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Communicating with industry to mitigate climate change

by | Aug 29, 2024 | Communication, Economics/Business, Energy, Industry, Investment, minimization/mitigation, System Change | 0 comments

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Communication, Industry, Interviews, Minimization/mitigation, Politics

Can we successfully communicate with industry about their greenhouse gas emissions?

 

In May, 2024, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego reported the largest annual increase ever in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s disappointing, dangerous, and it shows that we have more work to do as we aim for the goal of net zero additions and beyond. While it’s true that individuals can make a difference by changing their habits (see our page Steps page), industries are by far the biggest contributors to climate change. We as individuals, though, can do more than personal steps — we can advocate and communicate, and our successful communication with industry has the potential to make a huge impact. For example, in 2009, when teenager Cole Rasergerger learned about North Carolina coastal forest destruction, he organized his school for a mail campaign that, with the help of the non-profit Dogwood Alliance, convinced McDonald’s restaurants to switch to recycled packaging (read more here).

But how do we do that? Who would we talk to? What would we say?

Note: although resource extraction is a big part of industry — it is responsible for a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, and we hope to cover that in a separate article soon — this article will limit its focus to industrial processing and assembly.

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To answer those questions, we can first boost our confidence by providing a realistic sense of what to expect from our communication attempts: that is, that many companies are concerned about climate change. For example, a 2019 Guardian article explains that a number of  companies are secretly going green. Why secretly? Unfortunately, since these companies are being quiet about their sustainable improvements, we have to theorize about their reasons. According to The Guardian, it could be that the companies assume consumers and investors will incorrectly equate sustainable practices with lower product quality and/or higher costs. Another possibility: they’re concerned that drawing attention to sustainable changes in one of their products might raise questions about why their other products aren’t created in similar ways and that they’ll be accused of “greenwashing” for highlighting only the more sustainable product. It’s disappointing that they don’t feel they can share these successful changes, but it’s still great that they’ve made them.

More good news about helpful industrial attitudes comes from a 2023 McGill University study that shows that the common assumption we need to limit our arguments to the economic benefits of sustainability may be unfounded. Industrial leaders respond as well to messages about sustainability initiatives improving environmental conditions as to economics. More on that below.

Even more comforting are the results of a 2022 Harris Poll for Google Cloud survey of industry Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), which found that almost 90% of respondents agreed that they cared more about sustainability at the time of the survey than they had during the previous year, and that “Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives were a top — and rising — priority for executives in the survey (64%), on par with evolving or adjusting business models (63%).” 

Finally, according to that poll and the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board University, many CEOs have publicly admitted that they may be greenwashing —making inaccurate claims about climate mitigation achievements as a result of difficulties in accurately measuring and reporting emissions — and these same CEOs want to do better. 

So we have reasons to believe that communicating with industry about mitigating climate change could be well received. The next step is figuring out who to reach out to and what to say to them. Our outline: 

  • Who and What
  • Empower Yourself with Knowledge
  • Resources and Funding
  • How to Communicate

 

Who do we communicate with, and what should we talk about?

First, we can influence the way people in local businesses or small companies think by contacting representatives (by phone, email, or more) and asking questions like:

  • What can they share about their climate policies?
    Outdoor photo of seated man using laptop computer while speaking on cell phone

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  • What Earth Day events are they promoting that you could volunteer for?
  • How do they handle major product scrap recycling? 
  • For car dealerships: Do they have any electric cars on their lot that you can test drive?
  • For landscaping companies: Do they use electrical instead of gas equipment?
  • For grocery stores: What do they do with the expired food at their grocery store(s)? (Check out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Food Loss Prevention Options for Grocery Stores for ideas about suggestions to make, or schedule a meeting and bring it with you!)
  • For plant nurseries: Does their nursery carry [invasive species name — example: English ivy] – and if so, can they please, please stop? 

Although you may not influence the entire business through communication like this, your contact will be memorable to the person who responds, and it’s possible that it will be the beginning of significant change.

