Why Scaring People About The Climate Doesn't Work - And What Does Work Instead

For the first couple of years of doing climate comedy, I wanted to shake people. Not literally. Well, maybe literally, but let's say figuratively for now. I'd be on stage and I'd have this overwhelming urge to grab the audience by the lapels or to be honest necks and go: don't you understand how important this is?

I think most people in the sustainability world feel that. You get into this field because you've looked at it properly, and looking at it properly is inescapably terrifying at the point of entry - and for lots of people beyond that. So your instinct is to make other people feel what you feel. Scare them into caring.

It doesn't work.

I had a meeting recently with someone who works at a government think-tank researching what actually gets people to engage with the climate. Proper hard data, not the sort of general-vibes-anecdata I normally have to be satisfied with regarding my own work! And the thing that kept coming up was salience; how important something feels to someone personally. Not how objectively important it is. How important it feels.

Fear doesn't create or boost salience.

There's a brilliant concept I heard from Professor Kris de Mayer at Climate Outreach UCL: if you tell people the building's on fire but you don't tell them where the exit is, you don't motivate them to do anything. You just scare them. The information without the agency is just frightening, paralysing noise. (I keep trying to turn that sentiment into a joke for my new show, and to be frank that's what I should be doing right now, were it not for this lovely piece of quasi-literary procrastination).

I think a lot of climate communication boils down to the building-on-fire bit without the exit sign.

But the problem is that the currency of comedy is that the audience cares about what you're talking about because you do. You can't fake it, they can smell that. (I hate the word "smell", it's such an ugly word, but it's like an animal thing, they literally sense it.) So you have to find a way in to the thing you passionately care about, that makes it feel relevant to them too - salience!

And I'm anticipating using that word daily for the rest of my life because that's the territory I've been covering without having a name for it. Good climate communication nurtures the way that someone is feeling. I can't convince deniers, and I can't suggest solutions on any real scale, but what I can do is talk about the climate non-stop because I can affect its salience in the minds and hearts of my audience.

And the best bit is, that's a genuinely useful thing to say to audiences to encourage them to do the same! It puts a snazzy name and some scientific heft to the otherwise "hey we've got to talk about this" that I'd previously been circling.

It doesn't mean pretending everything's fine. It doesn't mean "toxic positivity" or glossing over the scale of what's happening. My new show has a throughline about me realising that I used to want to scare people into action, but that scaring people is pointless.

I still swing between hope and despair on a fairly regular basis, and I've come to think that's not a failure. That's just what a reasonable person feels in these circumstances.

BUT - I've stopped trying to pass the terror on!

Harvey Milk said "you've got to give 'em hope!" Not as a nice thought to end on, but as the meat and potatoes of your story. Hope that you choose deliberately because without it there's no motivation, no action, just a sort of comforting entropy. You hope aggressively, in order to move.

The other piece of this, which really shifted something for me as a performer, is agency. People don't need to feel more scared. They need to feel like there's something they can do. Even something small. Even something they'll probably fail at, like me and veganism.

The most useful thing I can do, the most impactful thing I can do, is talk about this stuff and make other people feel like they can too. Not because I have all the answers (the fact that nobody does is one of the liberating things about the climate when you squint), but because the conversation itself is the action.

83% of people want more action on the climate. Most of them think they're in the minority. We're not! We just haven't heard enough people saying it out loud.

Thanks for reading,

Stu

Sign up to my mailing-list below for exclusive climate comedy clips and chapters from my ebook on how we can talk about sustainability with more impact!