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Reaching Beyond the Choir with Kathleen Biggins · Simmer Down

• 0:00
  Kathleen Biggins: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Reaching Beyond the Choir: How to Talk About Climate Change with People Outside of your normal audiences.
• 0:09
  Kathleen Biggins: My name is Kathleen Biggins, and I am the founder and president of C-Change Conversations.
• 0:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And we have been doing just that since 2014.
• 0:19
  Kathleen Biggins: And we're here to give you some of our tips on things that have worked for us during that period.
• 0:25
  Kathleen Biggins: So, what does C-Change do?
• 0:28
  Kathleen Biggins: We seek out the non-choir and reach moderates and conservatives with nonpartisan communication on the risks of climate change and economic and societal benefits of addressing it.
• 0:38
  Kathleen Biggins: And we've had a lot of success.
• 0:40
  Kathleen Biggins: Since we started on the road in 2017, we have now been in 33 states and spoken to over 20,000 people.
• 0:48
  Kathleen Biggins: And we've done it by accessing them through different types of associations or groups, in fact, over 296 of them.
• 0:55
  Kathleen Biggins: And these include Rotary Clubs, the Young Presidents Organization, universities, schools, land trust businesses, country clubs, chambers of commerce, and houses of faith.
• 1:04
  Kathleen Biggins: And of course, we've also been talking to businesses as well who want to help bring their employees up to speed on what climate change means for them and why it is such a critical issue.
• 1:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And as I mentioned, we have had a lot of success.
• 1:17
  Kathleen Biggins: I don't mean to blow our own horn here, but I did want to share some of our survey data that really shows that our approach is indeed working.
• 1:24
  Kathleen Biggins: As you can see from these numbers, we are seen as nonpartisan.
• 1:28
  Kathleen Biggins: And also we are seen as something that is valued and would be shared with others and recommended to friends and other associations.
• 1:37
  Kathleen Biggins: So why is this topic so difficult to talk about?
• 1:41
  Kathleen Biggins: Well, it is the topic that historically has divided us the most.
• 1:45
  Kathleen Biggins: This scientific topic of whether or not greenhouse gases are changing how our climate works has divided us more than some really raw emotional topics like abortion or immigration or Blue Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter.
• 1:58
  Kathleen Biggins: It is this one that historically divided us the most.
• 2:02
  Kathleen Biggins: And that makes it really difficult for those of us who want to educate on it to bring in groups that currently are rejecting the science or rejecting that this issue is one that they need to care about.
• 2:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And even though there has been a lot of movement towards recognizing the issue, as you can see from this graphic, there's still quite a few places where people actually reject that climate change is even happening.
• 2:28
  Kathleen Biggins: And so we really do have our work cut out for us.
• 2:31
  Kathleen Biggins: We have a lot of people who are pretty dead set against learning about climate change or accepting it.
• 2:36
  Kathleen Biggins: And they are clustered in quite a few places in our country.
• 2:40
  Kathleen Biggins: So how did we get so divided?
• 2:42
  Kathleen Biggins: Well, I think it's really important to think back on when we became a land that was riven on this topic.
• 2:50
  Kathleen Biggins: And when you think about it, it really happened in the 2000s.
• 2:53
  Kathleen Biggins: Before that, there was kind of begrudging acceptance across party lines that climate change was a problem we needed to address.
• 2:59
  Kathleen Biggins: In fact, it was on both parties' platform in 2008 when John McCain ran on the Republican platform, different ways of addressing it, but agreeing that it needed to be addressed.
• 3:08
  Kathleen Biggins: But at that time, if the climate policy wending through Congress had indeed been approved, it would have been a very different scenario than what we have today.
• 3:18
  Kathleen Biggins: Because at that time, clean tech or green energy was much more expensive than fossil fuels.
• 3:23
  Kathleen Biggins: And it meant that if our companies had pivoted to use this more expensive energy, it would have made them less competitive with other manufacturers, especially China, who was using coal to grow their economy hand over fist.
• 3:38
  Kathleen Biggins: This was something that really concerned our manufacturing base, but also concerned consumer groups who didn't want to pay more for things like toothpaste and tomato sauce.
• 3:47
  Kathleen Biggins: And so there was a real pushback that this move would be economically painful.
• 3:53
  Kathleen Biggins: The other thing that happened during this period is the rise of the Tea Party, a group that is very articulate in its belief that big government is usually a bigger problem than whatever problem it is creating solutions for.
• 4:07
  Kathleen Biggins: And this is really true when you look at energy reform or climate policies, because you need big policies.
• 4:16
  Kathleen Biggins: What we're trying to do is not just change, quote, the light bulb in our house.
• 4:19
  Kathleen Biggins: We're trying to rewire our entire house to have a whole different type of energy system.
• 4:24
  Kathleen Biggins: And that needs big government to set the policy and the rules of the road.
• 4:28
  Kathleen Biggins: And so there was a real pushback on political reasons at that time.
• 4:32
  Kathleen Biggins: The other thing that happened was Al Gore became lauded and famous for his movie An Inconvenient Truth, which depicted climate change as a real problem.
• 4:43
  Kathleen Biggins: And as the left celebrated around this, it really created a pushback on the right.
