Author: Steve McGrath

One person will die today because of climate change

Climate change could wipe us out someday. That’s the story line, yet it doesn’t seem to be resonating on a broad scale. The truth is climate change is already killing us – if by us you mean humans on this planet.

According to a new report,

  •  350,000 individuals die every year as a result of climate change we’ve already experienced;
  • More than 99 percent of the mortality is occurring in developing countries;
  • 5 million will die over the next 10 years if we don’t change;
  • Nearly 1 million will die every year starting in 2030 if action isn’t taken; and
  • Climate change drains $150 billion from the global economy every year.

The report, by DARA and the Climate Vulnerable Forum, reflects death due to climate-related diseases and weather disasters; loss of habitat due to rising seas and desertification; and economic stress, including loss of natural resources.

How you receive these stats depends heavily on what you believed about climate change prior to reading this post. But even if you’ve bought in to the idea that climate change is occurring and is perilous, big numbers have a way of overshooting emotions.

The truth is we care more about individual suffering than group suffering. It’s human nature. That’s because of the way people regulate their emotions, according to another new study, out of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “People expect the needs of large groups to be potentially overwhelming,” the authors write. “As a result, they engage in emotion regulation to prevent themselves from experiencing overwhelming levels of emotion.”

So when you read the stats, don’t picture 350,000 people dying. That’s a data point. Picture the suffering of just one person – say, an infant – starving to death because the local farmland has dried into a brick.

Football, Fritos and the killer analogy

If you’ve got good stats to back up the value of your clean technology product, congratulations.

Quantifying the benefits your product delivers – e.g., pollution reduced, revenue generated, costs lowered, or time saved – can make a big difference to the communities you are trying to engage. Great stats, however, only work when the context is clear. How much is, say, 37 percent? 10 tons? A nanoliter? Compared to what?

To deliver that context and drive home the impact of your numbers, try drawing a simple, concrete analogy. That’s exactly what Reno Contracting of San Diego did a couple of weeks ago with a news release that began…

Reno Contracting has recycled more than 60,000 tons of waste from construction projects since the beginning of 2009, accounting for an average 72% of construction debris diverted from going to a landfill.

Great stats, but did they not get a lot better when the analogy kicked in?

This amount is the equivalent of three football fields, each 100 feet deep.

… and when the analogy was reinforced by this simple graphic?

While 60,000 tons of waste and 72 percent diversion are impressive, they operate on the cerebral level. Football field imagery, coming in the heat of playoffs for the country’s most popular sport, adds emotional impact.

So valuable is emotion that we’re in New England blogging about a West coast construction firm after seeing news that somehow caught the eye of Inhabitat, which gets 100,000 readers a day. Although I have no way of proving it, I think the football fields comparison made all the difference between obscurity and publication by one of the world’s premier green blogs. Okay, two, including us ;).

Ten days later, the Boston Globe rolled out three tangible comparisons in a front page story about coins that went missing in an armored car transfer. The coins weigh 4,317 pounds, equivalent to an average hippopotamus. Stacked, they’d be three times taller than the city’s iconic Hancock Tower. And, in case you hadn’t heard about the NFL championship tournament, the coins weigh more than the starting linemen of the two Super Bowl teams. There were graphics for all three of these analogies. Pounds are abstract. Analogies deliver emotional, or at least sensory, impact.

A client of ours offers up high-impact comparisons like these through their software. The product’s main function is performing forward-looking environmental impact assessments on manufactured goods while they’re still in the design stage. The software measures carbon, energy, air and water impacts of a design, not only in the straight-up metrics you’d expect, but also in their layman’s equivalents, such as:

Energy consumption – hours of TV watching, light bulb burning, laptop operation

Carbon production – miles driven (European car, American car, hybrid)

Air impact – liters of sulfuric acid created, Kg of corn grain produced in the USA, and (my favorite) bags of corn chips produced

Water impact – Deep ponds depleted, shallow ponds depleted, Kg of corn grain produced in the US.

Take your pick. If you can say your clean technology product can do the equivalent of taking 10,000 cars off the road, unscrewing 30,000 light bulbs and preventing 50,000 ponds from drying up, people will listen.

What other effective comparisons have you seen?

Mother Nature has gone off message

Forty-nine of our 50 states have snow on the ground – even Hawaii, says CNN – and we in the Northeast are getting dumped on. We’ve got official emergency declarations, National Guard activations, power outages, car crashes, flight cancellations and closings of just about every kind of operation that has a choice. It’s hard to worry about global warming today.