Second, stepping up the hierarchical ladder a bit, you could speak to a company’s sustainability manager, sometimes called the corporate sustainability manager, or CSR (corporate social responsibility) manager. These are the employees who make sure companies are being responsible to the environment and local communities. They help companies comply with environmental regulation at various levels of government, and they can implement, or at least suggest, sustainable practices to industry leadership. You can learn more about them in this Climate Steps article.

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If a company doesn’t have a sustainability manager or CSR, you can speak to their public relations department. Consider: if you can impress them with the importance of sustainability, you may influence them to hire a sustainability manager.

A number of people have also started contacting a company’s shareholders, who have power to directly affect company policies. In the U.S., you can find shareholders using EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system. You’ll find a guide for using it to research investments here. However, outside the U.S., it’s more difficult to learn who a company’s shareholders are. According to the multinational investment company BlackRock: “…the majority of investors (~ 61%) in the companies represented in MSCI Europe are either non-institutional owners or unidentified owners.”

 

Empower yourself with knowledge before you communicate

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Before we begin, it is important to educate ourselves — we want to be sure of our facts about global climate change in general, as well as of historical and recent conditions in the areas where companies are located. First, when we consider causes of climate change within various regions, we have to remember that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions do not remain in the countries that produced them and that the effect of climate change is global. There will be regional differences, however, in our changing temperature, rainfall, and related conditions (e.g., wet bulb, drought). To make climate change more relevant to the industry, it would be useful to know both cause and effect for the company’s locality, historic and recent, to help communicate our concerns. Here are some links for checking how conditions are now and how they’ve changed over time as a result of climate change:

Now you know where to look to have climate data at your fingertips. 

Next, it’s also useful to know how companies plan their sustainable transitions. Many use a corporate sustainability initiative (CSI) which, according to the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management, is “a holistic approach to conducting business while achieving long-term environmental, social, and economic sustainability.” Are they helpful for businesses? Yes: a University of Southampton study found that:

…organisations respond to climate-related risks by making substantive engagements in corporate sustainability initiatives, such as

Graphic showing overview of potential GHG protocol scopes and emissions across the value chain.

Overview of potential GHG protocol scopes and emissions across the value chain. Courtesy of World Resources Institute at https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards/Scope3_Calculation_Guidance_0.pdf. More information is available at World Resources Institute.

emission reduction initiatives, environmental innovations and efficient use of resources, which in turn facilitates organisations’ effort to reduce GHG emission and improve corporate carbon performance.

A cross-country analysis from Huazhong Agricultural University agrees: “The research underscores the pivotal role of corporate environmental goals in guiding compliance behavior, highlighting the ongoing need for monitoring and certification to enhance environmental compliance practices.”

Not only that, CSIs also influence investors:  a study by the Bedriftsøkonomisk Institutt Norwegian Business School found that the concept of corporate social responsibility  activities “positively influences shareholders…through an indirect path of customer satisfaction.”  Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, is defined by Investopedia as “a self-regulating business model that helps a company be socially accountable to itself, its stakeholders, and the public.” )

So we know we’re on the right track in our research. Next, what environmental laws must companies comply with? That’s in flux: in March of 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published new regulations for companies to collect and report data on emissions resulting from industrial product processing and assembly. Those requirements were less stringent than rules proposed earlier, but some companies and U.S. states still filed lawsuits almost immediately. The SEC paused the new law in April while it argued for it in U.S. court (if you intend to communicate with Liberty Energy Inc. or Nomad Proppant Services LLC, the two oilfields that filed lawsuits, you may want to look at their statement about why they’re pushing back). Some environmental groups also sued, stating that they considered the revised rules too weak.

You can also find information about climate laws in other countries here, but it’s worth stating that the U.S. has an outsized impact and responsibility because of its emissions history. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that “the United States has overspent its carbon budget by roughly 346 billion metric tons,” and that “the United States bears a greater share of the responsibility for current conditions—on both a national and per-person level.” If we can bring U.S. industry in line, our efforts will have a huge impact.

