How A Simple Metaphor Can Save Planet Earth
This is a guest post from FrameLab contributor David Fenton. After 35 years as a climate activist, people often ask
This is a guest post from FrameLab contributor David Fenton.
After 35 years as a climate activist, people often ask me “how do you remain optimistic?”
It sure isn't easy these days with Trump's oily, greedy assault on a livable earth. Here’s why I remain optimistic: the day will come when the public fully grasps the danger to everything they love from polluting industries overheating the earth.
When they do, of course they won't say “go ahead, kill my children's future, destroy my health and property, make food and insurance unaffordable.” They will demand protection and a rapid, war-like transition to clean energy and transit.
Politics will be transformed. I see this as inevitable. I mean, you can't ignore the weather forever as catastrophes mount.
The problem, of course, is that this moment of mass cognition could come too late to save us. Every tenth of a degree of warming gets us closer to temperatures and sea level rise civilization may not recover from. We edge closer to possibly irreversible tipping points of earth's life support systems.
Our job must be to rapidly speed up this moment of public understanding. That's the prerequisite to a mass movement to save a livable earth. Such a people's movement at scale is, I submit, the ONLY force that can defeat the corruption of our politics by a fossil fuel industry determined to profit from every last oil, coal, and gas deposit on earth.
Even if an enlightened climate candidate replaces Trump, they can't succeed at the scale demanded by physics without the public at their back.
Consider President Joe Biden's poorly-named Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment bill ever passed—by far—as imperfect as it was.
It passed the Senate by only one tie-breaking vote by Vice President Kamala Harris. Any time you win by only one vote, it means you haven't organized the public to be sufficiently at your back. You haven't really won, because the next Administration can easily reverse the vote.
And this is precisely what happened. Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote that gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. The U.S. now accelerates every form of planet-heating pollution, censors science and abdicates clean energy leadership to China.
Yet the public hears little about this disaster.
Yale research shows only 12% report hearing anything about climate change on social media. Sixty-six percent say they “rarely or never” hear or see anything about it in the media or discuss it with their friends and family.
Most Americans cannot tell you what causes climate change or how to solve it. It ranks 19th of 27 voting issues of importance in Yale and Gallup surveys.
This silence creates a vicious cycle: without public understanding, we can't build movements. Without movements, politicians won't act. As Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton once pithily said, “people can only act on the information made available to them.” Clearly, the climate movement is not effectively getting simple, understandable, essential knowledge to the public.
Until it does, we will keep losing.
“Simple” is the key word.
“Repetition is another.”
As Dr. George Lakoff has shown, only the repetition of simple messages changes the brain's wiring—and that’s what is needed to change public opinion.
So why don't Americans see the imminent danger? Why don't they have a conceptual framework in their brains to simply answer “what is causing climate change?”
One reason is the complexity of the climate movement's opaque language. “Carbon,” “the greenhouse effect,” “net zero,” “existential”—these are not kitchen table terms.
You certainly can't rally the public against a threat they can't simply explain, and rarely or never hear about. Another reason is our failure to use modern communication techniques to guarantee messages actually reach the public repetitively.
People don’t necessarily learn from facts alone. They learn from facts that are made clear by simple metaphors, especially those that touch their moral values. This includes visual metaphors, where people can “see” the problem and the solution.
For example, when asked what causes climate change, many Americans wrongly say it is caused by the ozone hole. Why? Because you can “see” a hole. It's a simple visual metaphor that sticks in memory.
The good news is research shows there is a winning metaphor for saving the planet.
The metaphor: “the blanket of pollution around the earth.” This activates two very strong, existing mental frames in the population. Everyone knows a blanket makes you warmer. Everyone knows what pollution is—and nobody likes or will defend it.
The pollution blanket around the earth is making it hotter. It traps heat that used to go back to space. It's like when you go to sleep with an extra blanket and you wake up sweating. That is what we are doing to our planet.
And all that trapped heat energy has to go somewhere—so it melts the glaciers and makes heatwaves, fires, and storms stronger.
People can understand this pollution blanket. As well as the solution—reduce, phase-out and take down pollution so the blanket will thin, and we can get back to a comfortable temperature.
As for the moral aspect, who keeps insisting on more pollution? It is the planet-heating profiteers, the greedy oil, coal and gas executives. They bought our politicians and much of the media so we won't act to stop them. They have known their products will destroy the climate for 50 years and lied about it.
When people learn this, they get mad.
When we help the public reach this level of simple cognition, it is far more likely a mass movement will emerge to defeat the fossil fuel industry. Certainly, without such simple, widespread public understanding, a mass activist movement won't succeed. So let's get on with making this our priority—an educated, mobilized public who can picture the pollution blanket choking our planet.
We can accelerate the kind of cognition point that fueled the successful mass movements of the last 60 years (many of which I have been honored to take part in).
The simple moral conclusion that segregation was wrong fueled the civil rights movement. The realization that we were fighting an immoral Vietnam war sparked the anti-war movement. Seeing the brutality of apartheid led to the successful movement for sanctions against South Africa. Understanding the insanity of the nuclear arms race led to the triumph of the movement to reduce nuclear weapons.
The crystallization of people's right to love who they please led to the legalization of gay marriage.
Yes, I am optimistic. I believe we can, and must, reach the point where a majority of people look at a gas powered car and say to themselves, “I really would prefer a car that doesn't cause asthma and add to the pollution blanket. The government needs to help me afford one fast.”
For their kids' sake, they'll want a car that doesn't cause more wildfires. A furnace that doesn't thicken the pollution blanket with stronger heatwaves. Buildings, factories and airplanes that are climate pollution-free.
Let's make this our goal. Because only people power can save us. As Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale said in 1971, “the only solution to pollution is a people's humane revolution.”
Let's say “the pollution blanket” every time we talk about climate. In every interview, every presentation, every conversation. The pollution blanket. The pollution blanket. Only when we are sick of saying it will it work to help save planet Earth.
David Fenton, the founder of Fenton Communications, is the author of “The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator,” with an introduction by Dr. George Lakoff.
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