It's Not "Climate Change" or Even a "Climate Crisis." It's a Straight Up Pollution Apocalypse
Green Living Plan: Despite destruction from heat waves to unprecedented events caused by constant industrial waste, policymakers, media and activists can't get the general public to care enough.
Charles D. Ellison | Publisher’s Riff
Perhaps, for many people, the last person they’d expect to get serious public policy advice from is Arnold Schwarzenegger. But on a certain point about how messaging gurus need to pivot fast on the still failed attempts to push “climate change” to the top of the global citizenry’s action list, the former actor and Governor is spot on. Reported CNBC in May …
Arnold Schwarzenegger says the global effort to mitigate the effects of climate change is being crippled by its fundamental communication problem.
“As long as they keep talking about global climate change, they are not gonna go anywhere. ‘Cause no one gives a s--- about that,” Schwarzenegger told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” correspondent Tracy Smith in a profile that aired Sunday.
“So my thing is, let’s go and rephrase this and communicate differently about it and really tell people — we’re talking about pollution. Pollution creates climate change, and pollution kills,” Schwarzenegger said.
He did serve two terms as a Republican governor in a heavily Democratic and liberal state, so he would know a thing or two about effective messaging, right? What’s resonating here is that, according to recent polling data, Schwarzenegger is right: the general American electorate - which must be the most critical in the needed policy response to climate emergency - is not really feeling “climate change” as a major emergency just yet compared to other issues. Here’s Pew Research’s latest overview of public sentiment, with under 40 percent (that’s not good) identifying global climate change as a “top priority” compared to other issues …
In the latest YouGov/Economist poll 70 percent claim it’s “very” or “somewhat important,” but we’d expect more given the gravity of the current situation …
Even though climate emergencies kill people, and even as the ecological support system we all need to survive - from air for breathing to water and land for basic sustenance - is under direct attack from fossil fuels and forever chemicals, the general American electorate at 9 percent (this is worse than the Pew results above) still ranks it below other pressing issues …
Not saying issues such as capitalist price-gouging and wage-stiffing aren’t important issues. But how relevant are they when there is no planet for any of that to exist on because we let this climate moment slip? Plus, imagine the enormous revenue streams we’re missing out on from the trillions of dollars generated in “green economy” response activity. That’s where the jobs of the future are and that’s what would actually cool inflation dramatically, and a healthy planet is what makes us all healthier and less reliant on a corrupt and inefficient health care system anyway.
So, how is this not getting through to the public in such a way that galvanizes a stronger public movement? The type of movement that translates into votes that unelect politicians who are blocking sensible climate and clean energy goals while electing policymakers who are focused on saving our planet, ourselves in the immediate and near term, and our children and future generations? How are Americans still not pointing to this issue as their top voting issue? Much of it, of course, has to do with wickedly high levels of partisanship, primarily from a Republican side that barely sees climate as an issue and a Democratic side that’s really not as committed on it either, as Pew noted …
But we’d argue a considerable degree of the blame falls on the failure of activists, advocacy organizations and media outlets who stubbornly embrace terms like “climate change.” We’ve watched this evolution of that phrase’s popular use unfold for some time now from “global warming” to “climate change,” and recently, the insertion of “climate crisis.” As we know, messaging is key.
It’s Too Soft
The use of these terms as descriptions of the most devestating planetary threat ever - aside from nuclear war - do not underscore the urgency of what we face. If we’re being honest, they have always been too soft, distant and esoteric. They are discussed in a language that may be comfortable for academics who labor over the science, but they are far removed from the struggles of everyday people who are simply trying to, these days, stretch ten dollars out of one. For them, climate change is irrelevant and something they have little time or energy to relate to. If it’s not threatening or killing them at that exact moment in time then it’s not something they should put any effort into thinking about. Yet, everyday people are critical in shaping a movement that pushes policymakers and the marketplace to expedite solutions.
But what if it was viewed as a direct threat? Perhaps one way of doing that is by framing it as a total “pollution emergency” or - let’s do it - “apocalypse” instead. We all know that pollution, as Schwarzenegger indicated, is harmful and that direct exposure to it is unhealthy and kills. We know, instinctively, when we’re being harmed by some form of pollution even when we don’t know the chemical compound. And we know, at least us experts understand, that “climate change” is the direct result of constant fossil fuel, man-made gas and other forever chemical pollution. We are seeing signs of pollution everyday, manifested in not only automobile emissions during long commutes, but through industrial smokestacks, the smell of leaking methane in cities, the accumulated mess of plastics and other raw sewage in waterways and rivers. We all know this pollution kills.
When we’re calling it “climate change,” it seems as though we’re not holding the industries and the people responsible for the increasingly apocalyptic moment we’re faced with accountable. They seem missing from the routine climate conversation, which is weird … and probably by design. They are absent from most media report or conversation, which is rather convenient for those industries and our broader capitalist system of extraction and exploitation. When, for example, media reported on orange-haze creating, bad-Air Quality Index inducing wildfires from Canada, they were simply called the “Canadian wildfires.” That put blame on Canada for creating wildfires that were not that country’s fault - Canada didn’t light that match. Blame, however, for that event falls squarely on the intense heat created by pollution. Full stop. These were really “pollution wildfires” in Canada.
Pollution is what kills. Calling it “climate” keeps the language a bit amorphous and unclear; it blames the phenomenon on the climate itself or on Mother Nature, as if the climate is causing the change. In some ways, that may bolster the arguments of so-called climate skeptics engaged in disinformation that these unprecedented and desctructive weather patterns are simply the result of the Earth itself undergoing its own form of change or entering a new “Age.” Clearly, science shows us that what’s happening is human-triggered industrial activity prompting global acid reflux.
Public conversations need be clear on that. That conversation should start now on what we need to start calling this moment. If we’re calling it everything else but the pollution apocalypse that it is, we’re simply not pointing to or calling out the real culprits. That’s the slow approach. We don’t have time for that. We do have time for a strategy that moves us closer to getting something done.