This guilt-based system of believing our individual choices are what’s needed to save the world will exhaust us. And when we’re exhausted, when we feel like we’ve done everything we can and it still wasn’t enough, it’s more tempting than not to just throw in the towel and, to paraphrase the prophet Isaiah, think “I might as well just eat, drink, take great vacations, and drive a giant SUV, right? If we’re all going down, why not enjoy the trip?”
So if you feel that, remind yourself—as I have to remind myself, too—that what really counts, what really carries the weight, is when we know we can act, and we share that sense of efficacy with others. That’s how social contagion begins.
“Look at the world around you,” Malcolm Gladwell says in The Tipping Point. “It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.” And in what direction do we want to tip it? As my colleague Michael Mann wrote in his 2019 TIME essay, “Lifestyle Changes Aren’t Enough to Save the Planet”:
We don’t need to ban cars; we need to electrify them (and we need that electricity to come from clean energy). We don’t need to ban burgers; we need climate-friendly beef. To spur these changes, we need to put a price on carbon, to incentivize polluters to invest in these solutions.…
Focusing on individual choices around air travel and beef consumption heightens the risk of losing sight of the gorilla in the room: civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of global carbon emissions. We need systemic changes that will reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, whether or not they care.
That’s why the single most important thing that I do, and that you can do, too, has nothing to do with solar panels, or food, or recycling, or lightbulbs. The most important thing every single one of us can do about climate change is talk about it—why it matters, and how we can fix it—and use our voices to advocate for change within our spheres of influence. As a parent, child, family member, or friend; student, employee, or boss; shareholder, stakeholder, member, or citizen: connecting with one another is how we change ourselves, how we change others, and ultimately, how we change the world. It’s contagious.
20 WHY TALKING MATTERS
“If norms lead people to silence themselves, status quo can persist. But one day, someone challenges the norm. After that small challenge, others may begin to see what they think. Once that happens, a drip can become a flood.”
CASS SUNSTEIN, HOW CHANGE HAPPENS
“The majority of people were eager to commence our discussion.”
HOWARD FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA
Climate solutions are complex and multifaceted. Our response to the challenges climate change poses to our world, our identity, and our way of life are even more so. It’s taken a whole book even to begin to untangle them. But the first, crucial step forward is simple. For you, for me, for every single person reading or listening to this book, there is one simple thing that we can all do:
Talk about it.
A year or so ago I was reminded of how powerful this can be. I’d just finished a talk at the London School of Economics and was heading up the aisle of the underground lecture hall when an older man named Glyn approached me. He said that he lived in Wandsworth, a borough of London, and had taken the train in specifically to hear me speak. He’d watched my TED Talk called The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Fight Climate Change Is Talk About It, and it had inspired him to have conversations about climate change with people in the borough where he lived.
I was amazed. Hearing that something I’ve done has made a difference—even just to one person—is why I do what I do. I sometimes get discouraged, and his words meant more to me than he knew. But Glyn wasn’t done yet.
He’d started keeping a record of all the people who’d joined in with these conversations, he said. “Would you like to see the list?” he asked.
“Of course!” I said, surprised. I’d never heard anything like that before.
He reached in his leather satchel and pulled out a stack of papers. I’d been expecting about seventy or eighty names. But his list recorded over ten thousand names. Now it’s upwards of twelve thousand (I checked back in with him before writing this). Twelve thousand conversations about climate change in a single English city borough, all because of one man watching one TED Talk about how important it is that we talk about why climate change matters to us and what we can do about it.
And that wasn’t all. His borough had just voted to declare a climate emergency, he said—because of the conversations they’d had. Now, two years on, they’ve also divested from fossil fuels, invested in renewables, and just before COVID they announced they’d be spending £20 million on their new environment and sustainability strategy.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DON’T TALK
You can do what Glyn did: use your voice to talk about why climate change matters to you, here and now. Use it to share what you are doing, what others are doing, what they can do. Use it to advocate for change at every level—in your family, your school, your organization, your place of work or worship, your city or your town, your state or your province. Use it to vote and to inform decisions your school, your business, your city, and your country can make. Talk about it in every community that you are part of and whose values and interests you share.
Talking may sound simple, almost too simple. But here’s the thing: most of us are not doing it. Even people who are alarmed and concerned about climate change tend to “self-silence” on the topic, says Nathan Geiger, a communications researcher. They want to speak up, and they know it’s important, but they can’t get the words out of their mouths.
Nathan decided to study environmental educators. These are people who are trained in communication and whose job it is to talk to the public. He found even they often hesitate to talk about climate change. And not doing so has repercussions for them; serious ones, he discovered. Many of them say they suffer from “severe psychological distress,” he writes, “as a result of not being able to connect with others by discussing a topic about which they report concern.”
