A new initiative seeks to tap into mothers’ concern for the world their children are inheriting.
Source: The Moms Who Are Battling Climate Change
Three years ago, I had a baby. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that she is extremely cute, and I enjoy being her mother. A few months after her birth, I was scrolling on my phone, and I came across news of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It described a future world that will have experienced 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. In this world, the oceans are acidifying, and most coral reefs have been bleached to death; hundreds of millions of people face severe drought, and even more face deadly heat waves. The kicker? This planet—the 1.5-degree-warmer one—was the best-case scenario. Scientists were using the report to argue that we should try to shoot for that. The Paris climate accord aims to limit the global-temperature increase to “below 2 degrees Celsius.” At present, both goals seem like a stretch. According to the U.N., all of the world’s current pledges would only cut carbon emissions by one per cent—a far cry from the nearly fifty per cent needed this decade in order to meet our goals. So, 1.5 degrees is coming. According to some researchers, we could get there around 2030, when my daughter will be entering middle school.
I did some further Googling: What will the world look like when she’s middle-aged? When her children are middle-aged? I found a Web site that lets you plot major events in your child’s life against the projected global-temperature increase. Even the “optimistic” scenarios show the world warming two degrees during her lifetime. The more realistic scenarios—the ones based on what countries are actually doing to reduce emissions, not what they’ve pledged—show it heating up to three degrees. There is a universe of difference between those numbers, but they are both awful, bringing rising seas, heat waves, food and water shortages, wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes, not to mention the loss of biodiversity. Naturally, this line of research prompted a nervous breakdown. I had always understood, intellectually, that climate change was an existential threat, but it was only after my daughter’s birth that it became real to me.
I’m not alone. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, twenty-six per cent of Americans report feeling “alarmed” about climate change, up from less than half that number six years ago. About the same number of people describe themselves as “concerned”—which seems like the way you should feel about your child’s “Animal Crossing” addiction, not the fact that the Thwaites Glacier could slide into the ocean during his lifetime, flooding coastal cities.
“It’s pretty bad,” a marketing executive named John Marshall told me, in reference to the public-opinion data. “If you were an alien looking at the planet, you’d ask, ‘Why are they not more worried about this?’ ” Marshall runs a nonprofit called the Potential Energy Coalition, which aims to boost awareness about climate change. The group recently conducted a series of randomized control tests to figure out who is most receptive to its messaging. They found that, for the most part, it’s women. Mothers and Hispanic women are especially persuadable. “Men are basically useless,” he said. This past January, the group launched a ten-million-dollar initiative called Science Moms. It consists of a Web site with bullet-point-length climate facts, and also an ad campaign that’s running in swing states. In the ads, which appear both on television and online, climate scientists—who are also moms—talk about their worries for their children. So far, the results have been promising. “What we’re most excited about is the engagement rate,” Marshall said, referring to the number of people who have been clicking and sharing.
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