Why common climate messaging backfires

This article fails to mention how much money and effort Big Oil has put into ensuring these misconceptions exist.

Remember the "your personal carbon footprint" marketing push of the early 2000s? Yeah that was paid for and run by Big Oil. They understood that pushing a "liberal" message that was obviously bullshit was a great way to hamstring the conversation, and we're still dealing with the ramifications of that.

Back when climate change was the issue of the day, there was a response I heard. Paraphrased, it's "I won't take climate change seriously until the people who tell me to take climate change seriously take climate change seriously."

For example, instead of climate conferences being virtual, they're held in person and attended by multiple leaders that fly in on private jets.

https://theconversation.com/why-are-people-still-flying-to-c...

People are sensitive to classism during a purported crisis, and so things like that tend to ruin messaging.

I’ve always been bothered by the lack of quantification of impact. If this is really an issue we care about we want to identify the worst behaviors/products and reduce those first. How many plastic straws is starting up a car, etc? How many car starts is an industrial office AC?

Too often this response is met with moral language: “everything counts, you don’t to help?”.

Climate messaging has the deck stacked against it. It requires and even demands that people abandon their skepticism, which tends to sound much like what charlatans and con men ask of you. It has some over-eager people on the left willing to propagandize (polar bear pictures trapped on tiny melting icebergs!) and exaggerate. It even strongly insists on measures that even the dimmest person can recognize as economically disastrous in the short term (which just so happens to be the period of time that people are most concerned with) for very long term benefits to a species that has for the most part decided that it no longer wants a future.

Some will insist that I am wrong on these points, and they're part of the problem.

Can we answer the elephant in the room instead? It's not the messaging. Nothing can be done on the user end, because of Jevon's Paradox [1]. People forget that oil is very cheap, and what we're using it for is profitable, but really quite wasteful, but we don't care, because the price is so low.

A 1 gallon bottle of the cheapest water is $1.5 at Walmart. 1 gallon of refined fuel is $2.6 to $3.6, so let's say on average double the price of the cheapest water you can buy. Unrefined petrol is $68/barrel / 42 gallons/barrel = $1.6 per gallon.

This means the only way to reduce CO2 output is to get oil producing nations to pump up less. Anything else does not make sense. Notably the one thing that appears to come close, artificially raise the price of oil in developed nations, think about it, does not work if it's not the result of supply and demand. Plenty of local interests are served by increasing taxes though, so you will find A LOT of messaging to the contrary. But taxing fuel in the west will not lower global CO2 output. In fact, by making oil exports go to less developed (non-CO2 capturing and even non-complete burning cycle power plants) it makes things worse for the same amount of oil burned.

BUT the IPCC's goal is only to change western policy ("equip western policy makers"). Read the intro to the IPCC reports and you will find this, for example here [2]. Their goal is to get western nations to change their behavior, frankly playing on personal guilt. The policies pushed are aimed at making people feel better about their contribution to climate change, NOT about arresting or even slowing down climate change. For the reasons outlined above this won't change anything. It may redivide oil use between nations, but not reduce it, and more likely it just won't do anything because most oil use is for economic activity.

And that's exactly what you see. Climate change policy has been hard at work, making decisions and interfering in people's lives (in the west), for 50 years now. There has been no useful result in CO2 release (local parties and interests may have been served, but global co2? Not at all). As the IPCC themselves argue: there has been zero effect on CO2 production. The only thing that may be making a dent is Chinese overproduction and dumping of solar panels, and only very recently.

In other words: climate policy within the nations talking about climate policy cannot achieve anything. You could get literally everyone in the US and Europe to agree on reducing climate ... and global CO2 production would not be affected. It's popular, but it cannot work.

Since oil producing nations will never accept real reduction in output where it cuts the income of the top of their societies, actual climate policy ... means forcing oil producing nations to act against their own financial interests, against the will of the top of their societies, against the will of their politicians. It means forcing extremely authoritarian and extremely unequal societies to accept a lot less economic activity (Venezuela is just about the most free large oil producing nation, outside of the US. And it gets a LOT worse than Venezuela). But instead on these forums we're discussing wind power in Southern Utah ... and that's if they're not discussing oil deals. Oil producing nations are the only ones capable of reducing CO2 emissions by themselves and they have made it clear many, many times that they have zero intention to do it, no matter the agreements they sign. They'll happily lie about it, of course [3].

So climate change policy has one option: force oil producing nations to comply. They will not respect agreements, even if you get them to sign them. They need to be forced. That means, at minimum, using the military to stop their ships at sea. To physically blockade Saudi, Venezuelan and Russian ports. Oh, and Russia has already demonstrated that that's not enough: they lit entire shipments of oil on fire, just burning them into the atmosphere for no useful purpose whatsoever, rather than stop pumping.

And since nobody is willing to discuss that there is no climate action. Or at least, there is no realistic climate policy that will limit and/or lower global CO2 emissions, people are just lying. And as the private jets argument points out, very well paid people are lying about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmzvdn9e18o