progressive community and media.  So I’ll be doing a series of posts in the coming weeks to set the record straight.

I’m fortunate to be able to start with a previously unpublished memo from one of the leading experts on public opinion and climate communications, Prof. Edward Maibach of George Mason University.  He is Director of their Center for Climate Change Communication and a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Communication.

Maibach has been involved in some of the most in-depth, multi-year polling on this subject, the widely cited “Climate Change in the American Mind Series.”  He discusses his findings, and why they are at odds with Obama’s silence on climate change, below:

Is President Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?

Ed Maibach

In a recent story by Juliet Eilperin about actions under consideration by the administration to raise vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, Jonathan Lash of the World Resources Institute gave voice to his concerns that the President has gone silent on the issue of climate change:

“I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change,” [Lash] said. “By excising ‘climate change’ from his vocabulary, the president has surrendered the power that only he has to explain challenging issues and advance complex solutions for our country.”

The President’s near-total silence on this issue throughout 2011 is perplexing given the clarity of his past statements about the need to deal with the threat.  Perhaps he has concluded that the issue has evolved into such a political loser that even speaking the words will jeopardize his plans.   If that is indeed the reason for his silence, findings contained in two research reports released last month – one by me and my colleagues at George Mason and Yale, and the other by a team at Stanford – indicate that the President would be wise to reassess his assumptions.

The Yale/George Mason study – Public Support for Climate & Energy Policies in May 2011 – shows that despite political polarization in Washington D.C., public support for a variety of climate change and energy policies remains high, across party lines:

Issue Priority & Support for Action

• 71 percent of Americans say global warming should be a very high (13%), high (27%), or medium (31%) priority for the president and Congress, including 50 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Independents and 88 percent of Democrats.

• 91 percent of Americans say developing sources of clean energy should be a very high (32%), high (35%), or medium (24%) priority for the president and Congress, including 85 percent of Republicans, 89 percent of Independents, and 97 percent of Democrats.

• Majorities of Americans want more action to address global warming from corporations (65%), citizens themselves (63%), the U.S. Congress (57%), President Obama (54%), as well as their own state and local officials.

• Despite ongoing concerns about the economy, 67 percent of Americans say the U.S. should undertake a large (29%) or medium-scale effort (38%) to reduce global warming, even if it has large or moderate economic costs.

• 82 percent of Americans (including 76% of Republicans, 74% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats) say that protecting the environment either improves economic growth and provides new jobs (56%), or has no effect (26%). Only 18 percent say environmental protection reduces economic growth and costs jobs.

Support for Specific Policies

• 84 percent of Americans support funding more research into renewable energy sources, including 81 percent of Republicans, 81 percent of Independents, and 90 percent of Democrats.

• 68 percent of Americans support requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if it costs the average household an extra $100 a year, including 58 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of Independents, and 82 percent of Democrats.

• Majorities support local policies, including installing bike lanes on city streets (77%), more public transportation (80%), requiring all new homes to be more energy efficient (71%), changing zoning to promote mixed development (57%), decreasing sprawl (56%), and promoting more energy efficient apartments instead of single family homes (52%).

The Stanford study – The Impact of Candidates’ Statements about Climate Change on Electoral Success in 2010: Experimental Evidences – provides even more direct evidence that climate change is not a political loser, but rather is a political winner for both Democrats and Republicans.  Specifically, the study shows that “endorsing the existence of warming, human causation, and the need for ameliorative action” wins votes among both Democrats and Independents, and does not lose votes among Republicans. “These results suggest that by taking a green position on climate, candidates of either party can gain the votes of some citizens while not alienating others.”

– Ed Maibach

Related Posts:

• Public support for action on global warming has grown since January (6/09)
• Opinion polls underestimate Americans’ concern about the environment and global warming (5/09)

• Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1 (9/09)
• New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade (10/09)
• Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming (11/09)
• Overwhelming US Public Support for Global Warming Action (12/09)
• Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks (12/09)
• It’s all about Independents — and Independence (1/10)
• Yale:  When asked whether they “support or oppose regulation carbon dioxide” as a pollutant, 73 percent said yes, with only 27 percent opposed, including 61 percent of Republicans (2/10)
• Washington Post Labels Global Warming a ‘Wedge Issue’ — But Doesn’t Seem to Know What That Term Means –   Stanford professor Jon Krosnick, which found:

“Political candidates get more votes by taking a “green” position on climate change – acknowledging that global warming is occurring, recognizing that human activities are at least partially to blame and advocating the need for action – according to a June 2011 study by researchers at Stanford University.”