But just in case you were out shoveling and missed it:

  • We (or rather our descendants) are going to be living for the next 1,000 years with the adverse effects of the CO2 we’ve already generated – even if we could somehow halt fossil fuel use today. That’s according to a study just published in Nature Geoscience.

So if you go outside today, bundle up – and pray for a way to stay cool.

We care less about the climate

Or so it seems. As the planet heats up, global media coverage of the climate is down. Journalists published 23,156 climate-related stories in English last year, down 30 percent from 2009’s count, according to DailyClimate.org.

The new UN climate agreement in Cancun was largely ignored, at least compared with the 2009 edition in Copenhagen. That‘s the one that brought us the Climategate scandal, which set carbon consciousness back decades. Daily Climate says the December 2010 Cancun conference got a mere 10 seconds of airtime on the major network news.

The public just doesn’t seem to care like it used to. Or is it the media?

One thing stifling effective climate coverage is newsroom “tyrannies,” including those of limited time and space, of balance, and of the required “peg” or hook to justify a story’s urgency, says New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin.

‘Bo-ho-ho-ring’

There’s another tyranny, adds a Dot Earth commenter: The Tyranny of Boredom. “What about the simple fact that climate is quite possibly the most boring subject the science world has ever had to present to the public?” Randy Olson asks. “This stuff is bo-ho-ho-ring.”

If boring, it’s also complex. Consider the fact that December 2010 was the United Kingdom’s coldest since nationwide records began in 1910, and it was central England’s second coldest December since 1659. Now that’s a news hook. But being of the man-bites-dog variety, it muddies the waters, undermining the general understanding that global temperatures are, in fact, trending up.

(Eco-jargon compounds the boredom, complexity and confusion. Sustainability, for example,is one of Advertising Age‘s top 10 “jargoniest” pieces of jargon in 2010. “The term is a good concept gone bad by mis- and overuse. It’s come to be a squishy, feel-good catchall for doing the right thing.”)

In all of these cases, the “right” side of the argument is simply drowned out. A wind power company in the UK notes that 66 percent of survey respondents living near its controversial project actually support its proposed massive turbines while only 12 percent oppose them. But you’d never know it. Said the wind power company’s CEO, “We see this too often, the small loud minority being mistaken for the voice of the people.” (via Treehugger)

A new communications weapon

Concerned climate environmentalists and scientists are hoping to penetrate the ennui and reignite passion for their cause through “mind bombs,” writes Der Spiegel’s Axel Bjanowski. Mind bombs distill a cause into a highly emotional image, such as Greenpeace’s famous bleeding whale (image above), and drive a core message home. But photos of polar bears on ice, violent storms, turbines, or hockey stick graphs have been mind duds. They just aren’t working.

Other new communications strategies might include:

Sexy ads, e.g., a good-looking researcher in a bathing suit in the Arctic

  • Enlisting scientists to do their own journalism
  • Thinking smaller, i.e., focusing on a single, discrete facet of the climate problem and engaging a target audience to act
  • Anointing a new Al Gore
  • Establishing dedicated channels and processes for communicating important climate findings. (via Der Spiegel)

My hunch is that climate interest will largely hinge on the mind bombs. Two sets of birds falling from the sky – sad but not climate-related – are insignificant in the great scheme of things, but they generated massive interest this week. Meanwhile, a truly nuclear mind bomb, the BP spill, has an astonishingly short half-life in the public consciousness.

Climate change is the most important question of our generation: How can we amplify the silent ticking of the most devastating bomb of all, so that we compel the world to disarm it?

Admit flaws to achieve perfect tone

Rhetoricians call it “arguing against interest.” In simple terms, it’s a good way to build credibility fast. You readily admit a weakness in yourself or your argument to actually advance your larger case. I swear to you, your honor, I had no role in the killing of which I’m accused. I was out of state, uh, delivering a shipment of drugs. This mechanism causes the audience to wonder, who but an honest-to-God truth teller would disclose something so damning?

Arguing against interest can be a powerful tool for building brand credibility. Look at Domino’s Pizza, now publicly admitting their old pizza was terrible. Or Dos Equis: What, the Most Interesting Man in the World doesn’t always drink beer? This is a beer commercial!

What makes arguing against interest so powerful is its stark contrast against the vast majority of communication that argues, often lamely, in its own interest. Ads, websites, press releases and corporate blogs dump buckets of overstated goodness on a cringing consumer. You know, if you buy the right camera, you’ll shoot National Geographic quality images. With the right diamond necklace, you’ll be back on your honeymoon, and with a fabulous spouse.

