Potential Energy: A broader audience& greater impact

This is a research-based guide from Potential Energy Coalition on how to make climate messaging land with broader audiences. The core argument: public support for climate action is already high globally, but the movement’s language has been too narrow, moralistic, and jargon-heavy — and fixing the message, not just the policy, can move support by double digits.

The five shifts it recommends:

Morality → materiality. Drop the “should/shouldn’t” moralizing. Frame climate as a tangible cost people feel now — through destructive weather, rising insurance premiums, pollution/health effects, and energy bills — not just a righteous cause.
Luxury → affordability. Stop assuming clean energy carries a “green premium.” Solar costs have dropped sharply since 2010, and the public increasingly already believes clean energy is cheaper. Emphasizing that it’s “unlimited” and “local” (rather than just “green” or “innovative”) boosts perceived affordability.
Banning → building. Messages framed as restricting or banning (gas stoves, EV mandates, “Net Zero”) consistently underperform. Swapping “bans/mandates” for “standards/incentives,” and “moving away from X” for “moving toward Y,” polls far better.
Global → national/local. With nationalism rising, “helping the world” is a weak motivator. Messaging that taps national pride (“my country should lead”) and local ownership (“powered by our state”) performs much better than global-responsibility framing.
Massive → manageable. People already worry about climate change but doubt it’s solvable. The fix is pairing urgency with a sense of incremental progress — framing change as “evolution, not revolution,” and citing concrete wins already underway.

On vocabulary, it recommends swapping jargon and polarizing terms for plainer, broader-appeal language — e.g., “pollution” instead of “emissions,” “clean” instead of “renewable/green,” “solutions” instead of “progress,” “fairness” instead of “equity/justice.”

The guide closes by noting it’s based on five years of testing (including 2025 data with The Rockefeller Foundation) and flags ongoing research questions for 2026, including finding a single unifying pro-climate narrative and testing findings across the G20.