 

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Before communicating with a company, it’s helpful to realize that sustainability managers and CEOs report that they’re having problems accurately tracking and reporting emissions data. In the Harris Poll survey mentioned above, CEOs said they don’t know “if they’re overstating their efforts, or how to benchmark them. Without the necessary data to track impact, how does one actually know how their efforts are doing?” Similarly, a TATA Consultancy Services white paper reports that companies are “struggling to measure the true value of decarbonization efforts in their supply chains.”

The United Nations is aware of these problems, and a United Nations consultancy is working on solutions: “While businesses, cities and regions have set their sights on net-zero emissions, many face barriers that are limiting their ambition or slowing their progress. The consultation aims to help to identify these barriers, understand more about how to refine approaches to transparency to promote greater ambition, and enable more consolidation, standardization and comparability.”

 

Empower Them with Resource and Funding Sources

In the meantime, we communicators can also offer information about available resources and funding to help companies meet requirements. In the United States, as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offers a huge Climate Action Funding Resource Guide with information for a wide variety of sectors, including industry. The EPA held a funding fair in 2023, and although that’s over, the assistance programs described in the guide are still available through the U.S. Department of Energy:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency graphic with flower and text reading “Investing in America: Climate Action Funding Fair”

Graphic courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at https://www.epa.gov/

Some of these may be useful to companies in other countries. For readers in the U.S., please keep in mind that these programs must be refunded periodically, and it’s possible Congress will decide not to refund them in the future, so the sooner we get started, the better. (And be sure to let your representatives and know that you support keeping such beneficial programs flush with funding. Learn more about communicating with politicians in this Climate Steps page).

There’s also technological help: the EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grant offers tools and resources such as Electric Power Sector Emissions Data and Electric Power Sector Emissions Quantification Methods and Tools to help grantees meet legal requirements.

The European Green Deal promises to offer financial help to European companies that try to cut their emissions through the following organizations and funding programs:

Additionally, a 2023 Pennsylvania Western University paper reports that the U.S. and Europe have opportunities to use smart smart technology like “fog computing, service-oriented middleware, and blockchain” to make  “automating, autonomizing and optimizing manufacturing processes” easier, thereby lowering their associated emissions. 

Keep in mind that it’s the responsibility of a CSR manager to be aware of some or all of these resources, but it doesn’t hurt to ask (respectfully) if they are, and if you communicate with companies that don’t have anyone in that position, you may be in a position to give them some happy news!

If you happen to be a scientist (or possibly a citizen scientist), companies sometimes reach out to people like you for information. Some forward-thinking managers ask for presentations or advice for their companies or groups within; for instance, Climate Steps gave a regionally tailored presentation to a Canadian construction firm and will be speaking at a packaging conference. Even if they don’t seek you out first, coming to them with a how-can-I-help? attitude can make for a much more fruitful exchange.

 

How to Communicate

Speaking of attitude, it’s wise to remember that when we’re preparing to communicate about something as powerfully divisive and frighteningly overwhelming as climate change, we need to be careful, because strong issues like climate change can generate strong emotions. In the way we communicate our interest in sustainability to industry representatives, our tone and our word choices are quite important: if we’re negative and accusatory, they may ignore our requests. It helps to follow the Golden Rule: how would you want people to talk to you?

Dr. Renee Lertzman offers further advice in a Ted Talk; she suggests that we first begin with ourselves, arguing that when we have more stress that we can handle, we experience what’s known as a chaotic response which can sometimes manifest as depression or despair and other times as rigidity expressed as denial or even anger. “Under these conditions, we lose our capacity to be integrated, resilient, adaptive, all

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those things that we want to be. So taking care of ourselves first is important – and it will help us understand others. [italics ours]”

Lertzman adds that when we’re overstressed, we try to protect ourselves by shutting down, which:

“…looks like people don’t care, it looks like apathy. And so a lot of folks who are seeing the urgency of the situation are like, ‘We’ve got to motivate you. We’ve got to get you psyched.’….And these things are actually not inherently bad, because we need solutions and we need to face the facts. But inadvertently, this can backfire and lead to more numbing and inaction…it’s not really touching what’s going on underneath.