Not saying such images aren’t seductive, but overstatement is the Achilles heel of marketers who are mired in old-school corporate communications. While gilding the lily has never been a great persuasion technique, today’s audiences despise it. They are sophisticated, discriminating and skeptical, if not cynical, driven largely by social media.

Case in point
A wonderful example of a brand arguing against interest to deepen credibility is Patagonia, the maker of outdoor apparel for skiers, rock climbers and campers (it’s like a crunchy Timberland). They’re not just sprinkling their content with a few aw shucks asides, they’re actually building their brand around a concept that, at first glance, is directly opposed to their own goal of making money.

The company’s Common Threads Initiative is urging customers to buy less clothing, wear it longer, repair it instead of throwing it away, and when it’s worn out, hand it back to Patagonia for reuse or recycling.

… to wrest the full life out of every piece of our clothing, the first three of the famous four R’s are equally important – to reduce, repair and reuse as well as recycle.

Under reduce, the company is calling on consumers to “buy what you’ll wear, and want to keep long enough to wear out” in order to “get by with fewer clothes.”

Under repair, it’s offering to fix zippers for free if the garment has enough life left in it.

(The company already has a recycling program that’s collected 39 tons of used clothes.)

This initiative is like General Motors telling you to drive your clunker into the ground because it’s the right thing to do. Of course, Patagonia is a for-profit business and commercial brand. So their larger goal with the Common Threads Initiative, one assumes, is to deepen customer loyalty, reduce raw material costs, and put a noble face on plain ol’ customer service (I mean, they’re probably going to fix zippers anyway).

Deep in the content
All this is clearly a flavor of cause branding, but Patagonia is taking it to the next level with a generous dose of argument against interest throughout its public content. For example, Patagonia recently underwent a corporate social responsibility (CSR) audit. A nonprofit watchdog organization took a hard look at their operations. Patagonia blogged about the audit in great detail. The post mentions a couple of instances of where the company fell short in the review (arguing against interest). They even admit they’re a founder of the group that was auditing them. Who even blogs about audits, much less the negative findings and conflicts of interest? Now you might be asking, where’s the marketing value in this? What comes through is not Patagonia’s warts, but its seriousness about being green and transparent. It’s as authentic as you can ever expect communications to get. And utterly believable.

Another example: In writing about the new Common Threads Initiative, Patagonia talks about its five-year-old recycling program, whose goal was to make all Patagonia clothes recyclable within five years. “This we will achieve in fall 2011,” Patagonia writes, “a year behind schedule.” Another argument against interest. This line is just sitting there in the copy, no excuses, no tortured transitions, just a fact. You make the call. This kind of statement is convincing.

Patagonia has a minisite, The Footprint Chronicles, that drills into the origin of Patagonia garments. Click on the Merino 2 Crew sweater and learn that the wool is sustainably ranched, the dye is okay, and the factory is okay,  but the wool travels 16,280 miles from sheep to store. “This is not sustainable,” the Patagonia website tells us. Who says this about their own supply chain? Nobody. In how many instances is it true? All the time, presumably. Patagonia cares so much about getting it right they readily admit what they’re still getting wrong.

In another Patagonia post, a blogger admits his orthopedic problems ruined his climbing adventure. One would expect tales of glory. But while Nike has LeBron and UGG Under Armour has Tom Brady, here’s Patagonia speaking through a guy whose arm keeps dropping out of his shoulder socket.

If all this arguing against interest sounds like overkill, it’s only because we’re calling out the exceptions to the rest of the Patagonia content, which as you would expect is generally favorable to the company. But this positive content is all the more believable next to a few well-conceived arguments against interest.

By acknowledging that’s nobody’s perfect, starting with yourself, you can strike the perfect note.

Fossil fuels = slavery?

If you have any doubt about the power of messaging, consider how we talk about renewable energy.

If you want someone to oppose renewable energy, talk about dollars. If you want someone to embrace renewable energy, try comparing fossil fuel use to slavery. Point out how our stubborn consumption parallels history’s reluctance to relinquish the most horrifically cost-effective of all labor.

Dollars: The New York Times just published a withering story on how the relatively high cost of renewable energy is delaying and scuttling wind and solar projects. By cost, we mean the price you pay a utility for power generated by that means. In this light, renewables are a luxury we can’t afford. (Of course, rates never account for the long-term cost of climate change, including health care impacts, nor God forbid, ecocide. Nor do they account for the cost, in dollars and lives, of foreign wars to keep our oil coming.)

