This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

At a congressional hearing on the greenhouse effect in 1981, Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives from Tennessee, remarked that it was hard to come to terms with the fact that rising carbon dioxide emissions could radically alter our world. “Quite frankly, my first reaction to it several years ago was one of disbelief,” he said. “Since then, I have been waiting patiently for it to go away, but it has not gone away.”

Gore’s hearings didn’t spark the epiphany he’d hoped among his fellow members of Congress. More than four decades later, the problem still hasn’t resonated with many of them, even as the devastating weather changes scientists warned about have become reality. Wildfires have turned towns to ash, and the rains unleashed by storms like Hurricane Helene have left even so-called climate havens like Asheville, North Carolina, in a post-apocalyptic state, with power lines tossed around like spaghetti.

“Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on [climate issues], they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.”

“I’ll have to admit to you that I’ve been surprised at how difficult it’s been to implement the kinds of policies that will solve the climate crisis,” Gore said in an interview with Grist.

So he isn’t exactly surprised that the issue is on the back burner this election season. When asked about their plans to fight climate change in the presidential debate last month, Vice President Kamala Harris assured voters she wasn’t against fracking for natural gas, while former President Donald Trump went on a tangent about domestic vehicle manufacturing. The subject took on a more prominent role in the vice presidential debate last Tuesday, when the Republican, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, hedged by calling global warming “weird science” while not actually dismissing it, and the Democrat, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, envisioned America “becoming an energy superpower for the future.” And that was about it.

“Since the struggle for votes is almost always focused on undecided voters, most of them in the center of the political spectrum, it’s not at all unusual to see immediate, visceral issues like jobs and the economy take the foreground,” Gore said.

As told in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s interest in climate change was first sparked at Harvard University, where Gore took a population studies class taught by the Roger Revelle, a climate scientist who had played a pivotal role in setting up experiments to measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was the 1960s, a decade in which the American public first started learning about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. Gore was stunned by the evidence Revelle presented, but “never imagined for a second that it would take over my life.”

He’s spent the decades since advocating for climate action. As vice president under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, he unsuccessfully pushed to pass the Kyoto Protocol, the first international attempt to push countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Six years after he lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that turned his traveling climate change slideshow into a hit, launched the issue into the national conversation. Today, he leads the educational nonprofit The Climate Reality Project, which trains people how to mobilize their neighbors to elect climate champions, counter greenwashing, and advance green solutions.

Fossil fuel polluters “use their legacy networks of economic and political power to try to block any solutions.”

As a prominent Democrat, Gore’s impassioned advocacy has been blamed for making climate change seem like a liberal thing to care about. To Gore, that’s an example of attacking the messenger without looking at the deeper reasons why climate change is politically contentious in the first place. “Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on it, they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.” If there’s anyone to blame for polarization, he said, it’s the fossil fuel industry, which has tried to take control of the conversation about climate change. 

“This is the most powerful and wealthiest business lobby in the history of the world, and they spare no effort and no expense to try to block any progress,” Gore said. “Whoever sticks his or her head up above the parapet draws fire from fossil fuel polluters, and they use their legacy networks of economic and political power to try to block any solutions of any sort that might reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.”

In his decades of talking to the public about climate change, he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed.

Even while progress has been slower than he’d hoped, Gore sees signs that things are moving in the right direction. Last year, 86 percent of new electricity generation installed worldwide came from renewables, for example. Not to mention that Congress, where climate legislation had long gone to die, finally managed to pass a landmark climate law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to drastically trim US emissions through green incentives and rebates. 

“It’s the kind of challenge that is so compelling—once you pick it up, you can’t put it back down again—because it really requires any person of conscience, I think, to keep working on it until we get the kind of progress that’s needed.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“Freedom” is often a Republican talking point, but Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to reclaim the concept for Democrats as part of her campaign for the presidency. In a speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, she declared that “fundamental freedoms” were at stake in the November election, including “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” 

A new study suggests Harris might be onto something if she’s trying to convince voters torn between her and former President Donald Trump. Researchers at New York University found that framing climate action as patriotic and as necessary to preserve the American “way of life” can increase support for climate action among people across the political spectrum in the United States.

“It’s encouraging to see politicians adopting this type of language,” said Katherine Mason, a co-author of the study and a psychology researcher at New York University. Based on the study’s results, she said that this rhetoric “may bridge political divides about climate change.”

Some 70 percent of Americans already support the government taking action to address climate change, including most younger Republicans, according to a poll from CBS News earlier this year. Experts have long suggested that appealing to Americans’ sense of patriotism could activate them.

