How About the “The Age Of Opportunity?”

Smile For the Camera, Please

I finally watched The Age of Stupid last night. Wow, what a wake-up call.

Not because I now know that glaciers are melting, or that Shell is flaring natural gas in Nigeria and poisoning ecosystems and generally doing Very Bad Things, or that Range-Rover-piloting NIMBYs are successfully halting British wind farms, or that India has a new and very popular low-cost airline run by an evidently rather unpleasant CEO.

I already know most of these things. But lots of people, presumably the film’s target audience, don’t. As Age of Stupid pans back into space in its final frames, leaving a dead future planet cluttered with junk satellites — Wall-E’s opening scene, except in reverse–the filmmakers were likely hoping I would be fired up to take political action.

I wasn’t.

Instead, I experienced a mild degree of paralysis, dread, and frustration, and a renewed conviction that many environmentalists in the climate movement have, for the most part, utterly failed to connect with and motivate  regular people.

Like An Inconvenient Truth, and Please Help the World—the opening film of the failed Copenhagen climate change conference—Stupid is built around a “threat” frame. The assumption is that we can scare enough citizens into caring about the climate crisis—if we can just explain the slow-motion horror we are unleashing, and connect enough dots between plastic toys and SUVs and coal plants and aviation—that the citizens of Earth will rise up in a groundswell of support and demand change.

Well, it doesn’t work that way.

For decades, Fortune 500 advertising and marketing departments have helped drive and shape social norms around energy-intensive lifestyles. Fast boats, big lawns, jet-set vacations, “safe” large vehicles.

But there is a new “good life” ahead—one based on conservation, efficiency, and responsible renewable energy generation. One offering a better quality of life. One offering prosperity and abundance, better health, and stronger communities. What we need to do is use the same tools that marketers have used very effectively, for years, to drive a new-values shift. We need to paint images and tell stories that showcase a better, brighter future, one less reliant on fossil fuels. It’s got to be fun, funny, entertaining, and sexy.

In other words, we need to stop threatening people with the bad news—they’ve heard it by now, and have  tuned out, by the millions—and start showing them what’s in it for them.