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action — a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I did not want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way. My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation under 10,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid poorly, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay several times as much. My mother pursued freelance writing for many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this? Orwell, who shares far, far more in his many brilliant essays, argues in “Why I write“:

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

And no, I’m not operating under the misimpression that my writing can be compared with Orwell’s. I know of no essayist today who comes close to matching his skill in writing. On top of that, bloggers simply lack the time necessary for consistently first-rate efforts. I’ve written more than 3 million words since launching my blog in 2006. Perfection isn’t an option.

Orwell does, however, have the soul of a blogger. He has a brutal honesty that puts even the best modern memoirists to shame. And he confronts the toughest of truths, which I think is perhaps the primary quality I aspire to at ClimateProgress.org, a quality captured in the label that Rolling Stone gave me, “America’s fiercest climate-change activist-blogger.” Orwell asserts, “Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose.”

I see more than four great motives to blog, at least for me. But let’s start with Orwell’s:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death….

Inarguable. At least Orwell notes that “Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists.” I make no pretensions to be a serious writer. I’m not certain that bloggers are journalists. I think we are, however, journal-ists. What is a (web) log if not a journal?

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement….

I dictate all of my blog posts directly onto the PC using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. For me the sound of a good phrase, the pleasure of a headline that works, is immense.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Even more so with a blog. In the event we don’t avert catastrophic global warming, I do hope that the reporting and analysis in this blog, which evolves over time, will be of use to those trying to understand just how it is that, as Elizabeth Kolbert put it, “a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself.” It will be a great source of bafflement to future generations, and I suspect that as they suffer through the misery and grief caused by our myopia and greed, a literature will emerge aimed at trying to understand what went wrong, how we did this to ourselves. Perhaps ClimateProgress.org will help.

(iv) Political purpose.… Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Orwell goes on to say of himself (emphasis added):

By nature — taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.

His always careful word choice is telling. The Wikipedia entry on “pamphleteer” asserts, “Today a pamphleteer might communicate his missives by way of weblog.”

Orwell explains the source of his evoluton:

I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience…. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

I couldn’t dream of saying it better than that.

And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

I also blog for at least two other reasons.

Peace of mind: I would be unimaginably frustrated and depressed if I didn’t have a way of contributing to the task of saving a livable climate, a way of responding in real time to the general humbug and sentences without meaning and purple passages of those who wittingly or unwittingly spreading disinformation aimed at delaying action on climate change. I hope the comments section on the blog serves as a similar outlet for readers.

Personal growth: The act of trying to explain the science and the solutions and the politics to a broader audience forces me think hard about what I’m really saying, about what I really know and don’t know. The rapid feedback and global nature of the blogosphere mean that I get to test my ideas against people who are exceedingly knowledgeable and articulate. Through this blog I have interacted with people from every walk of life, with widely different worldviews, from many continents, whom I never would have otherwise known. And all from the basement of my home, occasionally with my daughter by my side.

It boggles the mind that I have a profession that did not exist even a decade ago, but that is, in many respects, precisely what my father did, precisely what I never expected to do.

I first became interested in global warming in the mid-1980s, studying for my physics Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and researching my thesis on oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. I was privileged to work with Walter Munk, one of the world’s top ocean scientists, on advanced acoustic techniques for monitoring temperature changes in the Greenland Sea.

A few years later, as Special Assistant for International Security to Peter Goldmark, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, I found myself listening to some of the nation’s top experts on these issues. Even a generation ago, they knew the gravest threats that would face us today. They convinced me that global warming was the most serious long-term, preventable threat to the health and well-being of this nation and the world.

In the mid-1990s, I served for five years in the U.S. Department of Energy. As an acting assistant secretary, I helped develop a climate technology strategy for the nation. Working with leading scientists and engineers at our national laboratories, I came to understand that the technology for reducing our emissions was already at hand and at a far lower cost than was widely understood — if we had smart government policies to drive those technologies into the marketplace, policies which included putting a price on carbon dioxide pollution. Then I worked with some of the nation’s leading corporations, helping them to make greenhouse gas reductions and commitment plans that also handsomely boost their profits.

After my brother lost his Mississippi home in the Hurricane Katrina storm surge and asked me for advice on whether or not he should rebuild there, I started interviewing climate experts for what turned into my previous book, Hell and High Water. Our top climate scientists impressed upon me the fact that the climate situation is far more dire than I had realized, far more dire than 98 percent of opinion makers and politicians understand — a situation that, sadly, remains true today.

