How to Sell Climate Action to Your Rural Conservative Neighbors

A field guide to difficult conversations about climate outside of big cities

Wind turbines near Minot, North Dakota. Photo: Ken Cedeno/Getty Images

State Representative Tiffiny Mitchell has a challenge. She is a Democrat from Oregon’s 32nd District, a beautiful region at the mouth of the Columbia River downstream from Portland. She’s also new to statewide politics in a region that’s seeing a growing urban-rural divide, and her district reflects that chasm. In fact, in December a coalition of loggers and farmers tried to oust Mitchell for supporting a bill that would increase regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. The recall efforts ultimately failed, but the incident highlights how Mitchell faces major headwinds in selling climate action to her rural constituents.

While Monmouth polling shows that 69% of Americans want the government to take action on the human causes of climate change, there’s a strong partisan skew. A much lower percentage of Republican voters support action than Democratic voters. When they agree on the need to address the climate crisis, they don’t necessarily agree on how, or who should bear the responsibility to act.

Mitchell recently asked for my help in dealing with this disconnect. I’ve been in the trenches of creating social license for wind energy globally, and I write regularly about climate action, and so I understand how she is not alone in shouldering the challenge of communicating both the urgency of climate change and how to shape the right solutions. Though many people understand the stakes of the crisis, oftentimes, they find it difficult to engage with their conservative friends, family, and neighbors who seem skeptical about climate action. Often they avoid the conversation entirely, simply because they don’t know how to begin. It’s a big, ugly subject, so they avoid it. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Cognitive scientist John Cook has spent years finding creative solutions to help people talk about this existential question. He was the driving force behind Skeptical Science, a site that identifies and debunks climate disinformation sound bites, memes, and arguments. Cook now works at the Center for Climate Communication at George Mason University, where he researches what arguments do and don’t on our messy human brains, and what is effective in countering the long-running disinformation that has so polluted our ability to deal with climate reality.

Cook is also a cartoonist. His Cranky Uncle series, which is being extended this month both as a book and a game, helps illustrate key points of climate communication. The spiral of silence is one of them. Often, people want to talk about climate change, but they choose not to introduce the subject—thinking internally that they are the only ones concerned. The problem is that the vast majority of people are concerned. The Monmouth polling found that 71% of Americans view climate change as a very serious or somewhat serious problem. So most people want to talk about it, but fear of conflict or being the only one who cares is stopping them from speaking up.

Don’t be afraid to have the conversation. But how you introduce the topic matters.

“What is the most important thing we can do to contribute to climate action? Open our mouths and talk about it!” Cook told me. “This is the key to building the social momentum that is the foundation of political action.”

The major lesson: Don’t be afraid to have a conversation. But how you introduce the topic matters. There’s a communication framework to follow that helps people build rapport to ensure a connection before introducing potentially contentious topics. Advocates should consider initiating the conversation with more innocuous and nonjudgmental phrasing while disclosing only the relevant information. The final step is just as important: agree on a resolution.

Katharine Hayhoe can speak to the effectiveness of this approach. Hayhoe is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University; she’s also an evangelical Christian. She’s adopted a system of converting climate skeptics using shared commonalities — namely, her religion. Hayhoe connects with other evangelicals by talking about their shared faith and values. She establishes a personal connection and gets them into a place where they are willing to have an open-minded conversation about climate change.

Hayhoe is tapping into the upside of tribalism, something that’s very human and common across the political spectrum. But tribalism extends to many things besides religion and politics. It can be membership in a club, a family, a business or living in the country versus the city. It can be a common football team or other sports. There are multiple ways to find commonality with groups you are part of as you build rapport.

Mitchell, for example, has many things in common with all of her constituents, but she is still treated like an outsider in her coastal district. She’s from the far outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah, and grew up in a conservative, Mormon family. Her hometown was consumed by the suburbs during her lifetime. The combination doesn’t allow her to lean into the rural upbringings and common connections with her constituents quite well enough. What she leans into are the common love of nature and rural living, the love of family, the appreciation rural and small-town dwellers feel for one another, and the common challenges of accessible housing and food.

Mitchell may come off as an outsider, but it’s undeniable that her political position grants her access. Every influential, powerful, and rich person in the district will take her calls, access that most people don’t have. She’s had at least a coffee with many of the key people on both sides of the fence as well as innumerable constituents—building the relationships that will help her help her entire district.

That’s an important point in a nuanced way. Our innate tribalism means we tend to defer to authorities who are within our tribes. High-status individuals inside of our various tribes impart opinions and we tend to agree with them. As an elected official, Mitchell has that advantage. Doors open for her. People listen to her. She’s the same person as she was before the election, but with a minor superpower, one she’s using for good.

You have to make a choice about what topics and battles are worth fighting, and focus on what gains you want to make.

But that’s also an explicit tactic that can be used. Let’s suppose you have a large extended family, one that gets together on the family ranch a couple of times a year. In that tribe, there are going to be a couple of people who everyone looks up to and listens too, more than not. If you change their minds, you change many of the members of the tribe’s mind too. And you rarely change the minds of people like that in front of other people. Private conversations, or at least very small group ones, allow you to shift people without social dynamics getting in the way. Sway the leaders and influencers and a lot of the tribe shifts without you having to persuade them personally.

The next stage of communication is disclosing relevant information. You have to make a choice about what topics and battles are worth fighting and focus on what gains you want to make. Do this by listening to people and finding out their views on climate change. Then tailor what you share with them to match where their heads are at, not the larger set of possible information. This will help narrow down the large range of potential issues to cover to compelling discussion points.

Next, understand what the steps along a journey toward embracing climate action might look like. A few years ago I created this continuum chart of climate science positions. In general, denialists and skeptics shift to the right side of this chart as evidence and other persuasive elements emerge. The number of people holding extreme positions to the left of the chart diminishes every year. The evidence is too strong.