Bolstering Any Hint Of Climate Leadership

The call for political will gets louder and louder, from every corner and all sectors. I have to believe (rose colored glasses, perhaps) that there are more than a few leaders who’d have the personal values AND what it takes to build and leverage their own niche platforms. But, the majority of these folks have not quite crossed that line into bolder action.

So, let me tell you (anecdotally) what I’ve heard from my clients and my Living Change guests who HAVE been able to step it up. What helped them get there was usually a selection of the following:

• They’ve had a personal experience, often having to do with the world they are leaving for their kids.
• They read one more story about flooding or fires that could easily be impacting their family members across the world.
• They are frustrated by the same-old scripted climate messaging that comes from the communications department of their organization and others.
• They notice that a peer or competitor is speaking up more on climate topics.
• They get jealous of peers who are interviewed on podcasts and have that stage to speak more pointedly.
• They’ve got a stage at an upcoming sustainability event and realize they must USE it.

The list of facts and personal experiences that dig away at them just keeps growing. What these leaders didn’t realize before “going public” was that building some social capital or a footprint of speaking, writing, and engaging with others on these topics in advance of an event or before they pitch media is key.

Starting to engage more and build that social capital then becomes the political capital that bolsters their political will. I really heard about this from the local political leaders I spoke with in Season 1 of Living Change. They had a community of constituents who trusted them after building those online relationships or just being more visible and public about their values. THAT’s why they had something to activate and could counter their fears of getting louder.

I feel like I’m going to close every single one of my newsletter posts with: Let’s just GO, already!

News To Use

On the difference between taking a happy pill or pursuing collective joy. I’ve found the most uplifting times in my life have been while doing group bike rides or at the many KEXP live shows I attend here in Seattle. When you can look to the stranger on your right and left and realize you are all in this glorious moment together, it is bliss. There’s something there for climate advocates and communicators to much better leverage too, I’d argue. Alissa Quart recently wrote about this from the workplace lens in The Guardian, but it can be applied beyond those four walls:

Embracing collective joy may well rest, though, on vanquishing the punishing, singular idea of happiness – that it’s connected to efficiency, a person’s job or even our individual wellbeing. Collective joy, in contrast, is an attempt to alchemize, say, loss or powerlessness into significance, through physical movement, sound and embodied politics.

David Fenton on the climate communication failure. As he notes in his opinion piece for The Hill, for most Americans, climate change is a low priority, so what are we doing wrong? What is missing? Where are the opportunities? And, more important to me, which of these things will catalyze action super-duper quickly?

The climate foundations devote the bulk of their funding to the supply of policy, commissioning studies, think tanks, reports, conferences, etc. Yet, we have no shortage of great policy ideas to solve climate change. What we lack is demand for these policies, otherwise known as political will. No one is yet funding the massive public climate education and mobilization needed at scale that would create it. And it isn’t because of a lack of resources. It just isn’t their worldview. 

I came across a thought-provoking Concept Bureau piece that got me thinking about how climate action leaders and advocates, too, might capitalize on the idea of conspicuous commitment.

Conspicuous commitment gives the broader culture new ways to feel agency and to find genuine meaning in their lives. For the first time in a long time, it feels like something real, like the green shoots of an honest hope. 

What we need most are new models of what a generative, blossoming life looks like. 

Paul Krugman nailed it recently with his perspective on the “vehicular NIMBY-ism” regarding the pushback on the Lincoln Tunnel congestion charge. His thinking could also be applied to how likely even socially conscious people are to change their personal behaviors due to climate change. This is another reason why I think finding the right “aspirational” influencer who IS making said change, and helping message that person’s personal story about how they came to the change could really help. As ever - it’d be the most surprising conversion story (like the super wealthy white, male CEO who uses that tunnel, but somehow caught a climate change clue, and so started to use transit).

My armchair psychology is that even people who are socially conscious about big things — you might even call them woke — lose all sense of proportion in the face of suggestions that the way they live their own lives is problematic and might need to change, even slightly.

Thanks for reading my new Substack! I’m still trying to figure out the flow and what readers may find valuable, so I’d love to hear feedback here or via email. On that note, what are your questions about how to get louder and build your platforms - no matter how small you may think they are - for climate influence? Share those, too!

In the meantime, follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn, where I am most often. I’m done pointing people to the platform I got so much out of in the before-times (RIP), so am exploring other platforms too.