• 4:49
  Kathleen Biggins: If Al Gore was for this and the left were so euphoric about it, it became a topic that they no longer would consider.
• 4:56
  Kathleen Biggins: And we had a new litmus test for what makes a good conservative or a good liberal.
• 5:01
  Kathleen Biggins: There's also been the linkage to things like ESG and DEI, which have been really described now as a woke agenda.
• 5:12
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, something that is scientific, that is literally about physics and chemistry, has been dragged into this emotional quagmire.
• 5:21
  Kathleen Biggins: And as part of that, it becomes much easier to reject than if it were to be evaluated on its own.
• 5:26
  Kathleen Biggins: And lastly, change is scary and disruptive.
• 5:30
  Kathleen Biggins: And if you think about it, all of our energy transitions in the past have happened over a long period of time.
• 5:35
  Kathleen Biggins: But this one, because of some of the physical risks associated with climate change, really has to happen very, very quickly.
• 5:42
  Kathleen Biggins: And as these changes come, there is just emotional pushback because people become uncomfortable.
• 5:49
  Kathleen Biggins: Also, there's been a lot of positioning on purpose so that each of these issues would work well with our political bases on both the left and the right.
• 6:00
  Kathleen Biggins: So let's start with the positioning on the right.
• 6:02
  Kathleen Biggins: It has been depicted often within the press that many people read as, again, a part of big government, mandating big government regulations that are expensive and a waste of money.
• 6:14
  Kathleen Biggins: Something that will bring an economic penalty, that we will have to pay more for our energy, and that it is about sacrificing things we love, including our hamburgers, including our big cars, including maybe even our gas stoves.
• 6:26
  Kathleen Biggins: It has also been depicted as setting us up to be less competitive on the world stage, especially with China.
• 6:34
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, that is a bit of an older narrative.
• 6:36
  Kathleen Biggins: We can talk later in this presentation on how to debunk that because that is not really as valid today as it was then.
• 6:43
  Kathleen Biggins: And that it is a quote, liberal, politically correct mandate, again, tying back into that woke agenda.
• 6:50
  Kathleen Biggins: It puts polar bears in front of people.
• 6:52
  Kathleen Biggins: Hardworking people are paying more for energy or losing their jobs just because the Libs care about that polar bear way up far away.
• 7:00
  Kathleen Biggins: And then also a real almost, I want to say, training, um, that this is not a topic that conservatives are supposed to care about.
• 7:13
  Kathleen Biggins: In fact, it's almost a bit disloyal to care about it too much or to focus on it.
• 7:18
  Kathleen Biggins: People like us do not do that.
• 7:20
  Kathleen Biggins: And that is a very powerful tool, that sense of belonging and feeling comfortable within one's tribe and not breaking away from that is one of the most powerful human influencers that we have.
• 7:33
  Kathleen Biggins: Just to put a little flesh around that thinking, um, these quotes kind of give you a sense of what we hear as we travel the country talking to conservatives and kind of moderates who have rejected this topic historically.
• 7:44
  Kathleen Biggins: And that is that, hey, our fossil fuels, especially our natural gas, are much cleaner than other countries.
• 7:49
  Kathleen Biggins: We need to send them ours, or other people will capture the market and use dirtier energy, which is a credible concern.
• 7:58
  Kathleen Biggins: The other thing that we hear quite a lot is that these newfangled technologies, wind and solar, they are upsetting our grid stability.
• 8:06
  Kathleen Biggins: They're making them not work well when we need them.
• 8:08
  Kathleen Biggins: And they are costing us more money and again, leaving us vulnerable when our grids crash.
• 8:13
  Kathleen Biggins: And it's all those new technologies that are doing that, which again, if you look at the science, is not true, but it resounds quite well with this group.
• 8:22
  Kathleen Biggins: And the third is that factoring in climate impacts, looking at climate impacts is not valid because we aren't sure enough about what they are and we aren't sure enough about climate.
• 8:30
  Kathleen Biggins: And so we need to leave our markets and the economy separate.
• 8:33
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, if you look at the big picture, it's really difficult to do that.
• 8:37
  Kathleen Biggins: But if you divide energy and you divide climate away from it, it becomes a different type of equation and it becomes harder for people to understand exactly what is financially at risk.
• 8:49
  Kathleen Biggins: And on the left, let's kind of focus on what they have used to kind of again rally their base and make it a salient topic.
• 8:56
  Kathleen Biggins: It is a very important topic around the issue of social justice.
• 9:01
  Kathleen Biggins: If you kind of look back historically, um, while the environmental community was really concerned about climate change, it wasn't really until it was linked to social justice that the greater part of the Democratic Party really began to embrace it.
• 9:13
  Kathleen Biggins: And that's because there is a real incredible issue with the fact that many people who are disadvantaged are much more vulnerable to energy pollution today from our legacy fuels, and much more vulnerable to the climate impacts that are coming in the future.
• 9:29
  Kathleen Biggins: Another thing that kind of threads through much of what has been written on the left is that this is an existential threat.
• 9:36
  Kathleen Biggins: Whatever it costs, whatever the economic pain is, we have to do it.