Now consider slavery: That’s right. Purely economic arguments sustained slavery, as they do unfettered fossil fuel consumption, long after it should have ended, University of Michigan Professor Andy Hoffman points out. Hundreds of businesses had vested interests in the continuation of slavery. Apologists for slavery warned that abolition would end our “way of life” and crush the economy. They argued for self-regulation and quotas under the premise that capping the quantity of enslaved human beings would somehow mitigate the disgrace.

You see parallel arguments today in the crusading defense of ratepayers against even the slightest increases, the fetishizing of big vehicles (that thing got a Hemi?), and merely token investments in renewables.

Writes Hoffman:

Just as few people saw a moral problem with slavery in the 18th century, few people in the 21st century see a moral problem with the burning of fossil fuels. Will people in 100 years look at us with the same incomprehension we feel towards 18th-century defenders of slavery? If we are to address the problem adequately, the answer to that question must be yes—our common atmosphere will no longer be seen as a free dumping ground for greenhouse gases and other pollutants. (via TreeHugger.com)

True? Melodramatic? Hyperbolic?

Environmental disasters are so yesterday

The media decides what we’ll worry about. Today, that would be the economy, midterm elections, two wars, a tsunami, a new Bin Laden tape and a party drink dubbed “blackout in a can.”

Nothing much on BP these days, so the Gulf of Mexico oil spill must be pretty much taken care of, right?

Not according to this article in USA Today, which reports that:

  • The length of shoreline where oil is present has increased from 287 miles in early July to 320 today.
  • In Bay Jimmy, La., alone, 32,000 gallons of oil were sucked up in a recent 10-day period.
  • Oil, not surprisingly, is clinging tenaciously to marsh grass.
  • Cooler fall and winter weather will thicken the oil and make it harder to extract.
  • Cleanup worker count has dropped by nearly two-thirds, from 47,000 at the height of the spill to 16,200.

The disaster hasn’t gone away, but where’s the media? Well, kudos to USA Today for the above info, and to Frontline for kicking BP’s tail on Tuesday night. But in general, the media follows the conflict, the drama and the fancies of its paying audience to those insipid places we yearn to go. As a result, we’ve moved on from Afghanistan. We’ve moved on from Haiti. And we’ve moved on from the Gulf of Mexico.

To document this catastrophe fatigue, we searched for news stories on “Deepwater Horizon” (the name of the exploded rig and shorthand for the entire debacle) from April 2010 through Wednesday, Oct. 27 at 10:30 EST. Here’s what we found.

As you can see, the media bombards us with stories from April through July. Then the fatigue sets in. Just six months after the worst oil spill in history, the media is practically silent.

But the problems remain. That’s why Sean Penn is still in Haiti. That’s why Billy Nungesser is still in Plaquemines Parish. That’s why BP workers are still cleaning up the oil – some of them, at least.

Meanwhile, the media, drawn by our own insatiable appetite for trifling entertainment, has moved on to … well, Brett Favre’s … ankle.

Can Google save the planet?

Yes, yes it can, if it can do for a malfunctioning ecosystem a fraction of what it’s done for information.

The search giant just invested in an ambitious wind energy backbone for the eastern seaboard. Atlantic Wind Connection aims to collect 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind – enough to serve nearly 2 million households –and deliver it to transmission nodes from New Jersey to Virginia. This project would act as a “superhighway for clean energy,” eliminating the need for every wind farm to string its own lines to shore. This is Google’s second major investment in wind, following investments in solar and geothermal.

Keeping its own house in order, Google has pledged to become carbon neutral. As part of that initiative, it has built energy-efficient data centers, installed solar installations at its offices, and purchased carbon offsets for emissions it can’t prevent. On the demand side, the company has created the Google PowerMeter to help consumers reduce their energy use. Oh, and for what it’s worth, the company uses 200 goats to mow an overgrown field at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

The goats are clever, but what’s really important about Google is its uncanny ability to execute. Google wasn’t the first search engine, but it was the first to actually find what you were looking for. That prompted the world to rebrand the generic verb search (look it up).

Google is the company that put a chink in the armor of the Microsoft Office juggernaut with Google Docs. This is the company that lets you fly to anyplace on their planet (Google Earth) without a plane ticket (you might want to lower your window shades). Then there’s that kooky little site that plays videos.