She suggests that we aim for what she calls “attunement” in the way we deal with our own reactions to climate change and in our communication with others:

…attunement is when we’re feeling in sync, when we feel understood and we feel accepted for exactly where we are. 

…when we are more in tune in our window of tolerance, we are so much more capable of solving problems, being creative, being adaptive, being flexible, being our brilliant selves.

 

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Another part of being attuned is listening for clues: what is important to the person you’re communicating with? What are their concerns, frustrations? If you can remember and refer to them as you discuss climate change and their concerns, you’re more likely to connect with the person you’re talking to. 

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, Texas Tech University, has similar advice in “How, and How Not, to Communicate on Climate Change, a video from the Yale Climate Connection. She says we need to find something we share with the people we’re trying to talk to, a shared concern over something that will potentially be harmed or destroyed by climate change (what doesn’t that include?), and then talk about our concern about what will happen, rather than what they should do.  A shared concern, rather than a judgment, is easier to listen to, and therefore more likely to be considered.

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This dovetails with what Dr. Sarah Meyer, University of Washington, tells us in the same video: “People respond to emotion; they don’t respond to facts,” she says. Climate change is scary. We can talk about that, and about what we’re afraid of losing, and then listen with empathy to how whomever we’re talking to, whether that’s people in our circle or company representatives, respond.So how do we listen with empathy? Here is a good quote with useful advice from The American Federation of Teachers: 

  • “Active listening — vs. passive or casual listening — makes two-way communication possible.
  • It is the type of listening through which the organizer attempts to gather the feelings as well as the facts expressed in the message. 
  • It is the type of listening in which the organizer attempts to gather visual as well as verbal cues that build better understanding of the message. 
  • It is the type of listening in which the organizer attempts to control the natural tendency to respond to a message before the message is clearly understood. 
  • It is the type of listening that also communicates because it acknowledges the worth of the person doing the talking and thereby builds trust and emotional connections.”

We can also improve how our message is received by paying attention to the little things, like word choice, when we communicate with company reps. For example, when encouraging them to take some action, we can phrase things in terms of opportunities instead of blaming them and their companies for harm, and we can talk about the biggest possible impacts instead of the biggest problems. And, by the way, if you are writing, don’t use all caps: that makes it seem like you are shouting.

One last idea: the 2023 McGill University study mentioned above stated that we can honestly and successfully communicate about how sustainability initiatives can yield benefits. The authors found that: “Employing prosocial and achievement motivations [such as benefits to the planet] when communicating about climate actions is, based on our experiments, 55% more effective in generating interest than narratives that employ monetary motivation.” The study said noting social/environmental benefits approach worked best with small to mid-sized companies, and that’s important, because “they make up 99% of all businesses in the European Union and contribute 60–70% of industrial pollution.” 

To sum up, let’s apply the ideas above when communicating with both industry employees and shareholders:

  • Seek understanding and common ground.
  • Express concern, but not blame, about climate change.
  • Keep it positive. 
  • You’re there to help, if possible.

 

Go it alone, or work with others (many hands make light work)?

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with reaching out to companies by yourself, but there can be advantages to working with others on that communication, such as dividing the research described above with someone from your circle, and then sharing what each of you found prior to reaching out to the company you’ve chosen to communicate with. Also, if you’re seeking to call or visit in person and think you might lose your nerve, an extra person can give you moral support. 

Once you have communicated, share the news and inspire others with your efforts!

 

Let’s start communicating!

 

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Featured Image by F1Digitals via Pixabay.com

Contributors: Mark Stewart, Annette Olson

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