I made a decision I would not pull any punches — I would get “political” as Orwell defined the term. I joined the Center for American Progress in 2006 because it had become the cutting edge think tank for both policy and communications on progressive issues. I began part time, posting on this blog once a day. As readership grew and ClimateProgress.org became a leading voice on energy and climate issues, I began posting more. Now I’m a full-time blogger, writing several times a day and also featuring guest posts from some of the best writers and thinkers on the subject.  CP also has a terrific clean energy blogger, Stephen Lacey.

A key goal of this blog today is to save you time. There is far too much information on climate science, clean energy solutions, and global warming politics for anyone to keep up with. And the status quo media simply puts out too much analysis, most of it quite bad. And yet everyone needs to follow this issue, needs to have an an informed opinion on the most important issue of the decade and the century.

The terrific commenters on this blog bring facts, links, nuance — and even reasoned push-back — to what gets written here. You often direct me to a breaking story or study I haven’t seen, giving me the jump on others in the blogosphere. You are a key reason Time magazine named Climate Progress one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010.” And that’s why I worked to bring back the old comments system.

The ultimate reason that I blog is because it’s not too late. Just because the catastrophic climate changes we are headed toward will probably be irreversible for hundreds of years or longer, that doesn’t mean they are unstoppable.

We are going to adopt the clean energy strategies described on this blog. That is a certainty. But the question of our time is, will we do it fast enough?

Humanity has only two paths forward at this point.  “The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline,” as President Obama (!) said in April 2009. Either we voluntarily switch to a low-carbon, low-oil, low-net water use, low-net-material use economy over the next two decades or the post-Ponzi-scheme-collapse forces us to do so circa 2030. The only difference between the two paths is that the first one spares our children and grandchildren and countless future generations untold misery.

As I wrote above, if I have learned anything from the blog, it is that there is in fact a great hunger out there to face unpleasant facts head on.   And that is possibly the most reassuring thing I have learned in the past five years.  Thank you all for that!

This post is a (slight) revision.

Related Post:

• Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010

Obama has hit an all-time low in unpopularity in Gallup tracking.  No surprise, really:

1. The economy is still doing poorly
2. He spent months talking about the debt ceiling rather than the economic issue the voters care most about — and the voters weren’t fooled into thinking cutting the debt would stimulate either jobs or the recovery.
3. His messaging is still lame.  As NY Times biz reporter Joe Nocera wrote last week, “When did President Obama become such a lousy speech-maker? His remarks on Monday afternoon, aimed at calming the markets, were flat and uninspired–as they have consistently been throughout the debt ceiling crisis.”
4. He looked weak by the end of the debt ceiling deal — he had been insisting on  a balanced approach that included revenues and  ultimately agreed to sign one that did not include them.

In short, while Americans suffer, Obama focused on the wrong issue, he didn’t talk about it effectively, and he was rolled.

Given how poorly he is doing,  I do think it worthwhile to point out one recent rhetorical flourish.  He embraced the term “Obamacare” and turned it back on his critics in an Iowa event (video via Think Progress):

“I have no problem with folks saying ‘Obama Cares.’ I do care. If the other side wants to be the folks who don’t care, that’s fine with me.”

When you can’t kill a meme or attack phrase, the best rhetorical strategy is to reframe it to your advantage, if you can.  Here he uses short words and folksy repetition.  This is actually classic rhetoric — see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1” — which is, sadly, something the president hardly ever uses, even though he’s known for speechmaking.

Obama also isn’t known for his compassion, for “feeling your pain,” the way Bill Clinton was.  So if he were to actually repeat this formulation enough, then when people heard the phrase Obamacare, they would  in fact be hearing his spin on it, “Obama Cares.”

I would have said this is all rather obvious, and he should have done this (and a million other such things) over a year ago.  Indeed, rhetoric was developed 25 centuries ago  precisely to help people express emotion effectively.  And this instance does show that he can do it if he tries.

The key, of course, would be repetition — the cornerstone of effective messaging — something Obama  has not been known for at all in his presidency (in marked contrast to his campaign where, admittedly, repetition is considerably easier if not inescapable).  If he were to repeat this formulation enough, along with his surrogates, it could stick.  Otherwise it will dry out and die in the hot summer sun like so much drought-stricken corn.

On Friday, I wrote that Perry is Obama’s dream opponent (see “Rick Perry Thinks America Desires Another Rigid, Anti-Science, Idealogue Governor From The Great State of Big Oil“).  Perry makes it easy for even a lame communications team like Obama’s to make this campaign about the past versus the future.

The only thing weaker than Obama’s brand is the GOP’s, and especially anyone with links to the Tea Party or Bush.  Why do you think Jeb Bush isn’t running??

