Relatively few millennials identify as environmentalists:
The word “environmentalist” typically conjures up images of earnest young idealists gathering petition signatures and chaining themselves to old-growth trees. But [last week’]s study finds that older Americans are more likely to call themselves environmentalists than younger ones.
Environmentalist PR guru David Fenton suggests ways to change this:
I tell clients, “Don’t use the word ‘planet,’ and don’t use the word ‘earth.’ One of the problems we have is that too much of the public thinks that environmentalists are people who care about the environment and not about people. So the environment has become a thing apart. I think that’s why millennials don’t care for the term.
Now in the case of climate — the climate will be fine. The planet will recover. We just won’t be on it. And so this language and these images — “polar bear,” “Planet Earth,” “environment” — they signal the wrong thing to most people, which is that they’re struggling and we don’t care. We have to make the environment and climate be about them and their lives and the economy and justice and all the things that people do care about. And in fact that’s what it’s about, because if we don’t solve climate change, there is going to be a lot of suffering, by average people.
Meanwhile, Scott Clement argues that talking more about climate change would do Democrats some good:
In one study, Stanford’s Bo MacInnis, Jon Krosnick and Ana Villar compared what candidates said (and didn’t say) on climate change in every 2010 congressional and Senate election to how much Democrats won or lost by. In short, they found Democrats who took pro-green stances such as “global warming has been happening” increased their vote margin over Republicans by 3 percent compared with those who didn’t. The impact was much larger — a 9 percent vote-margin swing — when a Republican took a position doubting global warming’s existence or opposing action to address the issue. The analysis controlled for the district or state’s partisan lean in the 2008 election, as well as for whether the candidate was an incumbent.
The Dish 