• 9:39
  Kathleen Biggins: Just kind of pull up your bootstraps and let's get on with it.
• 9:42
  Kathleen Biggins: The economic pain is necessary.
• 9:44
  Kathleen Biggins: Also, a real focus, again, on polar bears and the environment and the things that are happening outside, a little less about what is happening to each of us on the ground today.
• 9:55
  Kathleen Biggins: A little less of a tieback to how we are experiencing climate change and still kind of a focus more on nature and what the disruption is out there.
• 10:03
  Kathleen Biggins: There's also kind of a feeling that on the left, everything is attributable to climate change, whether it's smog, whether it's fires, whether it's floods, whether it's locusts, just everything.
• 10:14
  Kathleen Biggins: Oh my, right?
• 10:15
  Kathleen Biggins: Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, that sense that everything is tied back to it.
• 10:20
  Kathleen Biggins: And in fact, some of it is really true because climate change impacts our system so widely that it is impacting many, many, many things that happen within our natural world.
• 10:30
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, but but we have to be careful because it is not causing every ill and every problem.
• 10:35
  Kathleen Biggins: And oftentimes the left loses credibility when it feels that way.
• 10:39
  Kathleen Biggins: And lastly, again, that that message of sacrifice give up your air travel, give up your burgers, give up your gas stoves, in order to fight this issue is one that does cause a lot of pushback on the other side.
• 10:51
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, a quote to kind of flesh that out this one issue that will define the contours of the century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent threat of climate change.
• 11:02
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, this is the issue overall, um, which does not yet resonate with the general population at large.
• 11:10
  Kathleen Biggins: And the other one, and I picked this up directly from a Republican congressman talking about the left's position, is that it is anti-car, anti-cal, and anti-capitalist, and how they say we have to deal with climate change.
• 11:25
  Kathleen Biggins: So we just share those with you because it kind of sets up why this is such a tough, tough topic to talk about, even when it's a scientific one and we have so much scientific backing to recognize and understand it.
• 11:39
  Kathleen Biggins: And sea change, as I have mentioned, has been traveling the country now since 2017, um, successfully bridging this divide, helping people understand why climate change is salient and why they need to care about it because it impacts them personally.
• 11:55
  Kathleen Biggins: Our job, as I kind of preface with that, is to make it relevant, to make it personal, to make it economically wise, and also socially safe to care about this topic.
• 12:09
  Kathleen Biggins: So, our main strategy is to reposition the issue, to take it away from being an environmental or a liberal issue, and reposition it as an issue that impacts our health and safety, our jobs and economy, and our geopolitical stability.
• 12:27
  Kathleen Biggins: And the reason we focus on those three is because those three are universally important to both the left and the right.
• 12:35
  Kathleen Biggins: They are kind of human issues.
• 12:37
  Kathleen Biggins: And in fact, research shows that these are the three things that are most important to them when they go to vote.
• 12:44
  Kathleen Biggins: And we believe that we can credibly make the story or the position that climate change negatively and profoundly impacts all three.
• 12:55
  Kathleen Biggins: And when we do that, it enables people to see it differently.
• 12:58
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, to see it as something that they really should care about.
• 13:03
  Kathleen Biggins: So our tenants are to make sure that we um meet our audiences and make it as easy as possible for them to listen to us.
• 13:16
  Kathleen Biggins: And so we do that in a couple of ways, but one of the most important ways is to try to match our speaker to the types of audiences we're reaching so that they can identify that with them as someone like them.
• 13:32
  Kathleen Biggins: So our speakers don't appear liberal, they don't sound liberal.
• 13:37
  Kathleen Biggins: Um they probably uh went to the same schools as our audiences or have other connections with their audience.
• 13:43
  Kathleen Biggins: And if we can't have our speaker do that, what we try to do is have our host within that community be one of the groups.
• 13:50
  Kathleen Biggins: So again, it's one of them that is bringing this topic forward, which makes it safer for them to attend and listen.
• 13:58
  Kathleen Biggins: The next thing that we try to do is go to them.
• 14:03
  Kathleen Biggins: We don't just go to a campus usually and put up inside and say, hey, come talk about climate change or come learn about climate change, because the people that we really want to get aren't going to do that.
• 14:13
  Kathleen Biggins: Instead, we want to go to them where they are already congregating, where they are already comfortable.
• 14:20
  Kathleen Biggins: So we tend to go to associations, whether it's a chambers of commerce, a rotary club, an investment club, a garden club, where they are amongst their peers and super comfortable so that they can actually hear our messaging.
• 14:33
  Kathleen Biggins: And lastly, we are really careful to be scrupulously nonpartisan.
• 14:38
  Kathleen Biggins: And I don't know if you notice in our survey data that we actually do that very well.
• 14:42
  Kathleen Biggins: We hear at the end many, many times, that people cannot tell what our personal political affiliation may be.
• 14:49
  Kathleen Biggins: And that's critically important.
• 14:51
  Kathleen Biggins: So let's drill down on some of our specifics.
• 14:53
  Kathleen Biggins: And I'm going to share a couple of slides that we use.