How do the rest of us compare? According to polling data from the Yale Climate Communication Program, when people across the U.S. are asked, “Do you discuss global warming at least occasionally?” the answer was mostly no. Only 35 percent of people discuss it even once in a while.
What do we talk about? Things we care about. Our speech is the television screen of our mind, so to speak. It displays what we’re thinking about to others, which in turn connects us to their minds and thoughts. So if we don’t talk about climate change, why would anyone around us know that we care—or begin to care themselves if they don’t already? And if they don’t care, why would they act?
Don’t be afraid of sounding like a broken record. We learn things from hearing them, again and again. As health and communication researcher Ed Maibach has been saying to anyone who will listen for the last twenty years, “the most effective communication strategies are based on simple messages, repeated often, by many trusted messengers.” In other words, the eighth time you’ve said something, people will just be paying attention. What do people pay attention to most? In general, we tend to favor personal stories and experiences over reams of data or facts. In fact, when you hear a story, neuroscientists have found, your brain waves start to synchronize with those of the storyteller. Your emotions follow. And that’s how change happens.
QUOTE SURPRISING SOURCES
Sharing a story about what an influential or a surprising person or group of people are doing about climate change can be a good conversation starter, and there are plenty to choose from. They can be religious leaders, such as the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Dalai Lama, or the more than eighty Muslim leaders who signed the Islamic Declaration on Climate Change, or one of the more than twenty thousand Young Evangelicals for Climate Action across the U.S. They can also be politicians whom people trust—although thes
e seem to be an endangered species of late. And they can even be celebrities. Although you may be skeptical of someone who lives a high-flying life and then touts the need for climate action and carbon cuts, at least they are using their large platform to raise awareness for good.
Business leaders are often perceived to be hardheaded and practical, with an eye to the bottom line. So when someone like Alan Jope, CEO of the large multinational corporation Unilever, says that “any companyI that hasn’t already got a net-zero ambition of some sort should be ashamed of themselves,” as he did on a podcast he and I did with the World Economic Forum in September 2020; or Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, sets a net zero goal for Microsoft, commits his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels, and says, “As awful as the COVID pandemic is, climate change could be worse,” many who respect their business acumen and financial success will listen.
Military officials can speak with authority to threats, and hearing what they think can often carry weight. In 2013, for example, when North Korea annulled their 1953 armistice with South Korea, the chief of U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear III, was asked what he thought was the biggest threat to the security of the Pacific. He didn’t say North Korea or a nuclear attack. Instead, he said, “Climate change.” Why does the military think climate change is a threat? “Drought and severe storms are triggering mass refugee migrations while devastated areas could become breeding grounds for terrorists,” says retired air force general Ron Keys. “We need to protect ourselves from these risks. This has to be everybody’s fight.”
Doctors and health-care professionals are widely trusted on health-related issues, and that’s exactly what climate change is. Amanda Millstein is a primary care pediatrician in California. She treats kids whose asthma flares up when air pollution spikes during heat waves and wildfire smoke turns the skies an apocalyptic orange. “Climate change is about health, and specifically the health of our children. Your children,” she says. So, speak up and advocate for change, in your community, your school, your company, and beyond. She continues, “COVID will eventually end. There is no vaccine for climate change.”
SHARE WHAT SCIENTISTS SAY
As much as we complain about the weather, it is one of our most frequent topics of conversation, and we usually trust our local forecaster. It turns out their opinions on climate change can carry some weight, too. But first, some of them have to be convinced. In a survey he ran in 2010, Ed Maibach found that only a third of TV weather forecasters in the U.S. accepted that climate change is human-caused. So he teamed up with the American Meteorological Society and Climate Central, a nonprofit climate news organization, to change that. That same year, they founded Climate Matters. It’s a training and resource program that helps meteorologists learn about and report on local climate impacts. They began with one man: Jim Gandy, a broadcast meteorologist in Columbia, South Carolina. Ten years later, nearly one thousand media meteorologists participate in Climate Matters across almost five hundred local television stations.
Did it make a difference? Yes. In media markets where the weather forecasters were part of Climate Matters, people’s awareness of the risks posed by climate change increased, even after just listening to a short six-minute segment. This program also changed the forecasters’ minds. A follow-up study ten years later found that the majority of U.S. broadcast meteorologists now agree that climate is changing and humans are responsible.
You can also tell people what scientists are saying. After all, we are the ones studying this thing, and we know that climate change is real, humans are responsible, the impacts are serious, and the time to act is now. Many scientists who engage the public have already been convinced of the severity of climate change for some time, and are speaking out. There’s Canadian geneticist David Suzuki; Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery; American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson; and British primatologist Jane Goodall, who inspired me as a child. I curate a list of over three thousand scientists on Twitter who study climate, and I get questions from other scientists all the time about wanting to do more outreach.
