How to talk about climate so the haters will listen

Imagine your job is to secure funding for a green corridor running through County Durham. This corridor will connect locals to miles of green paths along the River Wear. Benefits of the corridor are numerous. Biodiversity will increase, arts and culture researchers will engage with organisations to expand knowledge of the local environment, and exposure to nature will bolster health and wellbeing of residents.  

But then Reform councillors are voted into office. The first thing they do is a “Control F” search on all projects looking for the words ‘green’, ‘net zero’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘climate’. To keep your project funded you need to find a different description – and fast.  

What do you do? 

This is not a hypothetical, but a real-world predicament Stephen Backhouse faced recently in his climate consultancy work. 

Last week, Backhouse joined Clover Hogan, a climate activist, and Hannah Phang, Chief Marketing Officer of The Now Work, for an evening workshop exploring how climate messaging lands in a political landscape dominated by far-right politics, nationalism, and populism. The moderators began the evening by admitting a truth that those working in sustainability know all too well, that getting CEOs, the C-suite, and politicians on board with climate projects has become increasingly difficult in the last two years.

The moderators stressed that the key to convincing those in power is not to change the mission, but the language used to describe it.  

As anyone who has ever had an argument with family members of the opposite side of the political spectrum will know, certain words have different meanings depending on which ideological circles one moves in. Take the words “net zero” as an example. To anyone left of the centre, these words evoke images of hope that one day we’ll live in a world free from fossil fuels and rising temperatures. In the 2024 UK Parliamentary elections, no single party mentioned the two words “net zero” more in their  manifesto than Reform.

The Green Party mentioned it zero times, Labour three, and Reform 14. Each time Reform spoke of “net zero” it was to convey how the left’s climate policy “wrecks the economy” and increases the day-to-day financial burden of hard-working people.  

To explain why using words like “net zero” is a sure-fire way of not getting your project funded, Backhouse ran the audience through an exercise in vocabulary. On the screen behind him, Backhouse wrote the following words: 

Empathy              Patriotism

Power                   Legacy

Nature                  Security

Justice                  Tolerance

Resentment        Freedom

He asked the audience to write down which three words in the list best reflect the values of their organisation, and which three words least reflect the values of their organisation. As one might expect from an audience at The Conduit, most groups said their top three words were justice, empathy, and nature. The least popular were legacy, patriotism, and freedom.

Backhouse then divided the words into three categories he called green flags, red flags and landmines.  

Green flags are words that signal in-group acceptance. Backhouse explained that if you are at a party talking to a stranger and they use words like “justice” or “fair”, there’s a good chance you might get along with them. Red flag words are those that make you slightly suspect of the person you are speaking to. If at the same party a stranger starts talking about how much they love “freedom”, you might start looking around the room for somebody else to talk to. Landmine words are those that shut down conversation completely. To somebody far on the right, a landmine word would be “empathy”.  

To explain why, Backhouse gave a little bit of his own life story. He grew up in a rural part of Canada where most of the people around him adhered to very conservative Christian values. It was only when he moved to London and began studying political philosophy that he realised that the term that best describes the people of his hometown is “Christian nationalists”. Backhouse has devoted his career to understanding the motivations of this far-right movement.

“Christian nationalist groups are the most powerful groups on earth,” he warned. “They have access to resources Roman emperors never had. They have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel behind them. They have presidents lining up to cater to their whims. We need to take them seriously.”  

What makes somebody a Christian nationalist, according to Backhouse, is a belief in three statements: “We built this culture. We’ve lost this culture. We want it back”. Christian nationalists firmly believe they are fighting an existential war against invaders who want to see them and their culture disappear. “If you Google ‘empathy is a sin’ you will see many books under this title. And that is because empathy challenges culture wars. If you are fighting a war, empathy is the last thing you need,” he explained.  

“Be clear about what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to be right or are you trying to get sh*t done.”  

Tolerance is another landmine word because there are two different ways of defining it. The first is tolerating those who are not like you. The second is tolerating somebody until they conform to your ways. “One definition is a celebration of diversity; the other is diametrically opposed to it.”  

To get somebody who may be on the opposite side to you politically to align with your goals, you need to use non-triggering language that gets them on board with your project and present it in a way that does not come across as condescending. Hannah Phang gave an example from her own work coaching sustainability officers on how to communicate with a C-Suite that might not be on board with climate goals.

She explained that over the last couple of years there has been an ongoing belief in sustainability circles that those working in climate are like a “Trojan horse” who sneak inside businesses to get work done. “But if a team is going into a conversation with their CEO or board with the idea that they are the saviour who will change and transform this business for good, even energetically that intention will not be met well,” she explained. Instead of beginning a conversation with the emotional energy that you are there to reform capitalism, a better approach is to think of yourself on the same team as the CEO. 

Pheng advises that sustainability officers ask themselves essential questions that will align their goals with those of the person they are trying to convince: How can I get to know this person? What keeps them up at night? How can I frame sustainability in a way that helps them achieve their goal? “Ask yourself the question, ‘is being right [about sustainability] in the boardroom going to help you achieve your goal? Or is learning their language going to enable the goal in a more efficient and pleasant way so they are on your side?” Phang suggested.  

During the Q&A, an audience member asked the moderators where they draw the line between modifying language and staying true to their own beliefs. Backhouse answered that it is important to know which hills you are willing to die on and understand that in some circumstances you won’t be able to please everybody.  

He used the example of one of his relatives working at UNICEF. Government aid cuts have made it increasingly difficult to get funding for projects. His relative had to write a report about gender–based violence against women and girls who get assaulted while trying to collect water from the local well. “He knew he wouldn’t get funding for anything called ‘gender-based violence’ so he changed it to ‘violence against women and girls’ and kept his funding,” Backhouse said. His relative’s team was appalled at the change of language, but the vulnerable women and girls stayed protected.  

Backhouse ended the workshop on a positive note by pointing out that right-wing populist groups are not as popular as they seem. What sets these extremist groups apart from those in the middle is that they are well resourced and take up a lot of space in our media. “You have to think about what compromises you are willing to make in the short term so that you are there when Reform is voted out,” he said.  

Phang put it more succinctly: “Be clear about what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to be right or are you trying to get sh*t done.”  

For the people of County Durham, Backhouse found a solution to keeping their corridor funded. Instead of calling it a ‘green’ corridor he relabelled it to a ‘heritage’ corridor. That is because to those on the right, preserving nature isn’t about acknowledging man-made climate change, but conserving the beauty of their surroundings and their national pride.   

At the end of the day, Reform voters also care about the environment, they just express it in different ways.