• 14:56
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, this is not our whole presentation, which is about a 50-minute presentation when we get to do it in full, but I give you a sampling of our approach and some of the slides we we use and some that could potentially be helpful to you as you bring this message forward.
• 15:12
  Kathleen Biggins: So the first one is we keep the science super, super simple.
• 15:15
  Kathleen Biggins: It's so easy to overwhelm people, the science around this topic, because there is so much incredible and really well-researched science that explains what's going on, but it's hard to understand if we have too much of it.
• 15:29
  Kathleen Biggins: So keep it really simple.
• 15:31
  Kathleen Biggins: We use this basic slide, I'm sure many of you do as well.
• 15:34
  Kathleen Biggins: We might have all seen it in fifth grade, talking about how just a teeny tiny portion of our atmosphere is responsible for keeping our planet habitable.
• 15:42
  Kathleen Biggins: And when we add to that teeny tiny portion, it simply adds more heat to our system and more energy and to our climate.
• 15:50
  Kathleen Biggins: This is another slide that looks deceptively simple, but I find it really resonates with some of our conservative audiences.
• 15:56
  Kathleen Biggins: And this is about balance.
• 15:58
  Kathleen Biggins: And we're talking about how the carbon cycle has changed.
• 16:00
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, describing for them how using fossil fuels is upsetting the balance.
• 16:06
  Kathleen Biggins: So if you think about fossil fuels, there were little bits of plant and animal matter that fell to the earth millions of years ago, got silted over with time, heat, and pressure, got turned into pools of carbon, right?
• 16:17
  Kathleen Biggins: Our fossil fuels.
• 16:19
  Kathleen Biggins: And humans came along and really unwittingly, and that's a very important word, unwittingly started to use it for very good reasons and pumping it up into the atmosphere at an alarmingly fast rate, much faster than it happens in nature.
• 16:31
  Kathleen Biggins: And this upsets the balance that has existed really since humans' civilization has existed.
• 16:38
  Kathleen Biggins: And finding a way to underscore that this is out of balance is a really good thing when talking to conservatives and even moderates as well.
• 16:48
  Kathleen Biggins: And then we show this fabulous slide from NASA as part of them understanding just how out of whack our temperatures have become.
• 16:56
  Kathleen Biggins: And what we're seeing here is NASA's depiction of average global temperature back from I think 1860 up to modern times.
• 17:04
  Kathleen Biggins: And it starts with blue was colder than average, white average, yellow warmer, and red hotter.
• 17:09
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, that always, always gets people to sit up and notice.
• 17:18
  Kathleen Biggins: Another one of our tactics that we find very helpful is to make the information as localized and personal as possible.
• 17:26
  Kathleen Biggins: So much of our information about climate change is kind of on a global basis.
• 17:31
  Kathleen Biggins: It seems very big, overwhelming, and far away.
• 17:34
  Kathleen Biggins: But if we can translate what is happening down to people's own backyards and communities, it makes it much more accessible for them to accept that climate change is indeed happening and something they need to care about.
• 17:48
  Kathleen Biggins: And to do that, we look to many different sources, but one of the primary ones that we use is an institution called Climate Central.
• 17:56
  Kathleen Biggins: They are a nonpartisan group that puts out quite a lot of climate information down to the community level.
• 18:04
  Kathleen Biggins: And we are able to bring forward things that are good examples of how life on the surface in their town has already changed due to climate change with slides like this one showing how many more days over 95 degrees a city in Florida like Tallahassee now experiences than back in 1970.
• 18:25
  Kathleen Biggins: And I think most of us have a sense that it's gotten hotter or that summer seems longer or more uncomfortable, but actually seeing the numbers kind of creates a reality around that sense, and I think helps people kind of drill down on what's happening.
• 18:42
  Kathleen Biggins: The other thing we try to do is provide projections of what's to come if we continue on our current path.
• 18:48
  Kathleen Biggins: And this is actually a projection that is 26 different climate models averaged together, so it's not the worst case scenario, showing where our temperature will be at the mid-century mark and at the end of the century mark.
• 19:00
  Kathleen Biggins: And as we can see for Miami, um it's expected to get about five degrees hotter and feel um like areas much further south.
• 19:09
  Kathleen Biggins: But it is even perhaps more uh startling if you look at a place like a Chicago or a New York City, because their delta, the amount that they are going to heat up, is even more extreme because they're starting from a cooler spot now.
• 19:24
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, the other thing we drill down on is rain.
• 19:27
  Kathleen Biggins: I think we all know that climate change is impacting the ferociousness of our um rains and that because of our warmer oceans and our warmer air or atmosphere, that we are able to hold more water vapor.
• 19:41
  Kathleen Biggins: And when it comes down, it's often coming down in this really dangerous cataclysmic form.
• 19:46
  Kathleen Biggins: We look to show rainstorms that have flooded the areas where we're presenting.
• 19:51
  Kathleen Biggins: As you can see, this one was actually um in Washington, D.C., the other one was in Nashville.
• 19:57
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, trying to make the point that while it's happening everywhere, and we have a wonderful uh national slide showing that it is indeed happening everywhere, but then pivoting and bringing it back to say, remember this flood, you experience this, and these types of floods are being made worse due to climate change and will get worse in the future as things heat up.