The framing has taken shape under President Joe Biden’s administration, which has pushed for policies to manufacture electric vehicles and chargers domestically “so that the great American road trip can be electrified.” Harris underscored this approach to climate and energy in Tuesday’s presidential debate with Trump, emphasizing efforts to craft “American-made” EVs and turning a question about fracking into a call for less reliance on “foreign oil.”

Mason’s new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the largest to date on the effects of patriotic language around climate change, with almost 60,000 participants across 63 countries. Americans read a message declaring that being pro-environment would help “keep the United States as it should be,” arguing that it was “patriotic to conserve the country’s natural resources.” 

The text was illustrated by photos of the American flag blowing in the wind, picturesque national parks, and climate-related impacts, such as a flooded Houston after Hurricane Harvey and a Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in an orange haze of wildfire smoke. Reading it increased people’s level of belief in climate change, their willingness to share information about climate change on social media, and their support for policies to protect the environment, such as raising carbon taxes and expanding public transit.

The researchers wanted to test a psychological theory that people often defend the status quo, even if it’s flawed, because they want stability, not uncertainty and conflict. “This mindset presents a major barrier when it comes to tackling big problems like climate change, as it leads people to downplay the problem and resist necessary changes to protect the environment,” Mason said.

For decades, environmental advocates have called on people to make sacrifices for the greater good—to bike instead of drive, eat more vegetables instead of meat, and turn down the thermostat in the winter. Asking people to give up things can lead to backlash, said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The framing in the study flips that on its head, she said. “It’s not asking people to sacrifice or make radical changes, but in fact, doing things for the environment will prevent the radical change of the environmental catastrophe.”

“Patriotism or any kind of framing message, I think, can definitely backfire if it’s not seen as an authentic connection on values.”

Bloomfield, who has studied how to find common ground with conservatives on climate change, wasn’t surprised the study found that appealing to patriotism worked in the United States. In other countries, however, the results were less clear—the patriotic language saw some positive effects in Brazil, France, and Israel, but backfired in other countries, including Germany, Belgium, and Russia.

Bloomfield urged caution in deploying this strategy in the real world, since it could come across as trying to manipulate conservatives by pandering to them. “Patriotism or any kind of framing message, I think, can definitely backfire if it’s not seen as an authentic connection on values,” she said.

Talking about a global environmental problem in an overly patriotic, competitive way could be another pitfall. Earlier this year, a study in the journal Environmental Communication found that a “green nationalist” framing—which pits countries against one another in terms of environmental progress—reduced people’s support for policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Natalia Bogado, the author of that study and a psychology researcher in Germany, said that the new study in PNAS makes “no reference to the key characteristics of nationalism, but only briefly mentions a patriotic duty,” which might partly explain the different results.

If executed smartly, though, appealing to regional loyalty can lead to support for environmental causes. Take the “Don’t Mess With Texas” campaign, started in the late 1980s to reduce litter along the state’s highways. Its target was the young men casually chucking beer cans out their truck windows, believing littering was a “God-given right.” Instead of challenging their identity, the campaign channeled their Texas pride, with stunning results: Litter on the roads plunged 72 percent in just four years. Today, the phrase has become synonymous with Texas swagger—so much so that many have forgotten it was initially an anti-litter message.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Following the release of a major climate report last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the “climate time bomb” was ticking. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the United Nations symbol of a globe encircled by olive branches, Guterres declared, “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once.”

That call to action (possibly inspired by the movie of the same name) turns out to be a decent summary of what it takes to tackle rising carbon emissions. According to a new study out Thursday in the journal Science, countries have managed to slash emissions by putting a price on carbon, but the biggest cuts came from adopting a combination of policies. Seventy percent of the instances where countries saw big results were tied to multiple actions that generated “synergy.”

“There really isn’t a silver bullet,” said Felix Pretis, a co-author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. “That goes a bit against the conventional wisdom that economists have been saying that carbon pricing is the one thing we should push for.”

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress.”

Pretis and researchers in Germany, France, and the UK looked for big drops in countries’ emissions and compared those results against the policies that had been adopted. Using machine learning, they analyzed 1,500 policies across 41 countries between 1998 and 2022, and found just 63 instances in which countries substantially slashed emissions. In total, these cuts added up to between 600 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. 

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress,” Pretis said.

Part of the reason that the study only found 63 success stories is because it set a high bar in terms of emissions reductions, Pretis said. “But at the same time, we also see lots of policies having been implemented that don’t really bite.”

