In the late 1950s, Phillip Morris & Co. hired Leo Burnett Advertising to change the image of their feminine filtered cigarettes to make them more masculine. Filtered cigarettes were a technical ruse. They were supposed to be healthier and were mostly smoked by women. Burnett launched one of history’s [...]
… And We Better Figure It Out Fast As liberals, progressives and climate activists we are busy analyzing and dissecting the new (poorly named) “Inflation Reduction Act” climate bill. Does it contain too many giveaways to fossil fuel companies? Is it enough? How much will it lower our carbon [...]
“We can no longer tolerate Republican’s bankrupt delay on climate.” Do you get an image or feeling on the quality of their delay from this sentence? If we want our ideas to spread, we must use words that create images and feelings and connect them to stories and narratives [...]
Let’s say we wake up and find out that Jackalope are going extinct because they are being eaten by Bigfoot. After all, they are a favorite delicacy of Bigfoot. What do we do? We probably start a Save the Jackalope campaign... of course. We have to make people aware [...]
I spend a lot of time around climate activists helping them with climate communications. Like most of us, their perceptions of where others are in their climate journey are based on where they are themselves. This is a common human characteristic. But if we want to move people to [...]
Utah Phillips was a musician, a labor organizer, a story teller and a poet. Born in 1935, he spent part of his early life riding the rails. This quote of his is a favorite of mine. I believe it's a commencement address. It still rings true and is even [...]
Natural Gas, Fossil Gas, or Methane… Which Should We Use? Reality and truth should be bedrocks in climate communications, but what we believe often informs reality. Words influence these beliefs and thus our collective reality. Choose words that unconsciously activate the wrong neurons in the brains of our audience [...]
(Photo by Angus Mordant/www.angusmordant.com ) If you are a climate activist, or care about what happens to the earth or environment, then read this carefully. Our democracy is on the endangered species list. It is dying. And when it does, there will be no hope for the climate, ourselves, or [...]
Here’s a contrarian viewpoint. Regardless of who wins this election, climate champions still have a lot of work to do. I don’t mean the nut’s and bolts work of trying to rebuild the Clean Power Plan, re-enter the Paris Accord, our launch the Green New Deal. We have to [...]
The other day I was talking to my daughter on the phone when I noticed a subtle change in her reaction to the pandemic. I believe this also applies to the climate crisis. She said she’d just gotten back from a run to Target with her youngest daughter and [...]