• 20:19
  Kathleen Biggins: Obviously, you're in Florida.
• 20:21
  Kathleen Biggins: We don't always talk a lot about sea level as we tour the country, but in all coastal states, we really do drill down on it because it is such a critical issue.
• 20:30
  Kathleen Biggins: And Florida, of course, being a peninsula, um, is perhaps more exposed than any.
• 20:36
  Kathleen Biggins: What we try to do is not just talk about the projections, not just show grass, but also show these pictures of places on the ground that are experiencing sunny day flooding, not even a storm, that is impacting the quality of life and the businesses in these areas.
• 20:53
  Kathleen Biggins: And I think that's a really important message to keep hammering home is not just the storms.
• 20:59
  Kathleen Biggins: Sea level rise is actually impacting us on a day-to-day level.
• 21:04
  Kathleen Biggins: And one of the things that we have found very, very impactful to talk about is the fact that many of our coastal regions are accessed by low-lying bridges and roads that are becoming less usable, even at some high tides, which means that many of these communities are becoming isolated during big parts of the years.
• 21:25
  Kathleen Biggins: And many of these communities are multi-million dollar houses that provide quite a lot to the local tax bases.
• 21:32
  Kathleen Biggins: And so it is not just a threat to those homeowners, it's not just a threat to those families, it's actually a threat to the entire community because such a large part of the tax bases could be negatively impacted and could be lost in the future.
• 21:47
  Kathleen Biggins: And that's a side that a lot of people haven't really factored in quite yet.
• 21:51
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, the other tactic that we are going to just touch on quickly is again repositioning the issue to look Look at national security, look at migration, look at health issues that we know are very, very important to conservatives and to some moderates as well.
• 22:11
  Kathleen Biggins: And actually, this is a really easy story to tell.
• 22:14
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, I'm just giving you a few slides, not our whole layout.
• 22:18
  Kathleen Biggins: But the story on migration is compelling.
• 22:22
  Kathleen Biggins: We already have a lot of migrants coming up due to climate impacts from countries further south than us as they find their lands less livable.
• 22:31
  Kathleen Biggins: And that will only increase as temperatures go forward and our water systems get negatively impacted.
• 22:39
  Kathleen Biggins: But one of the things that I don't think many conservatives have thought through yet is that our southernmost states are getting really hot.
• 22:47
  Kathleen Biggins: And they're projected to get much hotter.
• 22:50
  Kathleen Biggins: And as that temperature goes up, there is a real negative impact to their economies.
• 22:56
  Kathleen Biggins: And it is projected by mid-century that there will be intra-country migration, that people will be moving from the southern states north to find economic opportunity and to stay safer.
• 23:09
  Kathleen Biggins: And really those left behind will be the poorest who have less opportunity.
• 23:13
  Kathleen Biggins: That is really eye-opening to a lot of people.
• 23:16
  Kathleen Biggins: And perhaps this is something you're already speaking about in Florida.
• 23:20
  Kathleen Biggins: But right now, migration is just about the others coming into our country, not about those within our own country having to move and how will they be welcomed and how will the northern economies work to integrate them?
• 23:34
  Kathleen Biggins: So a really big topic to keep a focus on going forward.
• 23:38
  Kathleen Biggins: Military also is easy to talk about.
• 23:40
  Kathleen Biggins: There are, quotes, galore.
• 23:42
  Kathleen Biggins: The military has been talking about this issue for a very long time.
• 23:46
  Kathleen Biggins: It's really universally accepted, and the military is taking a lot of specific action, whether it is investing in nuclear to stop using fossil fuels to be less vulnerable on the battlefield or other types of innovative technology as well.
• 24:01
  Kathleen Biggins: So don't be shy because the military is already hardening its assets because they are in danger and also because our training abilities have been compromised.
• 24:13
  Kathleen Biggins: And so feel confident in bringing in this messaging because it's one that resonates quite well with this target who hasn't perhaps tied that together with climate change.
• 24:24
  Kathleen Biggins: Health obviously is a universal concern.
• 24:26
  Kathleen Biggins: Climate change has myriad impacts on health.
• 24:30
  Kathleen Biggins: It's been clearly denoted again in the press.
• 24:33
  Kathleen Biggins: And it is this is kind of a heartstring issue because it is hitting our children worse.
• 24:39
  Kathleen Biggins: Children and the elderly are really most vulnerable to climate change.
• 24:42
  Kathleen Biggins: And it's a wide range of things from veteran diseases, from fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes to asthma to allergies, which really impact children, but also to heart attacks and lung disease and premature birth, the litany of negative consequences of climate change is quite long.
• 25:01
  Kathleen Biggins: And it is an important way to get people to notice about this issue.
• 25:07
  Kathleen Biggins: And importantly, two years ago, all of the major medical publications came out with the exact same op-ed, if you will, putting it out in all of the journals saying that climate change was the number one public health risk and that we needed to keep our temperature under 1.5 degrees C.
• 25:28
  Kathleen Biggins: And one of the things I would just like to note is that amongst conservative Republicans, doctors and the medical associations are one of the highest ranked trusted messenger groups.