Governments are falling short of their climate targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement by about 23 billion metric tons of CO2. The problem isn’t just caused by a lack of ambition, the study says, but a lack of knowledge in terms of what policies work in practice.

Carbon pricing, whether through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, was “a notable exception” in that it sometimes led to large emissions cuts on its own, the study says, and worked particularly well for emissions from industry and electricity. However, “it works even better if you complement and package it up as a policy mix,” Pretis said.

The study doesn’t capture policies “that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

For example, the United Kingdom saw a 19 percent drop in emissions from the electricity sector between 2012 and 2018 after the European Union introduced a carbon price for power producers. Around the same time, the UK had implemented a host of other steps, including stricter air pollution standards, incentives for building solar and wind farms, and a plan to phase out coal plants. Similarly, China cut its industrial emissions by 20 percent from 2013 to 2019 through a pilot emissions-trading program, but also by reducing fossil fuel subsidies and strengthening financing for energy-efficiency investments.

To cut emissions from transportation and buildings, the study shows that it’s an even better idea to pair together multiple tools. Regulation is the most powerful policy for reducing emissions from transportation, and it can work well alongside carbon pricing or subsidies. The study also stresses that different policies might be effective in different contexts. The researchers found that carbon pricing was less effective in developing economies, places where regulations to limit pollution and investments in green technologies might be a better fit.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said the study shows what measures to curb carbon emissions have been politically possible, but it shouldn’t necessarily serve as a guide for future policymaking. “It doesn’t capture policies that never passed—including those that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

Because of the bounds of the study, it also missed some of the most significant climate policies, Wagner said, pointing to the carbon taxes Sweden’s government passed in the early 1990s and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. The United States’ landmark climate law invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and tax credits toward low-carbon technologies like heat pumps. The law is estimated to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this exercise gets repeated five, 10 years from now, the Inflation Reduction Act would show up” as causing a big drop in emissions, Wagner said.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Talking about climate change doesn’t come naturally to most people, even those who are worried about it. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report discussing it with family and friends “rarely” or “never,” a survey found last fall. They might be intimidated by the science, nervous about starting an argument, or afraid of being a Debbie Downer. The resulting silence is part of why there’s not more social pressure to reduce fossil fuel emissions: People dramatically underestimate public support for climate policies, because that’s the cue they’re getting from those around them. The only way to break this cycle, communication experts have said for many years, is to please, please, start talking about it.

But a recently published book makes the case that not just any kind of talking is good; anything that resembles the phrasing of fossil fuel propaganda, even unwittingly, undermines what should be the central goal of reducing emissions. In The Language of Climate Politics, Genevieve Guenther, a former Renaissance scholar turned climate activist, writes that fossil fuel talking points have weaseled their way into becoming the “common-sense position,” espoused not just by the right, but also by the left.

Guenther founded the New York City-based volunteer group End Climate Silence in 2018, in the hopes of provoking the media into talking more about climate change. The common-sense philosophy behind her work is that words shape ideas, and ideas have consequences, so we should rethink the words we use. “To secure a livable future, one thing we will need to do is dismantle and reframe the terms dominating the language of climate politics,” Guenther writes.

“The book is positioned not so much as a guide to communication, but as a guide to taking a side in a battle of words: “One of the most powerful weapons you have is your voice.”

Her book lays out six key terms that she believes command the conversation, to the detriment of climate action: “alarmist,” “costs,” “growth,” “India and China,” “innovation,” and “resilience.”

These words are often used to prop up fossil fuels: by accusing people who speak out about the risks as overly alarmed, by pitting climate action against economic prosperity, by deflecting attention away from the US and onto other countries, and by protecting the status quo by pointing to carbon removal technologies and societies’ ability to bounce back. The book seeks to debunk these points of view, smartly documenting, for example, how economic models failed to account for the true costs of climate change for so long.

For each term, Guenther offers substitute arguments that “will be hard for fossil fuel interests to appropriate.” Don’t talk about “resilience,” she says, because it implies people can tough out extreme weather; talk about “transformation” instead. The result is a binary approach that suggests there is a right way and a wrong way to talk about the climate. This quest for black-and-white moral clarity risks antagonizing potential allies—such as the climate-concerned folks who think that carbon removal has promise or advocates who worry that a message could backfire if it sounds too scary, not to mention younger Republicans, two-thirds of whom favor prioritizing renewable energy over expanding fossil fuels. But that’s a risk Guenther is willing to take.

