Every climate report you’ve shared made doing nothing look normal
· 18 min read
It happened in the Arizona desert, in a forest that lies on its side. The trees of Petrified Forest National Park fell more than two hundred million years ago, and minerals crept into the wood cell by cell until every log became stone the colour of rust, amber and bruised violet. It is one of the most beautiful crime scenes on Earth. Visitors love it so much they take it home: a chip in a jacket pocket, a sliver in a glovebox, a little piece of the Triassic rattling around next to the parking receipts. The park has estimated the losses at around twelve to fourteen tons a year, carried out one innocent fragment at a time.
So the park did what every responsible institution does when it is frightened. It told the truth, loudly. Signs explained that the heritage was vanishing every single day, ton after ton, mostly in small pieces. Other signs threatened inspections at the exit gate and heavy consequences. The message was clear and factual, morally spotless even. It was also, as it turned out, an instruction manual.
When Robert Cialdini and his colleagues from Arizona State University tested the wording out on the paths, they found that a sign telling visitors that many past visitors had removed petrified wood produced theft about four times higher than a sign that simply asked people not to take it. Roughly eight percent of the marked pieces walked away against under two percent. Read that again. The park had spent years, and a fair amount of money, earnestly informing its visitors that stealing was what visitors do. People read the facts and understood them, then did exactly what the facts said everyone else was doing.
Hold on to that forest, because you have seen that sign before. Most of us in this field have written it. I have read so many versions of it that some nights I see it on the inside of my eyelids, in a nice sans serif, with a footnote.
Every climate report I have read in the last decade contains some version of the petrified forest sign. Emissions are still rising, the industry keeps building as if the carbon budget were a rumour started by a disgruntled intern, and most companies remain off track. We write it as a warning, and the reader receives it as a weather report on what normal looks like. We spend our best people, our best data and our best graphic designers telling the world, with ever more beautiful precision, that almost nobody is doing anything. Then we stand in the lobby afterwards, holding our nametags, genuinely surprised that almost nobody does anything.
I have spent years trying to turn what a few people know into what most people do, and I will admit it plainly: this question has made me slightly unwell. The people who care about the climate have the facts, the arguments, the moral high ground, and enough goodwill to heat a mid-sized Nordic city. So why does so much of that concern just sit there, like a bicycle left in the rain? Why do people who agree with you nod, share, applaud, write “so important!!” under your post, and then go back to their desks and change absolutely nothing? There are three obvious answers. All three are wrong, and watching them die is the most useful part of the story.
The oldest superstition in communication is that behaviour follows knowledge. If people are not acting, they must be missing information, so you give them more of it: a better graph, a clearer report, a sharper number per square metre, and eventually a second report explaining the first one. This is the theology behind almost every awareness campaign ever funded, and it has the survival instinct of a cockroach in a nuclear bunker.
The Petrified Forest should have killed it. It died again, quietly, in a Pennsylvania call centre. In the 2008 presidential primary, David Nickerson and Todd Rogers, who is now at Harvard, ran a field experiment on 287,228 registered voters. Some of them received a standard get-out-the-vote call: a friendly human voice, a day or two before the election, reminding them it was coming and encouraging them to go. Information, delivered personally, with warmth, at exactly the right moment. It had no significant effect on turnout. None. These people knew there was an election. Knowing was never the problem. If information alone moved people, the oldest tool in the campaign shed would work, and it mostly does not. That makes the question stranger. If people already know, what on Earth are they waiting for?
Fine, say the emotion people. Knowing is not enough, so make them feel it. Here the camp splits in two, and the two halves have been throwing chairs at each other for years. One side wants fear: the flood, the fire, the polar bear on its sad little ice cube, the volume turned up until the danger is impossible to ignore. The other side wants hope: the green city at golden hour, children cycling past a façade dripping with ferns, a calm voice asking you to just imagine the better future that is waiting for us. Imagine it. Close your eyes and imagine it. I have written plenty on the fear side of that fight, and I still think fear has teeth that hope lacks. But I have come to believe the fight itself is the wrong fight.
Look at the park. It tried fear, with threats of inspection, warnings of punishment and an entire architecture of consequence bolted onto the desert. The wood kept leaving. Rangers have described collecting pieces dumped by the roadside between the warning sign and the exit station, abandoned by visitors who lost their nerve in the last few hundred metres. All the fear managed was to move the guilt slightly further down the road, where it lay in the dust like a confession nobody had to sign. Hope would have done no better. Picture the alternative sign: a watercolour of the forest in all its ancient glory, and underneath it, in a gentle font, imagine this landscape preserved for generations to come. Lovely. Somebody would have photographed it, and then put a chip of the Triassic in their pocket on the way back to the car.