What’s next? Google Earth Engine will analyze satellite imagery to monitor changes in forest coverage and other environmental bellwethers. Then there are the cars that drive themselves, and the TV that’s also the Internet.

Can Google save the planet? CleanSpeak Google is good. (Google is maybe too good sometimes, at things like managing personal data their servers pick up along the way.) Given Google’s feats, it was heartening to see Google’s wind investment news last week, especially after a withering review in the Boston Globe of the nation’s first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind, which is threatening to come in at $2.5 billion, or 2.5 times the original price estimate. Plenty of other wind projects are also facing strong opposition over cost, use of open land, wildlife impacts, noise and esthetics.

Google is not perfect. Other companies rank higher on greenest company lists, but do you see Dell saving the world? Is HP putting the Dead Sea Scrolls online?

I don’t really know if Google can save the world. I do know the planet isn’t out of the woods yet, and harvesting wind energy on a continental scale would sure be a nice start.

Fragrance fouls provoke protests

Successful marketing draws attention to itself, sometimes drawing a bull’s eye on its own back.

Case in point is Abercrombie & Fitch, which critics claim has been dousing its products, employees and storefronts with a signature cologne that, it turns out, includes a potentially dangerous chemical. Diethyl phthalate has been linked to sperm damage in adult men and abnormal development of reproductive organs in baby boys.

Teens Turning Green marched on Abercrombie’s San Francisco store yesterday, calling the store’s perfume-igation “toxic trespassing.”

“Why,” says TTG’s overly hip video letter to the Abercrombie CEO, “are we overwhelmed by an unwanted and unasked for odor inside and outside your stores, [one] that permeates our clothing, penetrates our lungs, invades our personal space and occupies our personal consciousness. This is unacceptable.”

So, how bad is Abercrombie’s “Fierce” for men? It’s well below the median in a list of popular fragrances containing secret chemicals (not listed on product labels), according to a report by the Environmental Working Group in May. And the chemical in question is already present in 97 percent of Americans.

That tells us the critical factor in making Abercrombie a big, juicy target is apparently the carpet-bomb scent campaign. Allergy sufferers and chemical-sensitive individuals are built-in sympathizers, as well as parents concerned about Abercrombie’s sexualized advertising. Abercrombie is clearly the perfect foil for the Teens, a media-savvy organization with an enviable list of sponsors spreading its outrage Facebook, flickr, YouTube, posters, petitions and more.

They’ve got everything but their own fragrance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhK_yXSaAGg

 

E-waste foes waste no words

What are the right words for these photos of human beings, including children, working and, apparently, living amid electronic waste in the Ghana slum of Agbogbloshie?

Of course, there are none.

These images first appeared in the New York Times Magazine a month ago. I still see them every day, imprinted on every electronic device I see, whether in my pocket, on my desk, in my living room, stuck in my ears or in a chirpy television ad.

The photographer is Pieter Hugo, who writes on his website that the inhabitants have no name for the pit where they burn the old computers to extract metal for resale.

Their response is a reminder of the alien circumstances that are imposed on marginal communities of the world by the West’s obsession with consumption and obsolesce. This wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology.

The slideshow is one of the most effective examples of communication in the interest of cleaner technology that one could ever imagine.

Some 53 million tons of electronic waste was generated worldwide in 2009, according to ABI Research. About 13 percent was recycled. E-waste, along with its hazardous material components, ends up in places like Agbogbloshie – and China, India and Indonesia – mainly because it’s cheaper to smuggle waste to poorer countries than recycle it according to emerging global standards and laws.

“Now we are collecting far more, but they can’t prevent it from going offshore,” Jim Puckett, director of the e-waste watchdog group Basel Action Network told the Times. “People talk about ‘leakage,’ but it’s really a hemorrhage.”

E-waste contains dangerous lead, nickel, cadmium and mercury. In the United States, 23 states have passed mandatory e-waste recycling laws, most of which make electronics manufacturers pay for recycling. Many municipalities also have aggressive recycling programs. Toronto, for example, is promoting its e-waste recycling program with video in stark contrast to Hugo’s photos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Es9tWXZgw

(Are they actors playing schlubs or schlubs playing actors?)

Deliberately grating and based on we-want-your-gold TV ads, the campaign lacks any of the grandeur in the Ghana photographs. In fact, the juxtaposition couldn’t be more jarring. But on its own merits, it’s pretty effective. To be honest, Chuck and Vince cracked me up. But I wasn’t laughing this morning when I left my old computer monitor on the curb.