Could Futures Marketing have saved us from climate change (and ourselves)?

It would be fair for you to roll your eyes and say, “all you want is a jetpack” (what, like you don’t?). But if we take a step back and think about the single largest existential crisis that humanity has ever faced – anthropogenic climate change – and we consider the two main tools we as a species have at our disposal to combat that threat – acceptance of the science and the technology to change our behaviors – then we can start to do a little exploration about how something like Futures Marketing might have put us in a better position than we currently find ourselves in had we enacted it several decades ago. Sure, it may seem a bit pointless to look at something that might have been done, but it lays the foundation for why Futures Marketing is potentially so important. If we think that climate change is the end-all crisis that humanity will find itself in, then we are being utterly na?ve. If we make it out of this crisis as a still-functioning civilization, we can rest assured that we will put ourselves into another one soon enough. Futures Marketing could be a powerful tool against one of our greatest enemies – ourselves.?

At this point in the debacle that has been the last fifty years of climate change debate, many people would rather not hear about it at all. In a post on his blog Wait, But Why? way back in June of 2015, Tim Urban summed it up this way: “Just hearing someone say ‘climate change’ or ‘energy crisis’ or ‘tailpipe emissions’ makes me kind of gag at this point – just too much politics, too many annoying people, too much misinformation on all sides, and it’s just hard to know how much I actually care and if there can be a solution to all of it anyway.” That was written seven years ago (as of this writing) and though you might think that in that time we may have come to some consensus on the issue, well you would be wrong. Climate change denial – and in fact the denial of scientific facts in general – has plagued us every step of the way. The confusion and subsequent apathy that we have spent many decades feeling as a collective civilization has pushed us to the brink of catastrophe, and only now are we starting to wake up to that fact. I contend that it didn’t have to be this way, that the seeds of “caring for” or “acceptance of” climate change as a globally relevant issue which we should do everything in our power to battle might have been planted a long time ago so that today, when in reality we find ourselves at the precipice and wondering if humanity has the temerity to get past this, we might have been instead ushering in an era of net positive prosperity.?

Before we get into the role that Futures Marketing might have played (and still might), let’s look at the history here because it’s important to understand how it all progressed to understand what impact might have been had. The start of anthropogenic climate change can be traced back to the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom when it was discovered that coal could be burned to create energy in mass quantities and that the UK was sitting on a mountain of it. I’ll hand the mic over to Tim Urban again, who describes the crisis more eloquently than I ever could: “The problem is that unlike wood, most of the coal in Britain wasn’t just sitting conveniently on land – it was underground. When the Industrial Revolution got going, the British started digging – they were gonna need a lot of coal. As the revolution spread through Europe and to North America, Europeans and Americans started digging too – they also were gonna need a lot of coal. As everyone dug, they started finding other things too. They found pockets of burnable air we call natural gas and underground lakes of thick, black burnable liquid we call crude oil. It turns out that this whole time, humans had been walking around with a vast untapped treasure of tightly packed, burnable joules right underneath them. It was like a dog digging in the woods to bury a bone and uncovering an underground cave full of pulled pork. And what does a dog do who finds a cave of pulled pork? Does he pause to think cautiously about how to proceed or consider consequences for his health? No – he eats the shit out of it. Mindlessly, at full speed.” That is, more or less, how it went.?

What was not apparent at the time was something that would be concisely summarized by none other than Stan Lee in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man, that “with great power comes great responsibility.” Humanity had unearthed (pun intended) enormous amounts of power but was unprepared for the responsibility that would come with it, and to be fair, just plain didn’t know there was a responsibility at all. For hundreds of years coal was mined and burned for heat and to fuel ever-expanding machinery.?

A lot has already been written about how, from an economics perspective, we kept heading down this path because we have valued the wrong things, putting constant growth above all else. I already touched on this previously, but when we look at the time between 1950 to 2010, we can actually start to see how that plays out. The global population almost tripled in that time, and world GDP grew seven times over. Water use more than tripled, energy use increased fourfold, and fertilizer use went up by a factor of ten. What this all points to is the fact that humanity during this time went from a passive inhabitant on the planet to a geological force of nature within the span of a single lifetime. Want a few more harrowing facts to drive the point home? Global average temperatures have risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels and we’re on target to hit a 4 degree increase by 2100 (well over the 1.5-degree red line). Roughly 40% of the world’s agricultural land is seriously degraded, and in just 3 years (by 2025) 2 out of 3 people will live in a water-stressed area. At the rate we dump plastic into the sea, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish. Add to all of that the fact that the global population is projected to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050 (plateauing at around 11 billion by 2100), and considering the “always on” growth that economics demands in order to pull large populations of those living in destitution into a more comfortable life (and there is nobody arguing that should not be a goal), it’s glaringly clear that our planet will become uninhabitable very soon.?

