Hopenhagen, the attempt to drive public awareness of the climate talks in Copenhagen and get people to pressure world leaders to act, will likely be an expensive failure.
Last week the American Public Media radio program Marketplace ran a story on ”Hopenhagen”, an effort to increase public support for solutions to climate change. The campaign web page is an attempt to make the climate change problem seem both serious and solvable (a problem facing a number of advocacy efforts, as I’ve written about elsewhere). The campaign was designed by the international public relations and marketing firm Ogilvy and Mather and is supported by groups including Coca Cola, Dupont, BMW, and others.
The challenge of making climate change important enough to deal with but not so important it makes us all want to hide under the bed, is a daunting one. Attempts to make Americans take serious action on climate change have by and large failed. The few steps we’re taking will likely not do much to fend off the pending doom (for an especially dire take, read this article from yesterday’s Washington Post). The long-term effects of a problem that some say isn’t a problem at all take a back seat to an official unemployment rate of 10% (and an unofficial unemployment rate that is much higher), a weakened economy, massive federal deficits, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and so forth. Caring about a theoretically potentially bad future is a luxury – caring about keeping your job, your health insurance and your house is a current reality.
“Hopenhagen” is not the solution. The name is clever – get it, it’s a pun of “hope” like Obama had and also “hope” that we can solve the problem, and it’s also a takeoff of the name of the city the talks are in, get it? – but clever doesn’t generally lead to action.
Names that seem clever generally ought to be abandoned. They tend to draw attention to their own cleverness and the cleverness of the people who came up with them – and away from point of the campaign.
More importantly, hope doesn’t solve problems. Indeed, a reliance on hope can prevent solutions. Hope is a last gasp, it is all you have left when all else fails. “All we can do now is hope…” is never said by optimists or those actively solving problems. It would be like calling the effort “A wing and a prayer-enhagen.”
What is needed is a clear connection between current problems and current manageable solutions, and future problems and future solutions. Identify the goal, set the path to the goal, and take the necessary steps to that goal. Mark success along the way so we all feel as if our efforts are working, and keep going. Melting icecaps, massive starvation and no more polar bears is too big to imagine, and claims that changing my light bulbs will prevent the end of civilization as we know it isn’t credible. And no amount of hopenhagening will change that.