Perry is a two-fer.  He is hard-core Tea Party — and another pro-pollution, extremist Texas governor.  Remember, even Bush shrewdly decided to disguise some of that in the 2000 “compassionate conservative” campaign, which is the only reason he eked out a loss win.

The WashPost asks “Is Rick Perry too George W. Bush-y?”  The Atlantic asks, “Is America Ready for ‘George W. Bush on Steroids?‘ ”  TP’s Faiz Shakir notes that Karl Rove just said that distancing himself from the still wildly unpopular Bush “Is Not Smart Politics Strategically Or Tactically” for Perry.  [No wonder they call Rove Bush's brain.]

Artist Mario Piperni's rendering of Bush and Perry photos.

But how precisely do you distance yourself from Bush when you served as his lieutenant Governor?  In theory  you do it with a well-crafted communications strategy.  But it turns out so far that Perry is dreadful at messaging.  He’s an undisciplined blurter, a guy who “shoots from the lip,” somebody who  just says whatever nonsense comes into his head.  The classic example of that is Newt Gingrich.

You’d think that with Perry  building up to this announcement for months he would have had a carefully crafted message and specific talking points he would repeat again and again.  But instead, in a widely criticized move, he questioned Obama’s patriotism and specifically his “love” of this country — when Perry himself has repeatedly raised the possibility of Texas seceding!

Worse, Perry threatened violence against the mild-mannered Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.” Treason is a capital crime.  Averting the economic harship of a double dip recession (caused first by Bush policies and then by Tea Party extremism) is the job of the Fed.  Tony Fratto, Bush’s former Deputy Press Secretary, tweeted that Perry’s remarks were “inappropriate and unpresidential.”

On Monday, Perry suggested a policy that would harm the health of our children and endanger hard-won victories that keep the air and water clean.  As TP Green reported, Perry called for “A Moratorium On All Regulations“:

We’re calling today on the president of the United States to put a moratorium on regulations across this country, because his regulations, his EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America.

“We’re sending out a request today asking President Obama to put a moratorium on all regulations,” Perry said on WHO radio in Iowa, recorded live by ThinkProgress.

Under such a moratorium, the Food and Drug Administration would stop approving new drugs and preventing human experimentation; the USDA would stop checking for food safety; the EPA would stop monitoring for poisons in drinking water; the Library of Congress would stop loaning materials to blind people; the NTSB would stop investigating airplane accidents; HHS would end Medicare payments; no more patents, copyrights, or trademarks would be issued; DHS would stop protecting chemical facilities from terrorist attacks; the Treasury would stop printing currency; financial sanctions on hostile nations like North Korea and Iran would end; and the Federal Reserve System would shut down.

Perry’s “moratorium on regulations” would mean a literal end to the rules of law in the United States. At least it would also mean that all of President George W. Bush’s midnight regulations favoring polluters and industry abuses would also be lifted.

The defining characteristic of Tea Party extremists like Perry is their anarchical disdain for government.  As Climate Progress has noted many times, however, failure to act on climate change ensures the biggest government possible this century.

Salon has a piece on “Rick Perry’s dangerously overheated campaign rollout.”  Unless Perry gets some message discipline to pass himself off as a more rational, temperate candidate, he may end up as parched as Texas.

Below are old comments from the earlier Facebook commenting system:

• Bart Laws · Top Commenter · Assistant Professor at Brown University

Since when is anarchism “conservative”? This guy’s ideal state is obviously Somalia.

4 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 1:58pm

Mandy Henk · Top Commenter · Access Services Librarian at DePuaw University

As an actual anarchist, I appreciate your comment. Anarchism is about freeing people from oppressive control structures–including the state, but also including other power hierarchies. It has nothing to do with this crazy idea that corporations should be allowed to do what they please to people. That is the antithesis of anarchism.

Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:02pm

Bart Laws · Top Commenter · Assistant Professor at Brown University

Good luck with that. Without the power of the state, who’s gonna protect you from corporations? There seems to be a logical problem there.

4 · Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:23pm

• taylorbarke (signed in using Yahoo)

No the question is: Who is going to protect the corporations from us?

4 · Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:37pm

View 3 more

Wesley Rolley · Top Commenter · Northwestern University

This is what I get from Perry. He led the prayer for rain. It appears that God, if there is one, parried that with a big “not yet… I still have to deliver 40 days and 40 nights on the North East.”

Then again, maybe God is just upset that someone has decide to bail on thinking for themselves and testing God by asking him to bail him out. What I was always told was the God helps those who help themselves.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:34pm

Peter S. Mizla · Top Commenter · Vernon, Connecticut

Give Perry & the republicans enough rope and they will hang themselves- trouble is in the process they will take allot of us with them before they are kicked out of power.

