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Continuing from part one, here is part two of a two-part series on fixing climate communications.
Winston Churchill: “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
If it is a truism that age and experience bring perspective, then, as someone who is 50+ and has run an agency in the climate and sustainability industry for 20 years, I should have it in droves. My ability to zoom out and take a perspective on the climate industry has also been shaped by its roller-coaster nature: the booms and busts, the promising springs and the desolate winters. One of the many lessons I have gained from living through industry cycles is the industry’s rhetorical absurdity of describing the same projects, technologies, and investments by a dizzying array of names and acronyms. In my two decades of working in climate, I have seen the industry refer to itself as clean tech, climate tech, ESG, energy transition, sustainability, decarbonization, efficiency, and now resilience. The work didn’t shift, but the way the climate community told the story did, and in hindsight, to poor effect.
The climate communications playbook has followed a predictable arc. When I started, the industry was about innovation, so the nomenclature was cleantech or climate tech. At some point in the late 2010s, ESG, a tidy acronym that bundled environmental, social, and governance considerations into a single investment lens, emerged as the organizing framework. And of course, we are now living through the backlash, and “ESG” is now a political third rail, particularly in the United States, where it has been recast as ideological overreach. So now, I think, we are back to sustainability, a term that was reminiscent of the 1970s and assumed to be broader, softer, harder to attack. Except it is easy to attack. Then 2024 hit, and the cycle accelerated in ways even veteran observers didn’t anticipate.
