"Do you want to eat your peas with a fork or a knife?" is a well known false choice that parents use with kids. In either choice, hopefully, they will eat their peas. False choices are a particular type of frame. They are used a lot with both climate [...]
The death toll does matter, but I want to tell you a story. When I was a kid, my father stopped to get gas at a country station. I saw an old man sitting in the shade outside. He was dressed in a torn hunting vest and ragged clothes. [...]
I get a hundred climate emails a day. Most of them are issues-based. For example, I recently read that the Trump administration has rolled back, or in the process of rolling back 108 environmental/climate regulations. Each of these is an issue in itself. All of these rollbacks combined are [...]
We need some good news during this period of national chaos. There were three news stories this week that could be missed during the pandemic, but together they signal the moment of convergence for clean low cost renewable energy. Convergence means the merging of distinct things. In this case, [...]
I am captivated by maps. They possess some magical pull on my imagination. Names take on a mystical significance with the rhythm of their syllables; the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Kyoto and the Cauca. This could just be a romantic reflection, but I am curious about our human attraction to horizons. [...]
As climate communicators, we are all struggling with three main questions during the pandemic. The first is when is an appropriate time to restart our messaging. The second is what messages work best during these times. The third is which audience targets yield the biggest benefits. A number of [...]
I’d just finished giving testimony to an administrative law judge on why a new dirty tar sands pipeline was a bad idea. It is the climate equivalent of putting 40 black smoking coal plants in my state. There was a group of Union Local 49 guys in yellow t-shirts [...]
Remember when some kid told you that tennis balls had poison gas in them, and if you cut them open you would die? This became a widespread belief, or credo among my childhood friends. A credo may have some elements of truth, or sound true, or it can be [...]
(When I was in jail once, I could only sustain myself with my imagination. Pandemic social distancing feels similar, yet as necessary as fighting for the earth. We do it for each other because we care for each other. So this is for all my friends that are feeling [...]
As communicators, we know words matter. They influence whether we are attracting people to a new idea or unconsciously turning them off. Naming the “People’s Bailout Campaign," by a coalition of groups, is one example where we could have done better with our words. Why? Because the campaign name [...]
