Podcaster : Writer : Engagement Specialist
Since July 2021 I have worked as the lead for Climate Outreach’s new Climate Engagement Lab. It’s an applied research project to give civil society campaigners and advocates insights and advice on how best to reach those parts of society that climate campaigns tend not to – ie, most of them. I worked on and off for Climate Outreach for …
The problems of thinking about the vastness of climate change as simply one kind of problem. On my Medium blog: https://medium.com/@powellds/what-if-climate-change-was-not-this-thing-but-another-thing-e539868a647a “given no metaphor for climate change will be anything other than desperately partial and constraining, perhaps the most useful thing to do is not to try to pick the ‘best’ metaphor, but to always just be acutely aware that …
How can we build common cause between labour unions and climate campaigners on the future of high-carbon work? I was lead author on a major report from the New Economics Foundation. Trust in Transition was well received by energy unions (for example) – who have historically been disappointed at the lack of empathy and engagement from those whose campaign demands …
When the parks dried up and it hadn’t rained for over a month, I wrote about how strange it all felt to have it dawn on you that this is climate change. https://medium.com/@powellds/in-praise-of-mild-discombobulation-because-christ-what-else-have-we-got-bb3e7d648fb0 Ecological philosopher Timothy Morton argues that our brains are wired to generally not notice most things until they try to bite us or start behaving a bit strangely. Then …
If you’re going to scare people about climate change, make sure you give them something to do about it. For NEF: https://neweconomics.org/2017/08/earth_overshoot_day It is scary — make no mistake. Scary today. Scary already. … But scary without feeling like you can do something about it — without agency — is just dull, dead panic: rabbity-headlights time… Portraying the scale of how we’re going wrong compels us …
If we understand climate change as only being about numbers, we won’t understand people – or how power works. For Business Green (paywall, free trial): https://www.businessgreen.com/opinion/3008252/three-reasons-that-we-are-not-lines-on-graphs Reproduced by NEF, here. Power. We need to talk about power. There’s a reason many of the world’s richer economies have done so little for so long on climate change. It’s hard, and it …