The C02 will have a bigger voice in the end then BO.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 4:12pm

Leif Erik Knutsen · Top Commenter · Friends with Joseph Romm

“Government can easily exist without law but law cannot exist without Government.” Bertrand Russell.

Take your pick and vote.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 1:27pm

Jeffrey Davis · Top Commenter

All regulations? What about those against murder?

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:07pm

Prokaryotes – · Top Commenter (signed in using Hotmail)

Rick Perry the perfect Bush impersonator.

1 · Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 3:46pm

Julia Kuglen · Top Commenter · University of Texas School of Law

Worse than Bush.

1 · Like · Reply · August 16 at 9:19pm

John Tucker · Top Commenter · Tulane University

Perry isn’t rally “anti government” and neither is most of the tea party. That type advocates a seamless, uniform religion, law enforcement, military/ corporate facilitating, invisible hand type government.

The populist tea party is more closely a populist, anti intellectual, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism ) fascist movement. I’m not deriding them, that’s by actual definitions and the way they framed themselves ( http://teapartyreveal.blogspot.com/2011/08/defintiions-symbols-and-early.html ). They don’t even bother to keep up with the most basic issues of government affecting them; at present or historically.

Also lets face it – someone with a legitimate “anarchical disdain for government,” doesn’t suggest a surveillance and police state as a solution, and also has the sense to know and worry, when it partially already exists. ( http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2011/08/ponzis-and-predators-perry-outlines-policies/GocJEtJGv5iKloBLrLTbmK/index.html ).

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 17 at 12:19am

sasparillafizz (signed in using Yahoo)

Joe, he’s certainly living up to the shoot from the lip angle so far (just a couple of days in for him). Of course all this shooting from the lip comments, so far, are things most of the hard right would love – playing to the audience he’s staking out.

I hope he flames out, as I still consider him the most dangerous of the GOP candidates at this point (the one who could realistically win the primaries and have a chance of being elected, given an economy that wilts further, and who would do the most damage to the country if in office). It also appears he’s the guy with the money in the GOP race, at this point, already.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 1:39pm

Paul Magnus · Top Commenter

This is funny… are u a bigot?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/16/kathy-griffin-talks-michele-bachmann-bigot-conan_n_927900.html

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:25pm

Paul Magnus · Top Commenter

adult warning on the rest of it though…

Like · Reply · August 16 at 2:34pm

catman306 (signed in using Yahoo)

Now here’s a low hanging fruit.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 2:57pm

minority.report56 (signed in using Yahoo)

Here are a few categories of regulations that come immediately to mind.

Nuclear Safety Regulations.
Drug Safety Regulations.
Food Safety Regulations.
…See More

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 17 at 8:43am

Chris Mattingly · Environmental Consultant at Environmental Resources Management

WATCH THE VIDEO. He says “…a moratorium ON regulations…” Post a correction. Propaganda has no place in liberalism.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 5:11pm

Chris Mattingly · Environmental Consultant at Environmental Resources Management

The article stands as legit… the “ALL” quote is from the radio piece, whereas he left out the “all” in the street interview. “…calling today…on regulations…” vs. “…sending out a request…(mumbling)…on ALL regulations…”

Thank you for clarifying…

Like · Reply · August 16 at 7:17pm

Bart Ginsburg · Fresno, California

Oh brother where art thou’s brain.

Like · Reply · Subscribe · August 16 at 4:27pm

If true, this isn’t really news (see “Aussie PM Gillard gives climate speech Obama won’t” and links below).

What is news is that one of the giants of the environmental movement, Jonathan Lash, slams Obama in the piece for lack of leadership on climate.  I’ve known Lash for almost as long as he has headed the World Resources Institute.  WRI is in many ways a reflection of Lash’s temperament — rock-solid in substance and soft-spoken in rhetoric.

When Lash speaks out, people should listen.  Here’s what he said:

“I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change,” he said. “By excising ‘climate change’ from his vocabulary, the president has surrendered the power that only he has to explain challenging issues and advance complex solutions for our country.”

Lash answers the question that I and others have repeatedly posed about the administration’s lame messaging, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

Perhaps Lash is speaking out more bluntly because he announced in May he was resigning as WRI’s president after more than 18 years at the helm to become the president of Hampshire College, in Amherst,  Massachusetts.

He will be missed in DC.

Related Posts:

• Brulle: “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”
• Downplaying or remaining silent about climate change was and is a blunder for progressives
• The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2