• 25:41
  Kathleen Biggins: So if we can get doctors to start talking about this, or if we can let them know how the medical professional professionals are viewing this risk, it is a really good way forward.
• 25:52
  Kathleen Biggins: Another thing that we try hard to do is redirect the emotion.
• 25:58
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, on the right, climate action has been successfully positioned as something that's going to cost you, that's going to take away things that you really, really love.
• 26:07
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, cars, your gas stoves, and your hamburgers.
• 26:13
  Kathleen Biggins: And in fact, if you step back from it, climate action is all about saving things that we love and that we care about most.
• 26:22
  Kathleen Biggins: And so we have to find ways in to describe that.
• 26:25
  Kathleen Biggins: And one of the things we do in every single one of our presentations is find a local area that is being compromised, a place that people love that is going away, whether it's a redwood forest out west, which need the mist in the summer to keep them healthy.
• 26:41
  Kathleen Biggins: And that mist is being impacted by climate change, or whether it's our beautiful marshlands down south.
• 26:47
  Kathleen Biggins: There are different areas that we know are being compromised.
• 26:50
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, highlighting that lets people realize what they personally have to lose.
• 26:53
  Kathleen Biggins: We also talk about how investments could be impacted and what we can lose ahead with that using credible sources like Moody's and how climate change is pressuring these different types of categories.
• 27:05
  Kathleen Biggins: We talk also about our families and the fact that our health and happiness of our families are at stake and that it will be much harder to protect that in the future if we don't take action on climate change.
• 27:19
  Kathleen Biggins: So again, taking that emotional pull and making it about, hey, let's save everything instead of it being about taking things away.
• 27:28
  Kathleen Biggins: Another tactic we have is to make sure we put the temperature into perspective.
• 27:32
  Kathleen Biggins: We hear these things, especially when it's in Celsius, and you're like, well, what does that mean?
• 27:37
  Kathleen Biggins: 1.5, that doesn't sound like a big deal, when in fact we know it is an incredibly big deal when we talk about it as our global average temperature gain.
• 27:47
  Kathleen Biggins: And one of the slides we use for that is this one.
• 27:49
  Kathleen Biggins: And I really love the slide.
• 27:51
  Kathleen Biggins: So perhaps there's a way that you could think about getting the information or using something similarly.
• 27:56
  Kathleen Biggins: So on the bottom axis, we have time going back 20,000 years, and on the x-axis, we have temperature from about 11 degrees hotter to about eight or nine degrees colder.
• 28:07
  Kathleen Biggins: The gold is average global temperature, and the white are just milestones to give us reference points along the way.
• 28:13
  Kathleen Biggins: And as this chart depicts, we can see how the last transition, which occurred due to natural causes, happened over an eight to 9,000 year period, literally giving the world time to evolve the biodiversity and the ecosystems that have supported us for the last 10,000 years.
• 28:35
  Kathleen Biggins: And now, especially at the time of the Paris Accord, we were poised to potentially go that exact same delta in the next 100 years.
• 28:44
  Kathleen Biggins: So the juxtaposition from having thousands of years to make this change and for nature to be able to evolve to accommodate it, to forcing this type of delta in just a short period was what was so frightening and brought all of the countries of the world together at the Paris Accords to say we can't go to the high numbers of our projections.
• 29:09
  Kathleen Biggins: We have to make sure we stay down at that 3.6 degree Fahrenheit level, which correlates to a two degree C that we hear about so much in the press.
• 29:18
  Kathleen Biggins: Because at those levels, we think we can stay safer and we can handle the changes that nature will throw at us.
• 29:24
  Kathleen Biggins: And you will notice that whenever possible, we try to translate the numbers into Fahrenheit for our audiences just because people don't necessarily know the Celsius numbers and what they mean.
• 29:36
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, they sound so small when you hear them in general.
• 29:40
  Kathleen Biggins: But that is a really powerful point to message the fact that when nature is left to its own devices, this type of ship, which has happened, happens much more slowly.
• 29:50
  Kathleen Biggins: And so much of the danger is, in fact, at because of the rate that we are triggering it.
• 29:57
  Kathleen Biggins: Another way we talk about how these changes are kind of personal and put them in perspective, is to look forward.
• 30:06
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, this is from Climate Central.
• 30:09
  Kathleen Biggins: And what this graphic does is take a market like Orlando and look how future generations, all the way down to Gen Alpha, who were born after 2014, will experience climate change in the future as through temperature increases, depending on whether we take action or not.
• 30:29
  Kathleen Biggins: And you can see that for our children and our grandchildren, it's a much different future if indeed we come together now to take the action than if we continue on our current path.
• 30:41
  Kathleen Biggins: Another tactic that we have is to make sure that we clearly delineate how the cost of inaction, of maintaining our status quo, is much more painful and much more costly than the cost of action and moving towards a cleaner tech society.
• 31:00
  Kathleen Biggins: And this is a critically important story, and it's one that hasn't been told very well, especially to conservatives who kind of continuously hear the opposite in much of the press that they read.
• 31:12
  Kathleen Biggins: If you tie climate and energy together and look at the whole picture, the story is crystal clear.
