So, what can we do about it?
What climate communicators can learn from John Oliver
Comedian John Oliver is not everyone’s cup of tea. The banging on the desk, the random absurdities, the incessant outraged incredulity (“it’s true!!!”) can be grating. But there’s one thing his show Last Week Tonight consistently gets right: the structure. Each episode takes a deep dive into a single issue, rigorously fact-checked, and then ends with a segment that asks the crucial question: “So what can we do about it?”
That final pivot matters. It transforms outrage into agency. In the mainstream climate debate, by contrast, what can we do about its have been suboptimal. They tend to focus narrowly on changes to individual behaviour, fall back on vague exhortations (“Do something!”), or collapse into one-dimensional and frequently impractical solutions. What’s missing is a way to climb from the personal to the systemic. A ladder of action.
For many, the first rung of the ladder is personal behaviour. Take fewer flights. Drive an EV. Eat less meat. Have fewer children. All of these are good things, environmentally speaking. All of them, in the aggregate, will have an impact. None of them will be sufficient. And all are prone to the free-rider problem: “Why should I do something unless others do at least as much?”
The concept of carbon footprints is central to any discussion of individual climate action. A common critique is that carbon footprints are a scam, invented and promoted by oil companies to divert attention from their own activities. While there’s more than a grain of truth in that interpretation, the concept is nonetheless valuable in that it brings home the idea of embedded emissions. Carbon is invariably emitted as a byproduct of something that’s used or consumed, regardless of how efficiently that might happen.
The reason personal action is insufficient is not because it’s part of some oil company plot. It’s that it is the least effective thing we, as individuals, can do. As long as the cost of products and services does not reflect the damage their embedded carbon pollution causes (more on that later), we are putting the financial burden of cleaner choices unfairly on those who choose to do so.
The next rung is community action. This is where things get interesting. Communities can organize local initiatives, from neighbourhood solar projects, to recycling programmes to climate clubs. These kinds of activities are powerful because they are where the political and cultural polarisation that so often blights the climate debate starts to break down.
Research has shown that fostering intimacy in group discussions (through self-disclosure and shared values) is more effective in creating consensus on climate change than focusing on information alone1. Community-level climate action can provide an antidote to the kind of toxic outrage and division that prevail in social media and kill fact-based discourse there. In communities, where people know each other or share a common set of circumstances, trust and shared experience matter more. Community-level climate action can move conversations from “truthiness” to truth, from slogans to shared projects.
At the community level, climate communication is less about persuading strangers and more about building coalitions. It’s about depolarisation through proximity.
Where do companies - as distinct from communities - fit into this ladder of action? They occupy a disproportionate amount of attention in the mainstream climate debate. They have customers, employees, and shareholders to impress, and public relations budgets to match. They are also convenient (and often not entirely innocent) scapegoats for activists who need villains to blame.
Corporate action is complex. Some companies delay and divert. Some genuinely innovate toward sustainability. Others greenwash. If we want companies to act differently, we can act individually by giving or withholding our custom, or as a community by organizing boycotts to try to force change. But as recent retreats on climate action by the corporate sector have shown, consumer preferences may not be sufficient.
Which brings us to the top rung on our ladder of action: individuals can pressure companies, communities can organize campaigns, but it’s governments that set the rules of the game.
Governments make the rules
The top rung of the ladder is public policy. This is where the big stuff happens. And this is where climate activism so often falls short.
The slogans are familiar: “Vote for change! Make your voice heard!” The problem isn’t that the problem isn’t known. It’s that the trade-offs are not being addressed. This leaves the climate cause wide open to populist claims of utopianism.
Tony Blair has said that politicians are generally excellent at listening to their constituents, contrary to popular opinion. The problem is that those constituents want different and often contradictory things from politicians.
A John Oliver approach to climate activism would use the “so what can we do about it” segment to identify the specific policies that have the potential to make the most difference. It would weed out the impractical (“just stop oil”) and evaluate the pros and cons and trade-offs of the practical.
Carbon pricing and dividends are a prime example, although by no means the only one. They internalize the cost of pollution, incentivise cleaner choices, and return revenue to citizens to offset costs. They are not perfect, but they work across the whole economy, incentivising individuals, communities and companies to make cleaner choices, faster.
So, climate. What can we do about it?
Rather than focus on the problem, we can make ourselves and our communities aware of the solutions — and the trade-offs they require. We can resist overreliance on simplistic slogans that fail to recognise the complexity of the problem. And rather than calling vaguely for climate action, we can advocate for specific policies that work at a systemic level, influencing behaviour change at scale. And in the process, help build acceptance and trust across individuals, communities, companies and governments.
Public Understanding of Science, Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2022