One more point I should make here is that I will not state our planet is in peril, or that our planet is dying, or that we need to save our planet. The planet doesn’t need saving, but it does need better brand management. Earth has withstood a barrage of celestial events over the past 4 billion years of its lifetime ranging from asteroid impacts that dwarf any nuclear arsenal we have squirreled away to a sun which has over time grown 40% brighter and will eventually swallow us whole – and through it the planet has continued its adaptive existence. It is anything but fragile. However, the rhetoric of “saving the planet,” versus the need to save and restore the myriad life-giving gifts that it has provided to our species, divorces the importance of the role that we must play here. It is our civilization that is in peril, the life that we have built over millennia, that now has to adapt to this new world which we have set into motion. We are not working to save the planet; we are working to save ourselves from ourselves.?

Futurists, and consequently science fiction writers, have been having a field day with this since the 1970s. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) did its first projection on climate change disruption in 1977. As an independent non-profit organization (not an advocacy group) of future studies experts, IFTF was able to bring together a panel of leaders in climate science from around the world. When projecting via various futurist methodologies, they basically concluded that – depending on whose models you follow – the real questions to answer were “how bad will it get?” and “how soon?” Throughout the 70s and 80s, news organizations began reporting more widely on record-breaking annual temperatures and the widening hole in the ozone layer. Images of receding mountain snows and crumbling glaciers made their way into the lives of everyday humans, and agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA, which today plays a key role in tracking indicators such as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels or ocean acidification rates) were established.?

Throughout that time, however, the climate science was hotly (pun intended) debated among academics while the general public, and therefore politicians and business leaders, gave it little time or attention. It was either too large a problem, too costly a problem, or too far into the future to garner real concern. As we have already established, our imaginations (and let’s be frank that many in the political or business spheres especially in the 80s were not considered particularly imaginative to begin with) paint that picture with far less vividness, or a deflated sense of the reality of that future pain. We, as a species, just couldn’t cope. It wasn’t until the late 80s that two important yet very opposite agencies were established which would shape the public perception of climate science for the following decades: in 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in response, in 1989 the Global Climate Coalition was formed by fossil fuel companies with the mission to refute the climate science and continue business as usual (think back to the lobbying by the auto and fossil fuel industries to kill electric cars and you get the idea).?

Throughout the 90s the IPCC began churning out its reports on climate change – always met with staunch rebuttals by the opposing side – which resulted in some major international conferences (the Kyoto Protocols for one) and attempts to reign in emissions which proved to largely have no teeth. There was a lot of finger-wagging and doomsday prophesizing, but any agreements made by major emitters (like the US) were not backed by any sort of legal or even political consequence. It was a series of “gentleman’s agreements,” which were inevitably never truly followed through on as the all-important GDP growth metric always seemed to get in the way. For the public, who could only really watch the debate unfold in news outlets and academic circles, reducing the amount of carbon (and other greenhouse gases to be sure, but carbon garnered the large majority of storytelling attention) pumping into the atmosphere simply seemed far too big for one person, one community, or even an entire society to comprehend. It would mean reshaping the economy, reworking entire supply chains, losing jobs, losing income – difficult platforms for any business or politician to operate on. The story itself, and the necessity for behavioral change, was packed with data and information which was not particularly engaging to most of the population, so it was easy to look the other way.

It wasn’t until the 2000s that climate began to get real mainstream attention, largely via sources like books, art, and films, and began to integrate more deeply into the public consciousness as a serious threat. As scientific reports continued to paint the realities of a changing climate, each year the prognoses getting more dire, science fiction (and some non-fiction) creators brought to life worlds in which climate has run amok and our world is destroyed as a result. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Day After Tomorrow film, Manifest Destiny by painter Alexis Rockman, and of course Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, were some of the first visual representations (just to name a few) of what climate change could look like and how it could affect us going forward. And, of course, for every piece of media that showed the potentially disastrous effects there were just as many which attempted to refute the concept – mostly funded by conservative groups and fossil fuel interests (like the Global Climate Coalition).?

In his book The Planet Remade, Oliver Morton summarizes the conundrum by writing, “… who in his right mind would have thought of suggesting to Lyndon Johnson [in 1965] that the basic course of industrial capitalism needed to be altered? But thirty years later, rearranging the economy and wider society so as to eliminate emissions has become the whole agenda."

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There are a few key takeaways here that I’d like to point out to lay the foundation for how Futures Marketing might have played a role:?

1. For more than 30 years, while the science of climate change continued to progress, the public perception remained fairly stagnant, or even ignorant with the main sources of information being new reports (TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, etc.) and, for those intrepid souls, a scientific journal here or there. Competing reports on the validity of the science further muddied the understanding of the threat.?

