Resource Library

Learning to attune to the cycles of our own leadership can help movements know when to do the right thing at the right time. Winters are a time to be internally focused and are defined as periods of time for regeneration and re-evaluation. Spring is about opening up, taking on new personal responsibilities and experimenting. The summer is externally focused and is primarily about giving as much as we can to fulfill our different missions. Lastly there is fall, which is the season of harvesting the fruits from work during the summer and also starting to slow and break down certain elements to prepare for the winter. This metaphor framework can help give language to experiences that we know leaders face as they develop and traverse through many cycles in social change work.             

Communicators should highlight the negative impacts associated with fossil fuel extraction and global warming in order to persuade people who are confident in the economic security of fossil fuels. This survey of Canadians shows that the transition to cleaner forms of energy is broadly popular. Further, people who are more likely to favor the energy transition also worry more about climate change, identify on the political left or center, and have less hope in the future economic prospects of fossil fuels. Women, younger people, and higher-educated people also favor the transition away from oil and gas more. This article argues for political elites and other communicators to pay attention to the impacts that their messages can have on what masses of voters think about climate policy.

Optimize your climate messaging with the surprising results and important guidance gleaned from 76 climate persuasion experiments, presented by the social scientists who collectively analyzed them. Individual studies come out all the time (and the Lab loves to let you know about all of them), but it can be difficult to piece together the big picture from all the data points. That’s why it’s so valuable when researchers occasionally comprehensively review and synthesize a whole body of studies, such as this combined analysis of dozens of separate climate persuasion experiments in the US from the last 10 years. The social scientists will also share insights from their review of research on reducing political polarization on climate.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including new polling on the Build Back Better plan and its major clean energy and climate provisions and a new poll assessing voters’ trust in the two parties to handle climate and environmental issues.