Why is Talking About the Climate Crisis So Hard?

Over the past seven years, the Overton window–a term used to describe the range of acceptable political discourse–has shifted dramatically on the issue of climate change. In the 2012 presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, neither candidate mentioned the words “global warming” or “climate change” and not one debate question addressed the issue (1). 

But in the democratic primary for the 2016 election, the climate began to get significantly more attention, with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders calling climate change the “greatest threat to national security” (2). In the 2020 primary, every single major Democratic presidential candidate has released a climate plan, with most endorsing or supporting the “Green New Deal” championed by freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement (3). 

The 2020 debates have been a far cry from the 2012 general election silence – and even the relatively scant attention the issue got in democratic primaries during previous years. Joe Biden describes the crisis  as the issue on which he is most progressive. Bernie Sanders proposes a federal jobs guarantee to transform our economy around energy efficiency and independence, calling climate change an existential crisis. Elizabeth Warren talks about the importance of a just transition. Governor Jay Inslee of Washington based his bid for the presidency entirely around the issue of climate change. Nearly every serious 2020 candidate participated in a CNN town hall on climate change that lasted seven hours (4).

So how is it that, despite this massive shift in the willingness of political figures to discuss what scientists say is the most important crisis facing our planet today, the American people rank climate change as the 17thmost important issue – out of a list containing only eighteen (5)? For democrats, the issue is number five on the list: higher, for sure, but still only around 7% of likely democratic voters rank it as their most important issue (6). Shouldn’t this crisis, with all the political and media attention it’s receiving, be a more important issue to voters? 

Last spring, I wrote an article for Arcadia [which I can’t find on the website but would love to be able to link to] discussing the talking points used by climate change deniers, and how to debate them when the topic arises. Now this is all well and good when it comes to talking to that one relative we all have who doesn’t understand or want to think about global warming, but it doesn’t address the central problem: most Americans are not climate deniers (7). Eighty percent  of people believe climate change is happening and caused at least in part by human activity. Finding an issue that 80% of people agree on is rare, and making the fact that so many American policymakers deny and delay on climate change even stranger. 

Some, politicians, journalists, and activists will argue that this is due almost entirely to the influence of the fossil fuel industry on our politics, and indeed, there is some evidence to back this up. But that doesn’t address the discrepancy between the high percentage of people who say climate change is happening and the relative apathy they feel about doing something about it. This discrepancy is due to an entirely different factor: the inherent difficulty of communicating the urgency of the climate crisis. 

A few weeks ago, I spoke to my uncle Jack Cushman, an investigative journalist who has been writing about climate change and environmental issues since the 1980’s–first for the New York Times and then for InsideClimate News–about what he saw as the challenges that climate scientists, activists, and policymakers face in communicating the urgency of the situation at hand. Cushman was pessimistic but frank. He argued  that the American Petroleum Institute and oil giants such as ExxonMobil have done a good job sewing doubt for decades, arguing vociferously that not enough was known about the science to merit policy action. These are not empty words coming from Cushman, who was on the team of journalists from InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times to break the story that Exxon’s own research had warned about the dangers of manmade climate change decades before Exxon would admit it was happening (8). “There’s a large part of the world where it’s not difficult to convince people” that climate change is a serious threat, he adds. 

Even still, Cushman readily admitted that there are other factors that make communicating about the climate crisis difficult. “The catastrophe doesn’t ensue the immediate moment that you elect a new president who reverses policy course. Those policy changes take a long time to take effect,” he says. In the near-term, however, the policy changes required to make a serious dent in climate change will be perceived as authoritarian, and fossil fuel lobbyists can easily frame these policies as an economic burden. At the aforementioned climate town hall, for instance, many candidates fell into the trap of proposing policies that can be perceived as authoritarian. Kamala Harris spent an inordinate amount of time discussing a ban on plastic straws, which not only made her the laughing stock of conservative pundits but somehow managed to alienate progressives fighting for the rights of people with disabilities (9). Bernie Sanders managed to get dragged into a discussion of whether we should be funding abortions in third-world countries as a means of preventing overpopulation (10).

Contributing to this communication difficulty is the fact that scientists themselves aren’t very good at communicating their ideas. Cushman directed me to an article he wrote a few years ago for InsideClimate News, in which he shows an IPCC chart that shows a lot of uncertainty in the climate models, with a lot of spread in between different forecasts for future warming. The spread, however, is not caused by actual uncertainty in the models, but because each projection assumes different levels of greenhouse gas emissions going into the future. Cushman described how the models are quite precise, and the underlying science of climate modeling more certain than it has ever been. But the way the data is presented leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation, either accidental or deliberate, by pundits and special interests in the fossil fuel industry (11).

So obviously, scientists need to sharpen the way they present their data, leaving less room for potential obfuscation. Politicians need to avoid getting dragged into discussions that will make them seem petty, authoritarian, and partisan instead of genuinely concerned for the future of the planet. Voters need to be aware of when their elected officials have taken money from the fossil fuel industry. But what can you do? How can you talk about climate change to people who might be apathetic about it as an issue, and convince them that it’s a cause worth fighting for? 

As my uncle put it in our conversation, “the key for communicating the gravity of the situation is to spend a little time listening to the other person, to figure out what they value, and to draw a connection between what the science tells us about climate change and what they say they value. You gain some credibility just by listening.” As an example, he says, “if you’re…a subsistence or industrial fisherman in a coral reef environment, and we’re 90% certain those coral reefs are going to be destroyed in the next 50 years…that death of the reef becomes very immediate and profound to your family and your community.” 

This example underscores an important point that is often missed in public narratives about climate change: sooner or later, the effects of inaction will be felt by everybody, and they will cost millions of people their livelihoods, if not their lives. 

It’s not just the one billion (yes, you read that right) people who rely on coral reef ecosystems for sustenance or work (12). 

It’s not just the residents of cities in Southern Asia, the Middle East or the American South who will have to emigrate to escape uninhabitable heat, nor is it just the residents of low-lying coastal cities whose homes will experience catastrophic flooding (13).

It’s not just the people living in countries that will be flooded with desperate migrants and refugees from around the world as agriculture systems collapse (14). 

It’s not just the people who will be left homeless by increasingly destructive wildfires in towns like Paradise, California, nor is it just the business-owners who rely on business in those communities to make a living. 

Climate change will affect everyone in the long run. It’s time we snap out of our complacency and face the urgency and importance of this issue head on.