The Reality Based Community has done a spectacularly bad job in communicating with the vast middle ground of voters and consumers who don’t really know what’s going on with energy and climate issues. Sure, those people are convinced that it’s a good idea to “go green”, whatever the hell they think that means, and they’re vaguely aware that the US buys a lot of its oil from other countries, but I would wager that only a tiny percentage of them have any clue how much oil that is, in absolute barrel count or percentage, what kind of monetary flows it represents, or who sells us that oil. And as for the true urgency of our climate mess, hell, I know a lot of hardcore enviros who don’t really get it. But almost everyone I know can tell you within a couple of cents what the price of gasoline is at their local filling station after just a moment of thought. Good thing we’re not self-centered and myopic group?
I’ve long said that we need a really kick ass communicator on our side. We have some truly compassionate and brilliant people, including but by no means limited to (in no particular order) Hansen, McKibben, Schmidt, Oreskes, Meadows, Romm, Kolbert, etc. speaking out, but can any of them get up and dance? Can any of them get up in front of an audience that’s not mostly people who already know about climate change and really grab them by the frontal lobes and educate and entertain them? As best I can tell, no.[1]
Even one of my personal heroes, Carl Sagan, who was wildly effective in his time (and criticized by some other scientists for it), wouldn’t do the trick in today’s media saturated world that has the collective attention span of a fruit fly on a triple shot of Red Bull with a cocaine chaser.
If you want a good example of someone I think is an excellent example of expert and communicator in one tidy package, I’ll have to reach beyond energy and climate to astronomy, and Neil deGrasse Tyson:
It’s highly unlikely we can convince Tyson to make a career change, and we can’t trade the three postdocs and a some supercomputer time to the astronomy guys for him a player trade. So what are we to do? How do we grab the mainstreamers’ attention and tell them how gigantic our challenges are, when we have the squadron of flying howler monkeys (a.k.a. the deniers) waiting in the wings to call us “alarmists” or “true believers in the Church of Al Gore” or some other asinine thing, or even worse, simply lie about the state of climate science?
This is not a rhetorical question, and the stakes could not be much higher.
Suggestions?
[1] This is the place where you can no longer contain your frustration with me for overlooking your favorite climate communicator. Good. Get off your metaphorical ass and leave a comment here and tell me who I overlooked. Hint: If I were leaving such a comment, the first person I’d point to would be Greg Craven, because he does videos like this:
Lou,
I suggest, with the deepest sincerity, that you please give up the search for a great communicator or any hope that it would be possible for such a vast change in a culture’s opinion. One might as well put their faith in fusion, safe breeder nuclear, carbon capture and storage, geo-engineering or any of the other techno fixes. If such a culture change were possible, it would be a techno-fix in another guise, and would sure to be employed by those better financed organizations intent on keeping the status-quo as long as they can.
A recent study that I saw referred to on TheOilDrum as well as elsewhere, showed that most people will not change their minds when confronted with facts demonstrating their incorrect position. If you don’t believe this is really an aspect of human nature, is that because the study is correct and applies to your own thinking?
Changing a culture takes a long time, just like changing out infrastructure or implementing something complicated. I know we don’t really have the time, but that’s the predicament that we are in.
Watch how fast Russian opinion will swing back after a few good years of weather.
I really appreciate your blog and the effort you put in to keeping tabs on the climate-energy issues. I wish I had recommendations for you or something more positive to say.
Even though the dude in the video just told us to “forget” all the other problems and focus on climate disruptions…I think Anne Leonard (the story of stuff–book) does a good job explaining both the magnitude of our problems and the collective influence and interrelatedness of our actions–albiet in a traditional enviromentalist narrative.
We ALL need to be looking for solutions that fix multiple problems at once, rather than solutions that trade one problem for another…(corn ethanol is an example of trading one problem for another).
I remember Tyson’s wonderful demonstration of the relative sizes and distances in the solar system. Placing small balls representing the planets on a football field at properly scaled distances, he made everything crystal clear. Space is really, really, really, really empty and the planets are really, really, really, really far apart. A climate Tyson would need to start with with an equally clear and graphic demonstration. “Green Energy” is going to be really, really, really, really expensive, and really, really, really, really scarce. Imagine living in a world that has decided to cut its’ fossil fuel use by 85% to keep from cooking the globe. Want to study abroad? Fly to Paris. You will be there for four years before you can fly home to see your family again, instead of coming home every Christmas and every summer. Even if you foresee a significant portion of the planet covered with algae oil farms, it won’t be enough. Using less oil will actually mean using less oil. Sorry, there aren’t going to be any battery powered dreamliners. What’s that? Liquid hydrogen fueled airbuses? That’s space shuttle level technical complexity and cost. Keep your day job, Neil.
*Anyone* who threatened the status quo would get the “5 minute hate” caricature treatment. And who could stand up to that besides Greg Craven?
So Craven would probably get smeared as just too nice to be a real red-blooded American.
(where’s his birth certificate?)