Fear, hope and imagination are fuel, not strategy, and fuel poured on the ground without an engine is just a puddle that smells strongly of good intentions. The reason all of it fails was worked out decades ago by a man who grew up in Mundare, a farming village in Alberta about eighty kilometres east of Edmonton, in a school so poor that two teachers taught every high school class and the maths students shared a single textbook with their teacher. Picture it: a whole class leaning over one book, the teacher reading upside down. Albert Bandura, who more or less taught himself, went on to become one of the most cited psychologists who ever lived. His work on what he called self-efficacy showed that people do not attempt what they do not believe they can do, however much they care. In his famous studies, people terrified of snakes did not lose their fear by being told that snakes were harmless. They lost it by doing something small with a boa constrictor, then something slightly bigger, until their own experience told them they could.
Emotion without capability does not become action. Fear without a step curdles into anxiety, and anxiety does what anxiety always does: it looks for the nearest exit, and it is very good at finding one. Hope with no step attached becomes a screensaver. Give imagination nothing to do and you get a mood board, pinned to the wall of a meeting room nobody has booked since spring. Every time we turn up the feeling without lowering the step, whether the feeling is dread or delight, we hand people an emotion with nowhere to go, paid for with our own money and shown on our own slides.
So it must be conscience, say the decent people. Appeal to the good in them. Ask them to do the right thing for the planet, for their children, for the future. In 2008, Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius put conscience on trial in a mid-priced hotel belonging to a well-known national chain. Their first experiment alone tracked 1,058 opportunities for guests to reuse a towel in 190 rooms. Cialdini, it is worth knowing, spent long stretches of his career working undercover in sales and fundraising training programmes, just to watch how professional persuaders actually get people to say yes. A man who went undercover among the salesmen is not easily fooled by a nice slogan. One card in the bathroom carried the industry’s standard message: help save the environment. Another simply told guests that most people staying at the hotel reused their towels.
Conscience lost. In the second experiment, the standard environmental card got about 37 percent of guests to reuse their towels. The card telling them that most people who had stayed in that very room did so got about 49 percent. The planet was the same, and so were the guests’ values. What changed was the answer to a question nobody had asked out loud, standing barefoot on cold tiles: what do people like me do here?
And now I need a moment, because this is where it gets to me. Information, emotion and conscience. Three suspects, and here is the part that makes me slightly crazy: none of them is guilty of being useless. They are guilty of being given the wrong job. Every single one of them is still the default setting of climate communication, still the thing we commission, still the thing we fund, still the glossy sixty-page sustainability report with a forest on the cover and a drone shot of a wind farm on page three and a quote from the CEO about ambition on page four, still the campaign with the melting ice and the moving piano music, still the other campaign with the sunlit rooftop gardens and the soft voice telling you to imagine, still the panel debate where six people in good shoes agree with each other for ninety minutes under municipal meeting-room light and then walk back to the office to change precisely nothing, still the consultation response that took three weekends to write and that nobody will read, still the post that collects four hundred likes and vanishes like breath on a cold window, all of it standing on the same strange, stubborn, staggeringly expensive belief that if people only knew enough, feared enough, hoped enough or cared enough, they would finally move, a belief that has survived more evidence against it than any species of beetle in recorded history.
I am not saying burn the reports. I write reports. The whole information ecosystem matters: the studies, the images, the visions and the warnings are the soil that every movement grows in, and without them nobody would know there was anything to act on. But soil is not a harvest. Raising awareness and getting people to act are two different jobs done by two different tools, and we have spent decades asking the first one to do the second, like hiring a lighthouse to row the boat. So the real question is the one underneath all three suspects. If knowing, feeling and caring only get people to the shore, what gets them into the water?
Here’s what I’ve learned: what I call the cheat code to mobilising people. Compressed into four simple sentences.
That sentence is meant for work, not for a poster in the office kitchen. It bolts together four separate findings from four corners of behavioural science into a machine, and it works because each part answers a question people ask themselves silently before they move. Am I alone in this? Can I actually do it? Does my part count? What do I do on Monday? Leave any one of those questions open and the whole thing stalls in the driveway. Answer all four and the action almost takes itself. The part in brackets matters as much as the part outside them. The instruction is what you do; the bracket is what the other person has to feel. Most campaigns write the instruction in forty-point type and forget the bracket entirely.
The hotel and the forest are the same experiment run in opposite directions. In one, telling people what others do made them better. In the other, it made them worse. You don’t get to switch social norms on when the budget allows; they are always on, humming in the walls. Every message you send already contains a picture of what normal looks like, and people steer by that picture far more than by your beautiful arguments.
In 2017 two Stanford psychologists, Gregg Sparkman, then a doctoral student, and Greg Walton, found the twist that anyone trying to change something not yet normal should tattoo on the inside of their forearm. Their question was how social change happens when the majority has not moved. In one experiment at a café, lunch guests read one of two short messages. One said, accurately, that some people limit their meat consumption. The other said that people are starting to limit it, that the number is growing. Those who read about the trend were twice as likely to order a meatless lunch, 34 percent against 17. Walton was careful to point out that nobody had been asked to eat less meat. They had simply been shown which way the crowd was walking. This is the first way out of the Petrified Forest. You do not have to pretend the majority is already with you, and you should not, because people can smell that. You only have to show that people like your reader are moving, and that the movement is growing. Momentum is a norm in itself.
