What climate policy advocates (and everybody else) can learn from the health care fight

They don't match up. The polls say America wants regulation on polluters and to curb climate change. The polls also say America wants health care reform. They want costs to come down and they want to cover the uninsured.
But the rhetoric coming out of American living rooms and blogs and op/ed pages doesn't match. It's all about how Americans don't want to be pushed by government to pay for pollution caps or for an insurance plan that's available to all.
The stonewall isn't the policy goal, it's in the implementation. That boils down to one roadblock for most Americans right now.
Nobody trusts government. Whether they were burned by a lack of regulation of Wall Street or hit by $4/gallon gasoline, people don't think government is up to the task of re-forming anything. Not even the Beatles.
Advocates for reform on health and climate can't hang their strategies on "government will do it." People don't buy it.
The reforms have to be market-driven, customer-friendly, and proposed by Wall Street not Pennsylvania Avenue. Wall Street investors want a Renewable Electricity Standard, for example, because that will tell them they will see high returns on renewable energy investments.
Fund managers want health care reform because insurance costs continue to eat into their returns and their investors' dividends.

Why don't people want to help one another?

Recently, at a conference, a woman in the audience asked me, "why don't you advocate helping others as a message for policy change?" She was referring to the absence of altruism or saving the planet for less fortunate when referring to climate policy. Such as, "we must enact strong pollution limits to protect those south of the equator populations who will be hurt most by global warming, including the impoverished children of the third world."
It seems the Obama Administration is having similar problems messaging health care with the "30 million people don't have health insurance" argument. If they're going to get beyond the "nobody's coming after grandma" argument, they'll have to replace it with something stronger to enact change.
Both arguments, no matter how well intentioned, seem to fall flat. It might be the "dumped" mentality that the US audience seems to hold at the moment. That, "well, I'm not sure I want to go out on a date (or a limb)" for anybody right now.
Or it could be the messenger. The Pope has been using the moral obligation frame on climate for quite a while now, and we have yet to see the Catholic audience rise up and demand GHG limits from their governments, although the Pope certainly gets a lot of press whenever he issues an encyclical or a new edict. So if His Holiness hasn't been effective enough to use the altruism frame with his loyal audience, what chance do we have? What chance does Obama et al have?
The answer, and this is untested, may lie in how do we help the collective "we." How does insuring 30 million Americans help the costs of the rest of us? By making a larger pool of users who can access preventative care lower the costs of big ticket producedures? How does climate policy help the health of the developed as well as the undeveloped world? By not creating mass exodi of starving, homeless populations swarm the borders of unstable nations that might easily convert these desperate people into a militant revolution that the developed nations must quell?
Watch the debate change over the next few weeks as first health care and then climate come to the US Senate for votes.

Don’t keep repeating a strong word the other side is trying to push

This is from Climate Progress, but it bears repeating. "Their inaugural ad violates a central rule of messaging, rhetoric, and psychology: sh.That is not just a basic tenet of the 25-century old art of persuasion, but a well-demonstrated principle of modern psychology."

Once again, reformers repeat the charges of attackers. A few good examples:




Also:
http://blogs.nashvillescene.com/pitw/2009/08/brawlin_in_the_boro_no_death_p.php

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechjuliuscaesarantony.html

Why are Dems losing the health care debate? Jon Stewart shows us why.

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Obama Administration changing the frame on climate?

An interesting tactic. As New York Times front page story reports, it's an end-run around hawks and right-wingers, the Obama Administration has ordered the Defense Department to research how climate change would affect military operations.
The results are hardly surprising. Droughts and food shortages create population exodus in the third world, which creates border skirmishes. Unstable despots use new immigrants to ramp up nationalism and military power. The result: America's military has to be used as "peace keepers" or at least to drop in humanitarian aid, reducing its readiness around the world and taxing resources.

Will it be enough to shift the debate from polar bears and turtles and climate to military readiness and American security and climate? Senator Bob Kerry, Vietnam war hero, makes the perfect messenger as he carries the flag for the environment and the Pentagon. Hard to argue with that.

