Rebranding Climate Change as a Public Health Issue | TIME.com

But what if climate change were instead about an increase in childhood asthma, or a surge in infectious diseases, or even an influx of heat-induced heart attacks? Would that hold more resonance for the average citizen of the world? That’s what some climate change experts are hoping, as they steer the conversation about global warming toward the public health issues it raises.

After Covid, re-branding climate as a public health issue is sure to be a successful propaganda messaging strategy. Or maybe not.

A better approach would be to end the doomerism and re-brand as opportunities to make life better. The doomerism approach leads to depression and anxiety – and the obvious observation that if humanity will end in ten years, then why should we do anything at all?

Doomerish comes across as amateur propaganda – fear is a powerful motivator – until it goes over the top and people laugh at it.

When you want to sell a product to someone, you sell the benefits – not the harms. With climate change, we sell the hypothesized harms (many of which are over the top and highly unlikely or not in the realm of physics, causing people to tune it out).

A far better approach would be to sell potential opportunities and benefits – new, more efficient cars (which at some point, if they did them right, would cost less, not more). Nicer, more efficient homes that keep you pleasantly warm in winter and cool in the summer.

But that is not what we are doing. Instead, we sell fear, and follow that up with calls to ban vacations, ban air travel, ban the consumption of meat, and public shaming.

That is not a very good advertising approach.