On science, Apollo program, and civil rights

I was searching for the recent Time interview with Obama the other day (yeah, the one where he says energy should be his #1 priority), when I stumbled across an article titled “What the Public Doesn’t Get about Climate Change” by Bryan Walsh. The article was an excellent review a recent article in Science by John Sterman. Sterman documents what many of us know by now – scientists have been terrible at effectively messaging the climate crisis. Even smart, expert MIT students don’t really “get it” – that carbon sticks around in the atmosphere for a long time and that we need to be drastically reducing CO2 emissions rather than merely stabilizing them. We’ve known that climate change has suffered from a messaging problem for quite some time. Climate change consistently polls at the bottom of issue rankings, although one might argue that energy and economy are sufficient proxies. Walsh’s piece cites, a 2007 survey by the U.N. Development Programme that found “54% of Americans advocate taking a “wait and see” approach to climate-change action.” Wait and see! Yikes!

The next line in the chain of argument often goes that the correct messaging frame is one of an Apollo/Manhattan/Marshall program for energy independence. Through a message of massive public investment, this positivist, progressive message supposedly hearkens the can-do American spirit. The Apollo metaphor has become the basis for both major presidential candidate’s energy platforms, the basis of an entire organization – the Apollo Alliance, and a message of many social groups, like the We Campaign.

Although almost an aside in the piece, Sterman makes an excellent response to the Apollo metaphor.

Instead of a new Manhattan Project — the metaphor often used for global warming — Sterman believes that what is needed is closer to a new civil rights movement, a large-scale campaign that dramatically changes the public’s beliefs and behaviors. “[T]he reality is that this is even more difficult than civil rights,” says Sterman. “Even that took a long time, and we don’t have that kind of time with the climate.”

Many other environmental groups, and many on It’s Getting Hot in Here, have compared the climate crisis to civil rights before, but now more than ever, I think it’s time to think about what this statement means. Is an Apollo program to re-technologize America going to reduce our CO2 emissions the amount needed? And is the Apollo mantra really messaging climate and energy better, or just hiding them? Can we really build a clean energy economy if the general public doesn’t understand what the impetus and implications of that clean energy economy is?