Organizing at the Grass Roots–Tip 2

Personal, active bonding

Behind climate awareness-building Tip 1 - using conversational style - is something basic, crucial, and important and deeper, namely, use personal, active bonding.

Compare how fifty years ago the damage and devastation of the Vietnam War was brought home to us daily in the news and TV, but only weekly or monthly reporting of the climate devastation in India, Valencia, or Los Angeles, so that it is easier to ignore or forget. The powerful, influential, wealthy fossil fuel industry does not allow a fair case to be made for energy choices or consideration of the costly climate consequences. Advocates of renewable energy can only break that dominance through personal, human contact. If ordinary people, not only scientists, do not engage in this effort to connect with others face to face, the climate trap will be perpetuated. Our isolation, our difficulty to share our common values, and our silence must be broken. It amounts to building trust through personal, active contact. So when you meet or talk to each other, you feel comfortable with that person, you see that person, and there is no feeling of “who is that creep, or intruder?”

That trust leads to a two-sided exchange. It allows us as renewable energy activists to reach out, and it allows others to accept us. That will not come all at once, and may require persistence and putting aside our own ego, assumptions, and resistance. We sometimes think, “oh, if I send an email, they will be swayed.” But what is most successful is not electronic connection, but human connection. This contact cannot be established effectively over the internet or by phone.

Here are tips for building this human connection.

• Consider your audience. Approaches to talking about energy will vary. We should not raise the energy issue the same way for all conversations. Consider how the other person uses energy, for starters.

• Do not lose sight of your original purpose. We are out to challenge the fossil fuel giants and their poisonous products and to welcome renewables. We start with raising awareness of how we use energy. Focus on that rather than on renewables, so that you are not simply dismissed as a pontificating activist.

• Do a pre-mapping exercise to determine the person's overall energy awareness. A full map of consequences and rewards is not needed. Awareness of our use of coal, oil and gas might be enough to show, for some, how this energy is not as great as we think. This pre-mapping could be in the form of a simple psychological trigger, “I am soon out of gas,” and a behavior, “need to find it.” This could be reinforced by other pre-mappings, such as the trigger, “I am low on water,” and a behavior, “accessing water requires energy. We constantly use massive amounts of energy.

• Focus on their energy costs, not the broader climate costs. Many have been misled by the “drill baby drill” or “gas use is great” propaganda, Ask about electric bills, and what uses the most kilowatt hours of energy, or about what it costs to drive a car. Many will be stunned by what it costs to drive an EV rather than a gas vehicle, even if the purchase price of the first is higher. From there, you could talk about who supplies the energy, taxes that subsidize fossil fuel, or the cost of energy from the sun or wind or nuclear power or gas and why this varies widely.

• For those paying energy bills, try to breakdown the costs, starting with the cost for solar panels or for the kWh purchased from the local coal power plant. After asking, note this is not the only energy bill–what about the water bill, the heating bill, the gas bill, the travel bill, the bill to get your food grown and delivered, the energy bill to make your clothes, the energy bill to dispose of used things. This informal analysis might even broach on which energy form-–coal, gas, oil, wind, solar, or nuclear—is officially the cheapest.

• For those paying these bills, ask what is the Perceived Reward: For the diehard fossil fuel user, the trigger-behavior-reward loop might look like this. What is the trigger: Experience the need to use fossil fuel to heat, drive, buy, fly, drill, or mine. What becomes the behavior: Extract it, refine it, transport it, use it, or guzzle it to get my need fulfilled. What is the reward, or “What will you feel with this energy use?”: Time saved, more expense, and improved comfort or convenience? Avoid talking about the climate cost or consequences, short or long term. Avoid shaming or raising anxiety. Merely emphasize what is perceived as the reward. You may then try to explore what the deeper actual reward is and how this can be achieved without fossil fuels.

