Adrienne Hill of NPR's Marketplace Radio confronts the failure of environmental activists to change the world with warnings about global warming in a segment that analyzes how they are trying to sell the message and what they need to do to succeed.
[Global Change President Tom] Bowman says it's time to re-brand climate change: Dump the downer-impending-environmental-catastrophe image. And instead, come up with something more inspiring, a promising, new way forward for the country.
Hill recounts the various levels of hysteria activists have thrown at the problem and notes that until recently, being increasingly shrill and accusatory was the strategy, culminating in an advertisement from the U.K. in which children skeptical of climate change are shown exploding where they sit in a classroom.
One strategy that doesn't seem to have worked so far, focusing on all the horrible things that might happen if we don't act. Consider one of the environmental movements biggest ad failures, from the climate group 1010UK. In it, kids who don't want to participate in a plan to reduce pollution get blown up.
What isn't addressed in the segment is scandals in the scientific community regarding data on global warming, the persistent innaccuracy of previous predictions about the end of snow and catastrophic rises in sea level, as well as an opposition to command-and-control solutions that aren't the most economical response to warming.
Climate change enthusiasts can listen all they want to stories about how the only thing they are doing wrong is communication - but the reality is that the facts are complex, the solutions are not as obvious as they are presenting and the other side has good arguments too. It's not all about marketing.
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