2. It took science fiction to largely bring the threat into the public sphere, and even then, it didn’t happen until the 2000s and it’s taken another 20 or so years (as of this writing) for that to really sink in with the public to the point of real support (not always even action!) on the needed scale. We finally agree there’s a problem, but on none of the solutions.?

3. When the climate change storytelling (or “cli-fi” as it’s been dubbed) did start in earnest, it was always an apocalyptic image – i.e., we all suffer through climate disaster if we do nothing. But this type of messaging is neither sustainable nor actionable. It shows the problem in very stark terms, we all now agree on the severity, but it only presents a roadmap for disaster, not success. Sure, it shows us the future that we want to avoid, an important tactic as any futurist will tell you, but it doesn’t show us the direction we actually want to take. When we are made to feel that the world is crumbling around?us and needs saving, the average person simply feels over-whelmed.?

That last takeaway is especially important, because it sets up the need for framing the issue in a very different way than what we have historically seen. In her essay featured in The Future Starts Now, futurist and founder of KO Insights Kate O’Neill writes, “This dichotomy of dystopia versus utopia is more than useless: it’s dangerous. The falseness of that dichotomy and the despair of being left to accept dystopia keeps us from focusing on and addressing what we can each do every day to actively create a better future. We need to leave dystopia behind and invent a new framework and new language.”?

We touched on this with George Lakoff’s use of the term “tax relief” to illustrate the power of framing, noting that those two words, when used in political and economic debate particularly by conservatives, immediately frames taxes as a burden, or an affliction which demands reprieve.?

“In fact the frame of ‘tax justice’ – which instantly invokes community, fairness and accountability – has been fast gaining traction internationally as global scandals over tax havens and corporate tax avoidance have hit the headlines. Having a powerful way to frame the matter has no doubt helped to channel public outrage and mobilize widespread demand for change.” What this clearly illustrates is the power of positive framing to enact change throughout society – where “tax relief” may be a good talking point on the bully pulpit, “tax justice” actually encourages action. The same concept can (and should) be applied to climate change – where the majority of our communication around its importance has been based in fear, we should be looking at how to frame the issue in a way which promotes positive action, saying “doesn’t this future look promising? Let’s get there together.”?

So here comes the speculative (read: fun) part. What if, let’s say on the very first Earth Day in 1970, there had been a nationwide launch of an advertising campaign (and a robust marketing machine behind it) which showed what our world would look like not as a result of inaction – apocalypse – but as a result of concerted and coordinated global action – a verdant, green, temperate future replete with sustainable industries, renewable power, and most notably, manageable sea levels. It’s the type of future that we all want to live in (I think you would be hard pressed to find someone that says they would rather adapt to a climate stressed future), but few have sat down to actually imagine what that might look like.?

To consider the potential impact of such a campaign, let’s first recognize the effect of positive advertising versus negative. The data backs up the fact that ads which focus on a positive message, or play to people’s optimism, make a brand far more appealing to consumers. In 2013, a Belgian study of 1500 consumers showed that when watching a positive TV spot, people’s attitudes toward the advertised brand improved. This reaction happened regardless of the product category or its relevance to the consumers’ day-to-day. Recent campaigns from several Unilever brands – in particular Dove soap in its beauty category – highlight that using positive self-image ads boosts the audience self-esteem levels, and those brands have generated massive loyalties and even began to shift the conversation around what beauty is and what it means in our society. Unilever has drawn a straight line from its Dove products (the technology) to the broader evolution around beauty (social change). The same could have been done with climate change through the implementation of technologies that otherwise took over long for society to accept. I’m thinking about solar panels here.?

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, I knew one person with solar panels on their roof. It was a novelty, and understandably so. The technology was far too expensive for mass adoption, but more than that it took a very particular “type” of person to even consider solar tech at that time; the same type of person that might have considered GM’s EV1 when it hit the roads in 1995. What we have seen in recent years, however, is a dramatic drop in the cost of implementation and a rise in consumer acceptance (i.e., it’s no longer a specific “type” of person who considers solar an option). There are a few reasons for this:?

1. As the science becomes more accepted – there is largely no debate any longer about the impacts of climate change although you may still find the odd denier troll lurking in the more conspiratorial corners of the internet – governments and businesses across the world put into place targets to avert disaster. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have largely been the foundation for many of the goals set, along with the “red line” of a 1.5-degree Celsius temperature rise,?and the clear evidence of climate change-related weather events. In an article from the May-June 2021 issue of the Harvard Business Review titled Overselling Sustainability Reporting, author Kenneth Pucker notes that companies filing corporate social responsibility reports, and which couch their climate action goals in the Global Reporting Initiative (some of the more comprehensive benchmarks available), has increased by 100x over the past 20 years. One of the lowest hanging fruits for reaching those stated goals is solar panel installation, which is why solar installations for commercial spaces have gone from just over 1000 in 2010 to almost 16,000 in Q1 of 2022, and utility installations have jumped from 373 in 2010 to almost 80,000 in Q1 of 2022.?