Innovation is the driver of the economy?

"'Innovation has been essential to our prosperity in the past, and it will be essential to our prosperity in the future,' Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address."
-from AP story

President Obama, whom I admire as a statesman as well as a messenger, has brought out the word innovation at a time when his poll numbers are down and when the economy may have bottomed out.
While the candidate and the President is a master of language, this effort may fall flat at a time when he can least afford it.
Research on public opinion has shown a lack of faith in American ingenuity. Americans know the French are using nuclear energy better than we are, the Chinese are better financiers than we are, and the northern Europeans are decades ahead of us in renewable energy. Americans want to chant and say "USA #1!" but at the moment, they're not buying it. Not that flag-waving hasn't worked for presidents in the past, but to tell Americans, "hey, we'll be fine. We're smarter than they are" may not impact consumers to buy American or financiers to fund American innovators.

As Americans, we have always risen to the challenge when we have needed to, and there's no better motivator than need. Obama may want to emphasize that "America needs to be number one" right now for it's own sake to see America pull itself up by its bootstraps.

What business can say about sustainability

You're in business. Your customers are looking for energy solutions. They say they want cleaner, more reliable energy. And reliability includes cost.
Businesses that make efforts to promote conservation in the factory or workplace or invest in energy efficient equipment or vehicles are the companies customers want to patronize.
Those savings can be passed on to consumers. As well as being sustainable, using less energy or using energy better leads to reliable costs for customers as well as fulfilling their desires for clean energy.
As they say, "the best clean energy is the energy we don't use, and the best way to save money is to not pay for what you don't need."

Examples of messaging on climate

This is from a youth blogger on the negotiations in Bonn.

"In 2050, I’ll be 77, and given the pace of the climate talks in Bonn these two weeks, I’ll likely spend most of my retirement either under water or on fire."

And this is from CAP:

"The clean-energy economy is not a pipe dream: It is already happening in states across the country. More than 750,000 jobs already exist in renewable and efficient energy, waste management, land remediation, and the hundreds of other occupations that combine environmental preservation with economic growth."

Considering where Americans are on jobs (#1 priority) and climate (#20), which goal seems to be the most attractive? Which goal encourages rather than shames us into changing our behavior and creating good energy policy?

Message: Moving Forward

In this country, we've always moved forward. We travelled by horse and buggy. Then by cars and trucks. When we once made washers and dryers, we turned to making PCs and OSes. It's part of the spirit of this country and a testament to its innovation and endurance that where we once fueled our lives with oil and coal, we now turn to wind and solar. We're in a transitionary period, for sure, but as Tom Friedman has said, this is not a post-era, this is a pre-era. We are not post-Cold War or post-9/11 anymore. We are pre-clean energy. And it is the herald of an era that will make us healthier, wealthier, and more energy independent.

What today's youth can say about climate change

Key Messages:

• Without key measures to encourage clean energy, the world’s youth will inherit a larger, more expensive problem of global warming
• Policy decisions to encourage clean energy will create the good-paying jobs the world’s youth will study for and seek out to raise their standards of living
• Curbing fossil fuels and their use will stabilize costs for the world’s youth and raise their standards of living
• The world’s youth demand that the world’s governments agree on workable climate policies to move forward on global warming solutions
• The world’s youth demand that the world’s governments move forward to clean energy economies and reduce the effects on the youth living near the equator who will bear the brunt of global warming consequences

Great Video on Message Strategy for Health Care Reform

Welcome to Message Strategy

Regardless of which side of the political fence you're on, there's a right way and a wrong way to talk about your issues. After all, who can be against "tax relief?" Who wants to be on record voting against a "crime bill?"
There are gurus who talk about how to talk: Luntz, Lakoff, and even Obama. I don't pretend to be in their league, but I can bring up interesting items on what's trending up, what's not registering with public opinion, or what has shifted recently.