Climate-change activists should take some lessons from the mismanagement and miscommunication surrounding the pandemic. In both cases, people across the political spectrum feel helpless in the face of the problem. In both cases, experts need to figure out how to get people to overcome these feelings and act.
True, they aren’t perfect parallels; climate-change action faces a hurdle that hasn’t come up in the pandemic: a powerful fossil fuel lobby that’s been clever and influential, seeding public doubts about the science behind climate change. Still, climate-change denial is becoming rarer all the time, according to a survey released in April. It shows more than half of Americans believe human activity is causing climate change, and 64% say they are worried about it.
That study comes from George Mason University and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, founded by Anthony Leiserowitz. He says both COVID and climate change suffer from what he calls a lack of efficacy. Leiserowitz has looked at how public perception of the climate problem has evolved over the years. To keep up motivation to pitch in, he said, people need a sense that they can do something that’s effective — something that makes a true difference.
With the pandemic, people are feeling “done with COVID” in part because they expended so much energy on things that, in retrospect, didn’t have much efficacy — from disinfecting mail to keeping kids out of playgrounds to attempting to jog in masks.
With climate change, the problem of emissions is so big people don’t know where to start. Everything we do and eat and buy leads to carbon emissions. “We have much more work to be done on that side,” Leiserowitz said.