What Bandura’s snake phobics needed was a first step small enough to take with shaking hands, and a lecture on reptiles was never going to be it. Belonging gets someone to the edge of the action, but if the action looks enormous, technical or expensive, they will stand at that edge forever, feeling vaguely guilty, which is, incidentally, the exact emotional state most climate communication leaves people in. We have built a whole industry that manufactures guilt and calls it engagement. So the second job is to shrink the step until it fits a human hand. Ask for “sign this” instead of “transform your business model”. Swap “lead the green transition” for “ask this one question in your next project meeting”, or simply “tick this box on the form”. People don’t have or lack capability the way they have blue eyes. Your design either gives it to them or withholds it.
Here is where social proof turns on you, and where most campaigns that learned the first lesson fall straight into a second hole. In 1964 a young woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her home in Queens, and newspapers reported that dozens of neighbours heard her cries and did nothing. The story was later shown to be badly exaggerated, but it sent two young psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané, into the laboratory to test a disturbing idea: that the more people witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help. In their 1968 study, students talking over an intercom heard another participant appear to have a seizure. When they believed they were the only one listening, 85 percent left their room to get help, on average within 52 seconds. When they believed five others could hear it too, only 31 percent did, and those who helped took on average 166 seconds.
Now hold your next campaign up against those numbers. Every time you proudly announce that thousands are already acting, you are also whispering to each reader that they are not needed. Belonging pulls people in, while diffusion of responsibility lets them drift quietly back out the side door. The only antidote is to make each contribution visible and necessary, so the reader understands that this particular thing does not happen without this particular person. And here the floor goes soft for a second, because this isn’t a trick, just the truth. Step back far enough and every movement looks less like a crowd that agrees and more like a habit spreading through a forest, root to root, one tree noticing that the tree beside it has changed. Nobody planned the spring. It just arrived, one bud at a time, each one convinced it was early. A movement is a threshold crossed one name at a time, and each name is load-bearing until the threshold is reached. We are all a little smaller than we think, and a little more necessary.
Back to that Pennsylvania call centre, because the story has a second half and it is the best part. The standard reminder call did nothing. But another group of voters got a slightly different call. They were asked when they planned to vote, where they would be coming from, and what they would be doing beforehand. Those three small, almost boring questions turned an intention into a plan. Turnout among those voters rose by 4.1 percentage points. Among people who were the only eligible voter in their household, it rose by 9.1. It is the clearest proof I know that motivation is not the scarce resource. A plan is.
The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has a name for this, implementation intentions, and decades of research behind it: people who decide exactly when, where and how they will act follow through far more often than people who merely intend to. Motivation without a plan is just weather. It rolls over, it changes the mood for an afternoon, and nothing moves.
You can’t order the four parts à la carte. They come as a sequence, and the sequence is the strategy. Belonging comes first because it lowers the threshold before you ask for anything. Once someone feels they are among their own, acting stops feeling like a risk to their reputation and starts feeling like loyalty. At that point they are ready to hear that the step is small enough to take. Being told their part is necessary now means something too, because being necessary to a group you belong to is a compliment, while being necessary to a group of strangers is a burden. The plan only makes sense at the very end, since a plan shown to someone who does not yet want to use it is just a piece of paper, sitting lonely on the kitchen table.
Run the sequence backwards and you get the average climate campaign: a call to action, a moral reason, a frightening fact or a glowing vision, and a picture of almost nobody doing anything. Every element is true. The whole thing is a sign in the desert that teaches people to steal.
I have spent enough time mobilising the building industry, including the campaign that brought hundreds of Danish firms to demand stricter carbon limits, to know that the evidence is never the hard part. The evidence was there, as it always is, sitting in a spreadsheet, perfectly correct and perfectly still. The hard part is designing every moment of contact so that each of those four silent questions gets its answer before anyone has to ask it. That is why a signing page should take one step and not three. It is why it helps when every signer writes their own reason for signing and sees it next to the reasons of their peers. Every friction you remove makes Bandura’s boa constrictor a little smaller. Each name you show works like the towel card, and a visible signature is someone in the next room finally answering the intercom.
There is one more thing about the Petrified Forest, and it is why I trust that sentence as much as I do. Every year, packages arrive at the park. Inside are pieces of petrified wood, often with letters. People write that they are sorry, or that they have had bad luck ever since and want to make it right. The park has received so many that it keeps them, a pile of returned stone and confession that visitors can stand and look at. Some of the people who stole from that forest spent years carrying not the stone but the feeling of being on the wrong side of their own tribe.
That pile is the whole argument in one heap of rock. Even the thieves wanted to belong to the people who leave the forest standing. They were never missing information. They were missing a sign that told them who they were.
So stop writing the sign that teaches people to steal. Nobody acts because they are convinced. They act because they belong, because they can, because their part is needed, and because somebody finally had the decency to give them a plan.
Sources
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