This piece is in response to Charlotte Horler’s LinkedIn post titled “We’ve got a marketing problem” [on climate change messaging]. The post can be found here: https://bit.ly/3NONsJg
Your (Charlotte Horler’s) concern is founded but don’t you think mainstream media have already showcased the paucity of actions to roll back climate change?
The question is: where is the magnitude or threshold? It’s clearly in what is going wrong. It’s in why drought is killing people in the Horn of Africa and exacerbating conflict in the Sahel. It’s in the floods ripping through parts of Asia. Such magnitude is lacking in the scale of solutions being proffered, in spite of all the international mobilisation. Paris (COP21), though not playing out successfully, would not have morphed out of a hope doctrine.
Besides oddity and conflict, threshold is journalism’s most observed news value. Human beings love to watch and listen to horror and cliff-hangers stories. Tension and the appeal to negative emotions is what made Hollywood profitable. I think in marketing, the appeal to people’s emotions of fear and desire captures more than the appeal to their hope (unfortunately). Scarcity (of a supposedly limited new edition) is the one marketing technique the big players in tech are using to rake in profit. Scarcity appeals to FOMO (the “fear of missing out” emotion). The scarcity of action towards resolving climate change is what’s played out here. Do we really want to heap the blame on the messenger?
The above question brings me to this: who are in the main audience for climate action messages? Governments and the rich owners of modes of production (the “one percenters”). They’ve all got the message. Unfortunately, the one percenters wield power over Governments in our neoliberal formation. The issue is – they who wield power to change modes of production don’t want to go green because they surmise it’s not yet profitable to do so.
And as you say, they are creating “green tech” out of “brown bases”. The 99 percenters (those who are being overburdened with gloomy messaging around climate change) can only do so much.
Even if every media story around climate change for the next two years focuses on the actions being taken to roll back global warming in productive modes (e.g. the UK Government outlawing the production of brown energy cars by 2030), how would it help the citizenry (with no capital) to swing into action for change? In this conjunction, production holds sway over consumption.
In the melee, what happens to environmental/climate justice – the principle that people in the Global South are bearing the brunt of extreme weather events, over a problem they hardly created (but for which they’ve offered their forests and peatlands to sequester carbon), and should be compensated?
How does sounding positive over the big polluting countries’ reluctance to pay for climate inequities visited on those vulnerable nations, help their plight and address those relations of inequality?
What happens to disadvantaged groups – such as women and coloured people – whose habitat and livelihoods are destroyed by big transnational business, causing them to flee to the verges of disaster where they come face to face with the climate “beasts” as floods, etc.? How would these people watching stories of hope, though the stories are few and far between, get succour?
And talking about people … the 99 percenters who need a break from these depressing stories (you’ve rightly called out), many of them now take videos of oddity-satisfying news to post on social media. What’s the difference between this human instinct for oddity and media storylines? None! As a professional with cultural/media studies background, I’ve also hoped for a poetic and happy journalism. But if it’s not oddity or entertainment, who cares about the content?
I won’t fault the discourse of pro climate action activists and the media. I would fault the loud denial of a handful who wield power over modes production. The message has been heard. The listeners are not yet ready. What to do? Pamper them with messages of hope when, in fact, they need to swing into the action that would constitute the new storyline?
Messages of solutions being rolled out must be broadcast. But with the carbon budget to remain within 1.5 degrees Celsius ebbing away with every passing day, how do we sweep the observation of despair under the blanket of hope, while those with the power to effect change, keep driving in the opposite direction ? Whipping with ten sticks and consoling with one carrot , seems to be a fair ratio for the ongoing game.