Turning Climate Awareness into Climate Action

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication categorize Americans in 6 groups based on their climate change beliefs (or rather “feelings”!).

These range from the “Alarmed,” deeply concerned citizens who support climate policies, to the “Dismissive,” climate deniers who reject the very notion of climate change and often believe in conspiracy theories.

For me, these “6 degrees of concern” represent only the AWARENESS dimension of climate change.

In the graphic above, I plot these levels of Awareness in the X-Axis

But what is missing in public debate is the level of (Climate) ACTION which I map in the Y-Axis

You can be highly aware and concerned about climate change and do nothing, or worse bing-shop and drive a big SUV !

Hence, I am not interested in **judging** people by their level of awareness or feeling about climate change — but rather how do they genuinely ACT to fix the climate crisis.

And Guess What ?

Even climate deniers (25% of Americans) can be convinced to invest their money and time to fight climate change — as long as you don’t tell them they do so for the climate but for their own enlightened (material) self-interest.

I call it the “Climate Trojan Horse” strategy !

In my upcoming book The Frugal Economy, I show how businesses and policy-makers should “modulate” their communication around climate change to appeal to the different categories of citizens mapped in X-Axis — and get the buy-in (votes, basically!) of ALL of them for climate policies.

Learn about The Frugal Economy, an inspiring book on climate published by Wiley and Thinkers50 in October 2024.