The opening chapter of The Language of Climate Politics scrutinizes the word “alarmist,” often used to accuse scientists of exaggerating dangers, in the service of embracing “alarmed,” which Guenther thinks is “a perfectly appropriate” response to the planet exiting the comfortable conditions that complex societies evolved in over the last 10,000 years. She criticizes the various factions within the climate discourse, from “lukewarmers” and “techno-optimists” who imagine a warmer future won’t be so bad, to “doomers” who imagine it’s too late to fix anything. 

In the same spirit of putting people into boxes, Guenther’s critics might classify her as a “carbon reductionist” whose dogged focus on ending CO2 emissions elides the complex social and political factors behind weather disasters. In her view, anyone who questions those sounding the alarm, even a scientist who dislikes hyperbole, is overstepping. After the UN Secretary-General António Guterres proclaimed last year that the era of “global boiling” had arrived, NASA climate scientist Chris Colose criticized it as a “cringe” phrase that lets “bad faith people get an easy laugh.” Guenther condemns this critique as a distraction.

She acknowledges that her argument—“climate change will become catastrophic for everyone if the world does not phase out fossil fuels”—may not resonate broadly. “You may repel people who are generally disengaged from the climate crisis—not to mention centrist optimists—because it will be too much for them to take in at once. But that’s OK.” Her audience clearly isn’t the general public. To support this narrow focus, Guenther points to the “3.5 percent rule,” the idea that you only need to mobilize a small minority, 3.5 percent of a population, to force serious political change. 

To make the “vast, swift system change now needed to head off collapse, we will need to take a pretty large swathe of the 99 percent with us,” wrote an Extinction Rebellion strategist.

The problem is that this number comes from political science research on how nonviolent campaigns can overthrow authoritarian governments, not campaigns seeking social change in democracies. It doesn’t necessarily translate to the process of implementing laws to reduce emissions over decades. The Harvard researcher behind the rule, Erica Chenoweth, has warned that aiming to mobilize 3.5 percent of a population without building wide public support is no guarantee of success. “It can be easy to conclude, I think wrongly, that all you need is 3.5 percent of the population on your side,” Chenoweth said on a podcast in 2022.

One climate activist group that was inspired by the 3.5 percent rule has since shifted away from the strategy. Extinction Rebellion drew the world’s attention in 2018 when its members in the United Kingdom began blockading bridges, supergluing their hands to government buildings, and pouring fake blood on the streets.

For years, critics within the organization warned that it was misusing the rule, potentially missing out on more effective strategies that would bring in the broader approval needed to enact climate policies. “To actually effect the kind of vast, swift system change now needed to head off collapse, we will need to take a pretty large swathe of the 99 percent with us,” wrote Rupert Read, a former XR strategist, in 2019.

Three years later, recognizing this need, Extinction Rebellion UK announced that it was shifting tactics from smashing windows to building bridges, “prioritizing attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks.” Since then, organizers say, support has grown and more people are becoming members.

Near the end of The Language of Climate Politics, in what could be read as a self-critique, Guenther gestures toward the need for a broad movement to force the US to move away from fossil fuels—one that includes Black communities fighting toxic pollution, young people worried about their future, and possibly even (gasp) climate tech entrepreneurs. The book as a whole, with its emphasis on reinforcing divisions, feels firmly placed in a time when social media has inflamed polarization, and a moment when a Democratic president has been in power for years.

Having a climate-friendly face like President Joe Biden in the White House tends to cause the environmental movement to splinter, with some groups focused on “insider” tactics, like lobbying Congress and crafting policies, and others focusing on “outsider” tactics, pushing for more ambitious change by protesting. By contrast, if former president and vigorous climate denier Donald Trump gets reelected this fall, even the vaguely climate-concerned could be mobilized for a revived “Resistance” movement, once again united by a common enemy.

What Guenther’s book gets right is that conversations about climate change have to be steered away from tired talking points toward new, productive ground. But the book is positioned not so much as a guide to communication, but as a guide to taking a side in a battle of words, with Guenther writing, “One of the most powerful weapons you have is your voice.”

Research shows that the hard work of persuasion, however, usually starts with listening to people with an empathetic, nonjudgmental ear, as opposed to debating them. It involves asking questions, building trust, and accepting that you’re not always right. Guenther eventually embraces this practical advice for approaching conversations with real people in a three-page afterword, and it seems to counter the strident tone of the nearly 200 pages that preceded it. That’s because there isn’t one right way to talk about climate change, but many.