A new Gallop poll seems to contain both good and not good news for our work. More people think climate change is a personal threat and believe that impacts are happening now. But there is more polarization, people think the media exaggerates impacts, and people are often more concerned about other environmental impacts than about climate change. My personal takeaways from this for Earth Day outreach conversations—
- Don’t over-catastrophise, stick to what’s known (that should be scary enough anyway).
- Help people connect other environmental problems (like clean water, rainforest and species loss) to climate change.
- Solutions-oriented framing (such as the benefits of clean energy and the possibilities of effective heat mitigation) might be helpful to reduce skepticism in this polarized environment.
@Joanne Leovy Hannah Ritchie also talks about this in chapter 3 of her book, Not the End of the World. Other surveys show that people think actions like recycling and upgrading lightbulbs are effective climate solutions. I certainly saw that at an Earth Day event on Thursday. Rather than correcting that false notion, I settled on acknowledging the importance of personal action but that it is nowhere close to sufficient. We need systemic change. Which was a good segue to asking them to sign the constituent letter to our republican MOC.
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