How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years.

David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator.

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And you learned early on from your experiences doing PR for Rolling Stone magazine, you understood the power of getting quite big name, hugely influential musicians, and other cultural figures and celebrities. Now activism has some of that drive, but everything has become a little bit corporatized.

DAVID FENTON

So a lot has been corporatized. That is certainly true, but not everything. And it sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.

Fenton working with Nelson Mandela during his first US tour, Washington, D.C., June 1990 © David Fenton

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In terms of the figures, we often hear about 1.5 degrees of change - that sounds so small. But when you put it like this: over 1 million atomic bombs worth of heat every day is the amount of energy trapped in our atmosphere.

FENTON

The linguists and the cognitive scientists have established that as you're exposed to language from childhood and over your lifetime, it forms literal circuits in your brain. They call them frames. So in order to communicate successfully with people, the best way is to use language that activates existing frames. So for example, when I say we need to get to net zero by 2050, nobody knows what I'm talking about. There's no existing circuitry to process that language. What the hell is net zero? Is that less than zero? Now, if I say we have to stop pollution because pollution is heating the planet, we've formed a blanket of pollution around the earth that is trapping heat that used to go back out to space. And then everybody knows what I'm talking about because they know what pollution is. That's an existing mental frame. And by the way, no one will defend pollution. You won't find anyone that thinks pollution is a good thing. So it's a universally negative frame in all languages. And then when I say it's like a blanket around the earth, there's another existing mental frame. Everybody knows what a blanket is and how it works. It traps your body heat so you don't get cold. So that's what we're doing to the earth. And yes, all that trapped heat energy on Earth has to go somewhere. So it goes to create stronger storms and droughts and floods and melts the ice. And how much energy is it?

I tell this story in my book. I had the privilege of working with the great climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. We were writing his TED Talk some years ago and he said, "I really want to put in this talk that the Earth is way out of energy balance. There's so much more heat energy coming into the atmosphere than is now able to go back out to space because of these gases we've put in the atmosphere.”

And I said, "Great, Jim, let's put that in the speech. You know, how bad is it? How much energy is it being trapped?" And he said, "It's really a lot of energy, David. It's a quarter watt per square meter.” And I said, "Oh, wow, Jim, that doesn't sound like very much." He got really mad at me and he said, "What do you mean! There's a lot of square meters in the earth!"

I'm like, okay, like maybe we could find another metaphor to communicate this. And another scientist was in the room with us, looked at his calculator and he said, "Oh yeah, it's like exploding 450,000 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs in the Earth's atmosphere every day, 450,000 H-bombs a day.

And I said, "I think people can understand that. And because this was, I don't know, 12 years ago or so, and of course we've polluted so much more. That now that's a million H-bombs a day. That's the energy equivalent being trapped on Earth in case you wonder why we're having all these spiking temperatures so people can understand that.

But we don't use language and imagery and metaphor like that. Meanwhile, the activist community is in a battle to the death with the fossil fuel industry and their paid political prostitute agents. And those people go to business school, and they study marketing science and cognitive science. And they've had to, in most cases, use those skills to advance their careers. They've had to sell products and services to get ahead. Most of them, not the financial industry. And so they have a natural orientation to dominate discussions with effective, sticky, memorable language and imagery. And they also know that they have to ensure that their messages and imagery get out there and actually that they have to get the population exposed to that. So they're very focused on propaganda. So we're in a propaganda war. And as my friend, Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz at the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication likes to say, "This is a propaganda war. But here's the problem. only one side's on the battlefield, we largely are not."

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I just like how you use language. This is one thing that is pointed out in your book is that we have to use simple language. Survival, that's the word we understand. You point out that existential crisis is something that seems vague.

FENTON

The activists need to pay attention to mass awareness. Political change is a function of gaining political power through mass awareness, mass mobilization, and mass unification. And we're in a period on the left right now, which has happened in history before, where there's a lot of internal focus about the fairness of the processes within NGOs and activist organizations. And the legacy of racism in these organizations and gender and identity issues, all of which are essential and important and valid, but those are not the pathways to mass awareness and mass unity. If you overemphasize those kinds of issues, it's a kind of sectarianism, which is the opposite of how you unify people to get political power. If you don't assemble majority support - majority sentiment doesn't mean everybody - it means majority, then you can't take power. And if you can't get power, guess what? You can't help the vulnerable. You can't help the oppressed. This is, like most things in life, a question of balance. If you overfocus on the legitimate feelings and plight of subgroups of the population, by necessity, you won't establish what Reverend Jesse Jackson used to call the Rainbow Coalition. And without the Rainbow Coalition, you don't win. So, what I hope is that the scientists and the activist community can pay as much attention to cognitive science as they do to climate science. And then we'll get somewhere definitely.

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I like the humility with which you also recognize those on the Right, who politically don't share the same beliefs, but you recognize their abilities as messaging and simple communications. I mean, it's almost like an anthem, like just to go into those things and the power of music, you've used the power of musicians. The communications have to be like an anthem. It has to become an anthem for us to unfortunately take action.

FENTON

When I say "Make America Great Again", everybody probably cringes and I do too, but we have to learn from that. That is actually how the brain works. It works through being exposed to the repetition of simple, easy-to-understand messages that have an emotional, moral aspect. That's how the brain learns. It doesn't learn from facts. It doesn't learn from figures. It doesn't learn from policy pronouncements. And it certainly doesn't learn from complexity. 

Here's an example. People need to be conscious of the difference between internal and external communications. So, if you want to say that you believe in intersectional environmentalism, that's valid within your group. But if you use that in your public communication, no one understands what the hell you mean by that, not at all. Second, you're branding yourself as an other. You're not part of their world. You don't understand them. You have some weird agenda of your own, and you're incomprehensible. I hope my book makes a contribution to helping activists learn the difference between what the communists used to call an internal line and an external line. You know, the communists had a lot of things wrong, but that they were right about.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Eveline Mol with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Eveline Mol.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).