Scientists care about climate change, and most of us want to talk about it. But even with all that we know and all the passion we have about this topic, we scientists aren’t the most effective messengers on climate change. We’re number two.
YOU’RE THE BEST MESSENGER
As effective as religious leaders or physicians or scientists can be, it turns out that the very best person to talk about climate change, the most trusted messenger when it comes to contentious and divisive issues, is not them. It’s not me. It’s you.
Yes, you. Someone who understands why this issue matters, who shares the same values, who cares about them—you are the perfect person to have this conversation with the people in your life.
Immediately, the “buts” raise their hands. But I’m not a scientist. But I don’t know enough about it. But it’s too overwhelming. But I can’t cope with another depressing, frustrating conversation. But I’m not the right type of person to talk about this. Someone else can do it.
All of these “buts” are based on one big misconception: that the only way to have a conversation about climate change is to explain—or argue about—the science and to overwhelm people with the avalanche of bad news, starting with the most Dismissive person you know. Trust me, I’ve tried that approach. If talking more science would fix this, I can talk science with the best of them. As for Dismissives, though they may be the loudest voices, hundreds of attempts have taught me that conversations with the seven-percenters are largely fruitless.
Does that mean that the facts and the science don’t matter? Of course not. As I argued in Section 2, facts explain how our world works, and most of us like to know that. Facts also make us sit up and pay attention. They address the questions we have and provide solid answers to myths we might have heard.
But facts about the science are not enough to explain why climate change matters and why it’s so urgent that we fix it. We need more. We need to understand how climate change matters to us, personally, and what we can do about it in our own lives. And you, not I, are the expert on that.
HERE’S HOW TO START
Often at this point I hear, “I’m willing to talk, but where can I find people to talk to? Everyone I know agrees with me so there’s no point talking about it.”
I strongly suspect that’s not true: if we don’t talk about climate change much, how do we really know how people around us feel about it? Maybe they are Concerned or Alarmed, but they are anxious and don’t know what to do. Maybe they lack a sense of personal or communal efficacy. Maybe they are Cautious, and they’re not sure why it matters to them. In any of those cases, talking is a good idea.
Behavioral scientist Meaghan Guckian has some ideas. She noticed people who cared about it weren’t talking about climate change and decided to devote her doctoral dissertation to figuring out what might get them to open up.
Create opportunities to interact with people, she says. You’ll never know what people really think about climate change unless you ask.
As I was originally writing this very page, someone who works at an environmental nonprofit organization in Canada pinged me. “Hey Katharine,” she said, “your TED Talk inspired our friend Howard to talk to strangers about the climate crisis. Here’s his story!”
Howard had recently retired from being the director of Youth Justice for British Columbia’s Public Service Department, but he didn’t want to stop helping people. So he decided he’d talk to people while on his weekly runs through the grounds of Royal Roads University in Victoria. It’s a gorgeous campus built in an old growth forest of towering Douglas firs and red cedars.
Being nervous at approaching total strangers (as we all would be), he took a leaf out of the book How to Have Impossible Conversations. He posed a simple poll to them: on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “Climate change is not an important issue in the world” and 10 being “Climate change represents the greate
st challenge facing the Earth today,” what number would you choose? Sometimes he’d also ask if there were anything that might make them change their mind.
Only a few people gave brief responses, he said. Most were eager to talk. Many gave a score of 8 or more, some even choosing 11 or 12. “When it came to families, children often prompted their parents to select a higher number,” he said. Others dug deeper, disclosing their personal angst over their dependence on the fossil fuels that are causing the problem, the fact that they’d chosen not to have children due to the uncertain future, their conflict with family members employed in the Alberta oil patch, or how climate change was exacerbating other areas of personal stress in their lives.
This experience taught Howard many things—and if we all engaged in a similar exercise, we’d probably see them, too. First, he learned that people were eager to talk. Second, it was possible to disagree but remain respectful and constructive—easier, often, when you were total strangers rather than close family members. And lastly, everyone had something to share—concerns and solutions, too. “I was able to use what I learned to engage family members and friends in climate crisis conversations,” he said, “which to date have gone well.”
WHY THESE CONVERSATIONS MATTER
Look for opportunities to work together with people on climate solutions. This does double duty. It helps us understand that—both individually and collectively—we can make a difference. But while you’re working with like-minded people, also talk with them. Discuss why climate change matters, what you’re worried about, how what you’re doing can make a difference, and how you might bring more people on board.
Talking about climate does matter; the results can be very powerful. In social-science-speak, your response efficacy is high. Connecting with people over genuinely shared values reaches directly into our hearts, past the barriers of “them” and “us” that we’ve erected. We can identify with one another over something that matters to us deeply and defines who we are. That makes it the perfect place to start the conversation. But that’s not all.
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