Crucial Conversations about Climate Change
David Maxfield is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.
Dear Crucial Skills,
I followed the climate change summit in Copenhagen last December and found it very frustrating to watch world leaders unable to agree on actions they must take to protect the ecological health of our planet. The meetings quickly disintegrated into a discussion about the individual wealth of their own nations.
What crucial conversation would help leaders agree to a plan to preserve the planet’s health—even though this will be at some economic expense to all?
Frustrated with World Leaders
Dear Frustrated,
This is a great and timely question. Resolving climate change will require leaders to address some very sensitive conversations. And as citizens, we can help. When we take an interest and speak up, it encourages our leaders to speak up as well.
Crucial conversations require dialogue. Climate change has been mired in silence and violence for many years. The good news about the Climate Summit in Copenhagen was that more than 130 world leaders came together. Heads of state from five opinion-leader nations (U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa) met for seven hours and negotiated an agreement that forms a framework for a 2010 world summit in Mexico City. The decision-makers are at the table, and dialogue has begun.
It helps to Start with Facts. Another major advance world leaders made at Copenhagen was to agree on a set of facts related to climate change. These facts establish the common ground needed to build solutions. A few of the most significant of these facts are:
- Increases in global temperatures must be limited to 2 degrees Celsius.
- Some countries will be especially hurt by climate change and other countries must support them.
- Deep cuts in global emissions of CO2 will be required.
- Developed countries and developing countries will need to follow different paths.
World leaders must now find Mutual Purpose. This gets to the heart of your question. Nations and their leaders look to their national interests, which are often in conflict—at least in the short term. Climate change is a global issue that requires a broader, more long-term view. Remember the question we ask in Crucial Conversations: “What do you really want—for yourself, for others, and for the relationship?” This is the question leaders must ask.
Here are a few crucial conversations where national interests may be in conflict—and mutual purpose must be found. Our leaders would do well to bring these crucial issues to the table:
1. Developed countries, especially the U.S., use the most carbon per person. Developed countries benefit if carbon is capped at the national level, not the per person level. Developing countries, like India and China, use far less carbon per person, but they will soon use the most at the national level. They benefit if carbon is capped at the per person level.
2. Developed countries have proposed a cap-and-trade strategy. This strategy benefits developed countries because it favors rich over poor. Developing countries are hurt by this approach.
3. Developed countries have an obligation to resettle refugees. Island and low-lying countries—places like Bangladesh and Vietnam—will lose large portions of their land mass, producing tens of millions of climate refugees. What obligation do developed countries have to resettle these refugees?
4. Developed countries have benefited the most from carbon use over the last 100 years—and have been responsible for the greatest amount of carbon-related damage. Does this mean they should be held accountable for the damage already caused and pick up a greater share of the repair and resettlement bill?
Soon we must Move to Action. Have you ever been part of a team that got bogged down because the facts were never complete and the options never ideal? When it comes to climate change, we will never have all the facts or a painless solution. But we will have to act anyway. We can’t afford to let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
In Crucial Conversations, we recommend to decide how you will decide. Some climate change decisions may involve consensus targets, but most are likely to be consultative or independent. We can’t let the desire for consensus prevent us from taking action either independently or with small groups of other opinion-leader nations.
Finally, when a problem is profound, persistent, and resistant, its solution will require more than a crucial conversation. It will require a full-fledged Influencer strategy. Next week, I will apply our Influencer model to your question.
Best,
David
I am concerned that your suggestions on how to influence the climate debate did not include any serious thought about who should make the decisions, and what data should be used.
There are many, many good players in the climate debate. I have worked with climate researchers for two decades. Each looks at part of the data. The overall science community is responsible for synthesizing the disparate inputs into a cohesive whole that can be understood. We have seen by why of the “climate gate” problem that the free flow of ideas has not been allowed at the science level in this debate. To a scientist, this is the ultimate fraud, to subvert the falsification process by silencing other scientist’s voices. I was very disappointed that you seem to have missed this important point in the climate debate—forced silence. Can anything be more opposed to the VitleSmarts view point?
But I also want to challenge the idea that the “decision makers” you identified are “the right people” to make this decision. So often in my industrial career I have found that the words “decision makers” mean a set of people who don’t have the training or expertise to understand a problem, and actually feel this qualifies them to make decisions because they are not biased by the details. They skim (I have found they very seldom read) extractions of reports which are in turn reductions of reports where actual facts lie. The reductions are so far from the facts, that good decisions are impossible even if the “decision maker” has the expertise to understand what they are skimming. Edward Tuft, in his classic series of books on the display of quantitative data, gives a compelling argument that just such “decision making” lead to the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and all her crew. Our world politicians, with their individual agendas on their national and personal levels, and their lack of understanding of the underlying science, are hardly in a position to make good choices in solving a world crisis, even if the organizations who wrote the reports had been honest. The idea you present that “facts” can be “agreed upon” by these “decision makers” is frightening. If the science community can only agree by silencing dissent, how reliable is an “agreement” on “facts” arrived at by non-scientist politicians? Is it likely that such a body can plot a successful path to maintaining a health climate?
I want to stress I am not talking about climate change content (I believe the world’s climate is changing), but about how this important issue is debated and how the decision on action will be made—both crucial conversation skills. Whether operating a business, a shuttle, or a planet, if we divorce the decisions from people who can understand the topic, and we subvert dissention, we cannot expect to be successful. With the world’s climate and its people’s lives at stake, we cannot afford such decision making.
Even in a forum about dealing with differences of opinion in dialogue, there ought to be a way to deal with the need for scientific consensus to actually be acknowledged. It is true that not everyone is convinced that humans are contributing to global warming. It is true that no one can force anyone else to change his or her thoughts. It is not true that anthropogenic climate change is a matter of opinion. It is not true that the conclusions “Humans are causing climate change” and “Humans are not causing climate change” are equal. The first is supported by strong agreement among respected international scientific bodies. How can we acknowledge the validity of the scientific process that has already taken place without squashing other people’s right to free speech?
@David Osborne
As opposed to the people who benefit financially from denying the effect of burning fossil fuels on the climate?
I could not agree more with Ed Cotter’s assessment of your article. My chosen profession requires me to read documents and data with an eye for understanding what it is the author is stating. Many of those that replied to your article obviously did not take the time to analyze the points you were trying to make. I took away that you were merely using a current example (and I might add - a great example) to illustrate to us, the readers, that the use of Crucial Conversations is severly lacking in today’s politics.