• 31:22
  Kathleen Biggins: It is only when you divide them and look at them kind of in a vacuum that you can start making the economic story that the cost of the transition is too much.
• 31:31
  Kathleen Biggins: So we work really hard to say, hey, you can't just look at a piece of the problem.
• 31:35
  Kathleen Biggins: They are tied together.
• 31:36
  Kathleen Biggins: And if you look at it holistically, the message is really clear.
• 31:40
  Kathleen Biggins: We need to act in order to save dollars and to have a much more comfortable future.
• 31:47
  Kathleen Biggins: One of the ways we do that is to focus on the fact that we are spending taxpayers' dollars today in such increasingly amounts to deal with the natural disasters of which many, not all, are tied to climate change.
• 32:00
  Kathleen Biggins: We recognize that many of us are moving into harm's way as well, putting a bigger bullseye on our backs.
• 32:06
  Kathleen Biggins: But there is no doubt at this point, the research is clear and the science of attribution is helping us along this way in showing exactly the impact climate change has when it does on these increasingly number and severe natural disasters.
• 32:22
  Kathleen Biggins: And we're talking about a lot of disasters.
• 32:25
  Kathleen Biggins: Last year we had uh 23.
• 32:27
  Kathleen Biggins: This year we are already at $20 billion disasters.
• 32:31
  Kathleen Biggins: And taxpayers pick up a huge portion of that cost.
• 32:36
  Kathleen Biggins: And cities and towns and states are pivoting to harden infrastructure to prepare for the new normals that nature is throwing at us.
• 32:44
  Kathleen Biggins: So we are on the bill for these climate damages.
• 32:50
  Kathleen Biggins: And as taxpayers, we are already paying for them, and they will get much greater in the future.
• 32:56
  Kathleen Biggins: We also talk about how some heavy hitters are forecasting the hits to our GDP if we continue on this current pass.
• 33:03
  Kathleen Biggins: Swiss Re, which is the largest reinsurance company in the world, takes a look and showing that our economy will be significantly hit if we had a 3.2 degree increase, as much as 9.5%.
• 33:17
  Kathleen Biggins: The world economy, which obviously includes a lot of countries that are less developed, could have as much as an 18% GDP loss.
• 33:26
  Kathleen Biggins: Again, Swiss Re is kind of a sober-minded business expert.
• 33:31
  Kathleen Biggins: And so we find that these types of voices saying that the economic loss is real and will be significant is an important way into getting conservatives to think about the dollar and cents.
• 33:44
  Kathleen Biggins: Another thing that we include is uh this projection from the BlackRock Institute, which shows that local GDPs and the South and in the Midwest will be negatively impacted by mid-century due to the increase in heat, due to increase in natural disasters, also increases to human productivity drops and other things from the excessive heat and to agricultural yields.
• 34:11
  Kathleen Biggins: And we kind of go through that in much more detail in our presentations, but again, making sure the economic message is crystal clear.
• 34:18
  Kathleen Biggins: And at the same time as we share with them the costs that we are already experiencing and what is coming, we also share with them the fact that the energy transition is already happening and it has some real benefits to us already.
• 34:33
  Kathleen Biggins: As this chart shows, renewable energy, especially utility scale wind and solar, has dropped to be about 40% cheaper than fossil fuels globally.
• 34:42
  Kathleen Biggins: And in our regular presentation, we go on to talk about how battery storage also has dropped so that today, solar, utility solar, and batteries are cost competitive with fossil fuels.
• 34:53
  Kathleen Biggins: And that's kind of a game changer because what that means is you have not only the cheaper energy, but the stability to use it for greater periods of time without having those anciliary costs of climate change happening because of the release of greenhouse gases.
• 35:09
  Kathleen Biggins: And so it is a cheaper way to go, again, when you look at the bigger picture.
• 35:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And the on dollars and cents alone, um, it the renewable energy is taking over, especially within the power arena or the power category or electricity category at a rapid rate.
• 35:29
  Kathleen Biggins: And this translates to savings.
• 35:32
  Kathleen Biggins: And this is kind of an eye-opening chart that shows that in Texas during 2022 they saved about $11 billion because of the high amount of renewables they have in their own energy power mix.
• 35:44
  Kathleen Biggins: Texas is already number one in win.
• 35:47
  Kathleen Biggins: It is about to overtake California as the number one state in solar, and it is a leading installer on grids batteries as well.
• 35:57
  Kathleen Biggins: And so it is a real renewable powerhouse.
• 36:01
  Kathleen Biggins: And importantly, that has translated to dollars in their actual power customers' pockets.
• 36:07
  Kathleen Biggins: And that's a really important link to make.
• 36:10
  Kathleen Biggins: Also, we talk a lot about the job creation that has come through the clean energy transition.
• 36:15
  Kathleen Biggins: And a last uh tactic is to really focus on innovation.
• 36:21
  Kathleen Biggins: Innovation is kind of our get out of jail card, if you will.
• 36:27
  Kathleen Biggins: And not that innovation can do everything, but it is through the innovation of these clean energy methods that are giving us the hope that we can continue to power our economies in a way that is acceptable and still decrease our risk to climate change.