2. Of course, no government or business is truly working for the benefit of the species or the planet without seeing something in it for themselves. I don’t mean this to sound cynical, because I do in fact believe that doing good and making a profit are not mutually exclusive, but as we have already discussed it very likely means changing how we measure success and shifting consumer sentiment. While we may be lagging in our metric changes, we are certainly seeing a shift in consumer sentiment. According to a survey conducted by OpenText – an information management company which commands the largest business network trading grid (think supply chains) in the world – across 27,000 consumers from 12 different countries, 84% of consumers plan to prioritize?buying from companies with an ethical supply chain (including a strong sustainability component), 81% of consumers believe businesses have a responsibility to ensure their suppliers abide by an ethical code, and 81% of consumers are willing to spend a premium if they could be certain it was an ethically sourced product. Consumers are demanding change from the companies they buy from, and companies in turn are not only making changes internally, but influencing similar changes across their supply networks and leaning on governments to enact the necessary regulations to keep emissions in check. In the solar market, that consumer demand has led significant increases in residential and small commercial installations (with California leading the way, little surprise there), which has in turn driven economies of scale for panel producers and thus driven the price of solar panels (and installations) down to a point where within the next year (as of this writing) solar could well be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels, something that was almost unthinkable when Ronald Reagan was pulling the solar panels off the roof of the White House in 1986.?

3. It’s not just economies of scale which ramp up with consumer demand – the technological development of solar panels, particularly around materials science and efficient electricity production, has seen a dramatic increase (and investment) in the last few decades as a result of the increase in solar as an affordable option for residential and a means to an end for?corporate goals. According to a BBC report in 2020, the average commercial panel converts 17-19% of light energy to electricity, up from 12% conversion rate 10 years ago. That may not sound too impressive, but it translates to the power rating of a standard size panel increasing from 250W to 370W. Let’s say you’re looking to put 5 panels on your roof – a decade ago you would have generated 1.25 kW whereas today you would crank out 1.85 kW. Or, taken another way, if your goal was to generate a total of 2 kW a decade ago it would have taken 8 panels and today it would only take 5. That’s cost savings due to technological improvements, and as demand continues to mount the advances in technology to help meet that demand speeds up, which in turn drives more demand for ever more efficient and affordable panels.?

Now for some back-of-the-napkin math to help illustrate the potential efficacy of Futures Marketing. In 2022, an estimated 97.2 gW of electricity in the United States comes from solar (whether that’s photovoltaics or concentrated solar-thermal power), and the price of solar has dropped 70% since 2014, and solar-related jobs have increased by 167% in the last decade. Now let’s say that our campaign that we started on the first Earth Day in 1970 had a somewhat negligible 5% effect on adoption rate, which means that instead of reaching 2022 solar power numbers in 2022, we actually reached them by 2019 – doesn’t sound like much, right? But if you consider the fact that costs have dropped 70% over the last 8 years (from 2014 to 2022), that means they drop at a rate of 8.75% yearly. So in the three years we’ve “added” to solar adoption, the cost has had a chance to drop another 26%, which would bring it under the threshold of being less expensive than fossil fuels. As soon as that happened, solar would experience a boom like the oil rush of the late 1800s. Jobs, on the other hand, would have the opportunity to continue growing another 50% in those three added years. Of course, we’re discounting a lot of economic factors here, like the possibility of a plateau for job growth in the industry or whether our supply chains would be able to keep up with the demand. The math here is very rough – I’m not an economist as you can clearly see – but the math itself is not the point. We don’t know what sort of effect Futures Marketing might have had (or might still have) on adoption rates, but the potential for effect is enormous. Climate change was wrought by technological means, and it can be equally addressed by technological means. The technology adoption is crucial, and it’s actually at the heart of sustainable development as a concept. Liam Young writes in his book Planet City that “sustainable development – an economic development that is compatible with the environment – was a motto that brought authorities, businesses, and some environmentalists to the negotiating table. Underlying this was an assumption of ‘ecological modernization’ – new technologies and markets that can both boost the economy and protect nature. The environmental problem was thus rendered technical.” What this underlines is the basic circularity behind Futures Marketing: accelerate adoption of new technology – improve living standards through that technology – increase speed of technological innovation – accelerate adoption of new technology … lather, rinse, repeat. That technical rendering of sustainability starts by showing people what the world could look like at the end of this cycle and working our way back to today.?