Climate Change: Monkeying with the message

How can we change not only our nation's climate policy but our environmental behaviors, too? The answer might involve primates and shopping.

Late last September, Mike Hughes was having breakfast with Al Gore at a midtown Manhattan hotel. “It’s kind of a heady experience to sit across the table from him,” says the president and creative director of the Martin Agency, an advertising firm famous for its Geico cavemen and talking lizards. Together with Cathy Zoi, CEO of Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, and Hughes’ colleague Chris Mumford, Gore and Hughes were discussing the $100 million ad campaign the Martin Agency is developing for the Alliance. The campaign is still in development but is due out in the next few months. Its primary aim: to point voters to public policy solutions for the looming climate crisis. “Right now,” Hughes says, “we have incredible numbers of people in the US who say global warming is an important problem that needs to be fixed. But most people think there’s nothing they can do about it—or that someone should do something about it, but that someone isn’t them.”

 

The Alliance and the Martin Agency are hoping to make climate change a major issue in the upcoming presidential race. “Even though people think climate change is important,” Hughes notes, “it’s not one of the top three issues that people cite when talking about their choices for president.” Public policy isn’t the only focus of the ad campaign, though. The Alliance is also hoping that in conjunction with what it’s calling “community partners” across the nation, it can inspire significant changes in Americans’ environmental behavior: in the ways we drive; heat, light, and cool our homes; wash our laundry; and buy our food. Such changes could have a tremendous worldwide impact on the environment. After all, we Americans are among the worst polluters on earth, responsible for approximately 26.5 tons of greenhouse gas per person every year, not to mention a host of persistent pollutants, toxic chemicals, solid wastes, and other environmental offenses. Our greenhouse gas production alone is three and a half times the world average and at least twice that of most of Europe.

 

At their meeting, Hughes tried to absorb all that Gore was telling him: The polar ice caps scientists thought might last 50 years may now survive only 10 or 20 more; severe droughts, floods, and heat waves are already taking their toll, especially in poor and low-lying places across the globe; and more species are being lost now than ever before in history. It was a lot to take in over omelets.

 

The conversation Gore and Hughes had in that Manhattan hotel is one that everyday American environmentalists have often, too. How can we change not only our climate policy but our environmental behaviors as well? Making significant efforts to curb our production of greenhouse gases and other detrimental habits is key to a livable future here and in places where the American lifestyle has become an enviable model.

 

There are good reasons to believe, however, that many such campaigns—the Alliance’s included—may well come to naught. Not because the Martin Agency’s advertising expertise is in any way lacking, or because the Alliance won’t be able to accurately depict the urgency of the crisis. And certainly not because certain government officials and grassroots organizations aren’t trying hard enough. But the agency might come up dry because we as a nation seem almost immune to such efforts. In fact, study after study shows that the majority of interventions aimed at improving environmental behavior—advertising included—demonstrate few, if any, long-term benefits.

 

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