• 36:46
  Kathleen Biggins: And whether it is the older ones that are now taking root or the newer ones that we need to complete the transition, um, there is so much exciting activity happening.
• 36:59
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, for conservatives and I believe liberals, the idea that human ingenuity and hard work can create solutions that can help us in this fight and that we are having success is one that really, really resonates.
• 37:14
  Kathleen Biggins: And we always are sure to talk about the progress that's happening in the nuclear arena and in carbon capture because those are two ways forward for many conservatives that believe that those are the best ways to address it.
• 37:28
  Kathleen Biggins: And we we talk about the cost issues, we talk about some of the things that are hampering them, but we include them in this suite of potential new technologies that are coming that will help us in the future.
• 37:41
  Kathleen Biggins: Lastly, I'd just like to say a couple of other tips that we we will share.
• 37:46
  Kathleen Biggins: One is remember we have to make it politically and socially safe for conservatives to move their position on climate.
• 37:53
  Kathleen Biggins: Part of that is by again approaching them in a group where they're comfortable and they see perhaps their peers nodding or asking good questions and like, oh, well, maybe this is okay for me to think about as well.
• 38:04
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, but part of it also is to remind them that there was a time when climate change was a bipartisan issue, when George H.
• 38:12
  Kathleen Biggins: Bush was a president, even when George W.
• 38:14
  Kathleen Biggins: Bush was president, and that there were multiple bipartisan uh bills put into Congress in the past, and that it is a growing issue for young Republicans and the future of the Republican Party today, because there is a real, real discrepancy between older conservative Republicans and the younger cohort who are now becoming the bigger voting bloc.
• 38:36
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, and so it makes them realize that in order to protect their party and to um stay in power, there that modification is coming and it and it's okay to do.
• 38:49
  Kathleen Biggins: The other thing is don't depend on science or facts to make the points.
• 38:55
  Kathleen Biggins: This issue is an emotional issue.
• 38:58
  Kathleen Biggins: And research has shown that people's position is much more of an emotional one than a rational one.
• 39:05
  Kathleen Biggins: And again, it ties back to our sense of belonging and our sense of what our group thinks more than on a specific fact.
• 39:13
  Kathleen Biggins: And if anything, too many facts, too much science just kind of makes people go cross-eyed and retreat from learning about the issue.
• 39:22
  Kathleen Biggins: Make sure you debunk the false narratives.
• 39:24
  Kathleen Biggins: There's a lot of new information about China and the fact that now they are out competing us in the new energy form instead of worrying about coal in the past.
• 39:33
  Kathleen Biggins: And that's a very important story to make that many people haven't heard yet.
• 39:37
  Kathleen Biggins: And also about energy reliability and how so much of our grid disruption is in fact due to climate change and into the increased pressures that are coming from the need for more air conditioning.
• 39:49
  Kathleen Biggins: So the status quo is making our grid more vulnerable, and that's kind of a messaging that isn't heard loudly or clearly.
• 39:56
  Kathleen Biggins: And lastly, feel free, and I say briefly play it out, um, to use the stewardship card.
• 40:03
  Kathleen Biggins: The fact that we are called upon to leave the earth at least as good as we were given it, as something that plays in in or re-re resonates on both sides of the aisle.
• 40:17
  Kathleen Biggins: And it's an important one because everybody wants to leave a good world for their kids and their grandkids.
• 40:25
  Kathleen Biggins: And we just need to tie the dots together for everyone to understand how we are blowing that and the tools that we have to make it better, and that's why we need to act quickly to do so.
• 40:41
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, and it is a powerful, powerful persuasive point, and it's one that we really, really um hone in on throughout our presentation.
• 40:51
  Kathleen Biggins: So I hope this was kind of like a speed date where we could just tell you a bits and pieces of everything that um we do that we have found really successful in broaching this difficult topic with new audiences.
• 41:03
  Kathleen Biggins: If you would like to know more, please reach out to us or to have us come into your community to give a presentation.
• 41:11
  Kathleen Biggins: Um, we, as I said, do travel the country and talk to a wide range of different types of groups.
• 41:16
  Kathleen Biggins: We thank you so much for sharing this time with us.
• 41:20
  Kathleen Biggins: If you would like to get more information from us in the future, you can sign up for our monthly newsletters and our many blogs.
• 41:27
  Kathleen Biggins: And if you have any specific questions, please, please feel free to reach out to me directly.
• 41:32
  Kathleen Biggins: My information is here on this last slide.
• 41:35
  Kathleen Biggins: Thank you again for joining us.
• 41:38
  Kathleen Biggins: We hope this was helpful to you.
• 41:40
  Kathleen Biggins: We hope that this will indeed stimulate new ways, new avenues to reach out to groups that currently do not think that climate change is a topic they need to care about.
• 41:53
  Kathleen Biggins: And as all of us on this call really do recognize, we are all in this together.
• 41:59
  Kathleen Biggins: And no single party or no single individual, no single state can take the action necessary for us to be successful.
• 42:07
  Kathleen Biggins: We really do need to come together around this problem.
• 42:10
  Kathleen Biggins: So good luck.
• 42:12
  Kathleen Biggins: And thank you.