The Overhead Wire Daily | Don’t Think of a Climate Change

Many years ago I attended a political event with friends on political and issue messaging in Austin featuring George Lakoff as a speaker. Lakoff is a cognitive linguist and in his many books and writings he discusses how people use language and metaphors to evoke feelings and reactions. His most famous book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate became a must read for those thinking about how to counter conservative framing of issues with more liberal or progressive ones.

After that there were a lot of attempts to fix the language people used to appeal to natural allies including in the urban planning and transportation spaces. And in climate change Lakeoff believed, at least in 2010, that people should be talking about the “climate crisis”.

All these years later, researchers at USC have found that climate change and global warming are such pervasive terms and so well understood, the framing of climate justice, climate crisis, and climate emergency didn’t seem to hit with people when climate change on its own does.

But global warming and climate change as ideas themselves are abstractions to people who really can’t tell the difference between global average fluctuations in temperatures of a few degrees. What they can feel however is how they are impacted, such as how hot they feel.

I think this is part of the reason why people really understand on a basic level how they are impacted by storms, by extreme heat such as in today’s NYT interactive article about heat increases in growing cities, how people might not be able to go to as many outdoor concerts in the future, and in their energy bills going up. 60% of Americans feel that climate change is driving up energy bills.

I would tend to agree that if we’re talking outside our own space to communicate with “normies”, ideas should be as simple as possible and easy to understand on a basic conceptual level. But that’s what makes transportation policy hard too. For example we often get fed reasons why highways must be expanded but there are lots of good reasons not to and it’s not just a framing push back but a philosophical one.

There will always be better way to talk about issues with clearer language, but sometimes it’s also just getting ourselves to understand the basic idea in the first place, so we can break it down for others.

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