• If that person uses much energy, especially gobs of fossil fuel, ask about the real reward of that huge energy use suggesting it is an addiction. Only this personal connection allows for this personal challenge. Thinking of a smoking or cocaine addiction, psychologist on addiction Dr. Jed Brewer writes, “Look deeper into your body, not thoughts. When you think about the habit, what does it feel like? What sensations come to mind? What urges or emotions. Getting clear on what the actual (such as energy) rewards are allows you to start to unwind the trigger - behavior - reward cycle, and actually change a part of your brain that keeps track of how rewarding an activity actually is." The same applies to energy: what is the real perceived reward of such energy? Here we are looking more at personal perception, bliss, contentment, and anxiety, not the social, economic, or environmental consequences, or externalities.

• If you encounter a person who denies being hooked, casually dissect or explore more deeply the habit loop: the trigger, the behavior and then the perceived reward per unit of time—daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly—or map parts thereof, and then the real reward, again devoid of the social, environmental consequences. For example, assuming a trigger, such as needing to get to work and driving my gas or hybrid car 1000 miles a week, what amounts does this take in energy and at what costs? What is the perceived reward, and the deeper, actual reward? This can be made into simpler mappings, such as the need to fly for a reason (trigger), the flying (behavior), and flying with energy usage and benefits to a destination x miles away (actual reward), including the cost of time and the cost to fly. Or, as one renewable-advocate talks with like minded person, the loop can emphasize more awareness, such as comparative energy usage not in gallons or pounds but in CO2 emissions, and the perceived reward if there is one.

• Non-antagonistic, peaceful outreach is key to relationship building. Sometimes, climate activists expose their unwillingness or inability to communicate about climate change and this can immediately create resistance and distrust in the listener, a situation we should all strive to avoid. Create occasions for this person-to-person contact, by talking over the fence, in the parking lot, or in the shopping aisle, or by pushing the doorbell button. Sometimes activists fail to reach out to establish contact with ordinary folks or if they do, then tarnish that outreach. Better is to evolve a constructive approach, welcoming a stranger to sign an energy petition, offering a flyer, inviting someone to a talk. If outreach to strangers seems difficult, then zero in on your immediate circle first, your close friends, brother or sister or parents, or a person you know who brings up the energy issue. Outreach requires an organized, sustained, resolute, and repeated effort to connect with others—boots on the ground. Observe how we sidestep values, ideology and solutions, and even the very devastating consequences of climate change. Our intention is not to shame, denigrate, judge or argue with the individual, but to convey the great difference between fossil fuel and renewable energy use against a backdrop of a common denominator of shared habits and shared values around energy. Questions about the source of energy, alternative uses of energy, amount of energy units consumed, and the direct cost of energy build awareness about energy sources and costs, all on that person-to-person basis show what we have in common.

• Over the longer term, promote energy as a choice issue. Strive to do so in repeated conversations, by sharing newspapers articles, radio and tv information, and via social media. The topic cannot be left to the fossil fuel industrial complexes to steer. Remember that the first steps are to raise awareness of what we are trying to accomplish with renewable energy, not to focus on “addiction to fossil fuel”, which might be considered biased, accusatory, evaluative or judgmental. We aim to heal, over time and through repeated dialogue and contact, our own energy anxiety. At the same time, we seek to nudge others to gravitate toward renewable energy use and away from fossil fuel dependency. We know this as a life or death choice but beware of doom-mongering.

This personal bonding opens a crack in the door to a broader energy awareness, perhaps even recognizing the fossil habit loop. Looking at the cost paid by the consumer daily will help the listener recognize the harm of fossil fuels. It is often just a simple matter of a quantity of A (travel, home, food, shopping, water) requires a  quantity of B energy usage and cost, such as in dollars, and then to a reward perceived, and then, but not necessarily, the actual reward. 

These soft approaches, applied non-threateningly and non-controversially, help us realize that we share common values, such as pocketbook issues and reducing costs, risk aversion, pragmatism, security, or even a desire to conserve natural beauty.