Stacia Tipton: You’ve been working on climate issues for decades. What’s the key lesson from Copenhagen?

Charlie Miller: If anything was clear at Copenhagen, it’s that the world’s nations are waiting for the U.S. to act. When it does (we’re pushing very hard for a Senate vote this spring), President Obama can knit together the historic breakthroughs obscured by the end of the Copenhagen meeting. The coalition of the willing that emerged represents roughly 60 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. It will undoubtedly be joined by others. A lot of hard work remains, but a lot of hard work is now finished. When most of the pieces of the puzzle are in place, it’s much easier to add the missing ones later. But Senate action is critical.

ST: When you and I were doing media around Kyoto in 1997, we had daily phone briefings and sent press releases by fax. How do digital and social media change the information flow today – and possibly the outcome?

CM: Ah, the good old days! Glad I sold my stock in fax machine companies, shortly after I sold my buggy whip holdings (just kidding!). Things have changed a lot since then. We were blogging from Copenhagen and sending out twitter feeds, and we were also sending out material for our Facebook page. We’re still running the analytics, but it appears that a lot of people were paying attention – our hash tag for Copenhagen was showing up anywhere, and many blog posts were using our twitter quotes. It’s pretty difficult to demonstrate that we were influencing the outcome, but we sure changed the reporting of the negotiations. Much more influential in shaping the outcome, of course, were the 40+ EDF staffers who attended Copenhagen.

ST: A climate bill always seems to be “next” on the Senate’s agenda. How do communications help advance an issue, when policymakers are focused on other priorities?

CM: Many Senators understand the urgency of climate action, but everyone understands that getting a bill through the Senate will be extraordinarily difficult. Majority Leader Reid has said financial reform is next in line, along with a jobs bill. But we’re optimistic that a climate bill will come after that, sometime this spring. We’re hoping that Senators get beyond the rancor and hyper-partisanship of the health care reform bill, and start focusing on the climate emergency. We’re using communications to convince fence sitters that a climate bill will create jobs and help the economy, that we’d rather have those jobs here in the U.S. instead of China, and that the consequences of failure will be far more costly. We’re using all the traditional campaign media tools, and most of the new ones too.

ST: What can we look forward to from EDF and its climate team in 2010?

CM: We’re focused like a laser on the Senate. EDF has been working to get to this point for years – we were the first environmental group to recognize this threat, and we’ve devoted more staff and resources to climate than any other group, by a wide measure. Getting a Senate bill is indispensible for action in the U.S., and action around the world, including China and India. I think that the EPA “endangerment” finding, and the threat of EPA regulating greenhouse gas emissions, will help nudge some Senators our way. In fact, it already has. We would vastly prefer a bill through Congress to EPA regulation, however. Climate should be a more bipartisan issue that health care, in part because of the extensive ground work we’ve laid over the last five years.

Other sources that might be of interest:

The New York Times: Copenhagen Climate Talks

Environmental Defense Fund in Copenhagen

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The Obama Administration has provided myriad examples of both good and bad messaging in recent months. With such an ambitious agenda, they were bound to make at least some mistakes. And when you look at how they’ve dealt with climate change legislation in the two months since the House passed its version of the bill, you can see what I mean.

Despite overwhelming public and business community support for action to arrest the growing impact of a warming planet, the President has been largely silent on the matter this summer. His silence is surprising given previous statements that climate change was a signature initiative for the administration in this calendar year.

What happened? To paraphrase a line from the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” what we have here is a failure to communicate. Climate change legislation has seemingly fallen off the administration’s to-do list: they basically stopped talking about it, which sent the signal that other issues were more important. In the process, they lost a real opportunity to advance their agenda.

Although the President is not a client, if he were, I’d offer him these suggestions for his messaging on climate change: 

1. Lead, don’t follow: Both the public and the business community want action: the former worries about the environmental impact of doing nothing and the latter frets about the economic impact of the lack of certainty that makes planning for the future very difficult. Although the margin of victory was very narrow, the House did pass a bill requiring real changes. If you want climate change legislation to pass this year, make it a priority and demonstrate your support for it in word and deed. Waiting for Congress to take action signals you don’t think this issue is a priority and makes those members on the fence think twice about risking a vote on such a controversial issue.
2. Keep the high ground: The legislation is complex, and there are many potential outcomes. But focusing on the controversy and challenges (or allowing others to do that with no reply) is a mistake. Instead, you should articulate a vision of why legislation is needed and how it will help. The president’s job is to identify national problems and propose solutions. State your principles to Congress and keep the pressure on them to act.
3. Give people something to believe in: Despite contentious battles over health care and financial security, the public still generally supports positive action on issues such as climate change they believe require it. By putting climate change legislation in a positive context that stresses solutions to real problems, you give the voting public something to be for and position legislative action as a societal benefit.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. But that’s exactly my point: if you want action on your climate change agenda, you need to start talking about it.