This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern. KABC 790. My guest today is John Marshall, the founder and CEO of Potential Energy Coalition. John, pleasure to have you on the show.

Great to be with you, Matt.

Well, John, you know, I understand from your bio, that you didn’t immediately fall into the environmental world, coming out of school and college. What, what drew you into this area?

Yeah, that’s a great question. And the origin story is I think, like a lot of people’s my, my kid made me do it. I’m a, I’m a career business guy and marketer, and I spent the last 30 years working with big companies to help sell their products and position their brands and help them communicate with their customers. And one day, my 17 year old, who was taking a course, on climate change, came home from school and said that you know, how to communicate, no one understands what the heck’s going on, and I want you to do something about it.

And he actually locked me in the house for two days, and said, I want you to make some calls. And so I, you know, I’ve been in the marketing and business world for for a few decades. And so I said, Okay, I’ll get my rolodex out. And I’ll call my fellow executives and, and CEOs and say, do you, you know, you’re good at communications?

Do you have skills and teams and assets and, and resources that you would put into climate communications if, if I asked you to, and after a couple of days, I got a lot of yeses. And so my my kids, IDF turned to turn into a little bit of a career shift.

And we ended up starting a new nonprofit called the Potential Energy Coalition. And our mission is to try and get the best marketers in America to help communicate climate change in a different way, in a way that grows the number of people who care about it in a way that’s really non political, and in a way that can hopefully make Americans aware of what’s actually happening.

So like a lot of these things, it starts with the younger generation kicking us in the back a little bit and saying, Get off, get off your duff and do something. So in this case, it was effective. But since that time, I’ve been working on taking all my for profit skills, and trying to try to help Americans understand what’s happening with respect to the environment and climate change. And so that was in what 2017

That was in 2017. Yeah.

And so, so you’ve made the shift. Are you fully doing this full time now?

Yeah, we ended up it took a couple years to get it off the ground, we got a lot of interest among, among the my fellow marketers, and we incorporated a nonprofit and launched about 20 months ago, and I’ve built a little teams of about 25 people who are working nonstop on their basically corporate folks I’ve met working on how do you take those skills, and you know, help people understand what’s happening with climate change. And we’ve, yeah, we’re up and running and have launched our first big campaign earlier this year. And we’re gonna do a lot more.

So tell us a little bit about your first campaign.

So the first campaign, which launched at the beginning of the year is called Science moms. So our approach to this issue is to try and grow the number of people who are understanding it, or were a bit concerned about it and acting on it. And right now, only about one in three Americans is actually actually it’s about 26% of Americans actually, more exactly is concerned about climate change. So I want to double that number.

And so what I’m looking for is new segments who don’t typically get involved in the climate movement, that we can actually involve in it. And so our analysis showed us that the mom was a really great place to start. And, and she tends to be the person behind a lot of change that happens in society, whether it’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or, or any other social issue. And, and the research really showed that she was more concerned about it, but didn’t know as much about it.

And so we, we worked with a group that we helped to form called Science moms, which are a series of climate scientists who are also mass. And this is a group right now of a really prominent climate scientists who are at the leading edge of their field, but they also, you know, see it not through a scientists point of view, but a mother’s point of view, as well. And they were eager to get their message out. And we had the marketing skills to help them create content.

And so we, we started to work together. And we have a bunch of amazing women who are advocates for educating people on climate and they talk about it through the lens of being a mother as well as being a scientist. So that’s, that’s the first effort and we’ll continue to launch campaigns to go after different segments of the population. This one has gone after, you know, in about seven or eight states, the pretty large number of mothers who haven’t thought about the issue very much, when they do, they tend to get pretty active.

And they fall in the, you know, red, red, blue and purple camps that’s like across the board politically. And we’ve what we’ve been looking for is, you know, Americans who don’t want to view this as a political issue, but one of you this is a human issue, how do we bring them? How do we bring them to the party, and we’re having pretty good success with both Republicans and Democrats in terms of getting more people involved with climate change.

So what’s what’s the message to to a mom, that that you’re directing? That kind of leads them into this conversation specifically? I think it’s a brilliant strategy. And kudos to you and the marketing team at mean, marketing has gotten so much more sophisticated in terms of understanding audience and testing audience and kind of maybe you could look, have us look under around the curtain to see what the wizards are thinking and doing that, you know, I’m sure that the audience loved to know how marketing gurus think.

Yeah, well, at one level, it’s pretty simple, on another level, more complicated, but the simple one is just getting a whole bunch of people together and thinking, learning how, what they understand what their daily concerns are, what their worries and passions and needs are, and, and trying to get into their heads. You know, and I think the issue with climate change is often it’s not going to be the first thing that comes to mind, when you’re, you know, trying to feed your family and you know, do your job and deal with your healthcare and all these other issues.

And it’s probably the biggest issue that we face, but it may not be the most immediate issue. And so we found that the advantage of thinking like marketers is when we think about the human being, first, we don’t think about the issue first. And so if you’re trying to grow the number of moms who are aware of and concerned about the issue, the first thing to do is to figure out well, what do they think about on a daily basis, that happens to be their kids.

And so if you, if you think about positioning the issue in the context of what are you doing, to give your kids a better life, that’s what moms do, they focus on it all the time, they’ll walk through walls to, you know, ensure that their kids have a better future. And probably one of the most meaningful things that they can do is, is get active on climate.

Because if one thing is going to affect life, 20 3040 years from now, which is basically their kids future, it’s this massive environmental issue that we’re facing. So we have been grading these communications through the lens of what the mom cares about.

And through her language, and that, you know, that has been sort of a different view, we’re not talking about global warming, we’re talking about, you know, the effect of a changing climate on heritage future, our kids ability to thrive and breathe clean air and have a good job and a safe community to live in.

Well, that is, it seems rather obvious when you say it, but I guess it’s kind of like water to the fish. So we’re so part of this system, that sometimes we don’t even see it. And that’s, that’s a pretty obvious one, when you say it’s like, of course moms care about their kids and, and want a good future for their kids.

That’s, that’s an obvious, kind of no brainer, I didn’t need a marketing guru to tell me that, but I needed a marketing guru to tell me that because I just it’s too it’s too hobbyist, I didn’t see it.

Well, that, you know, here’s an interesting thing, what we’ve learned, like, you pretty much have to go through and you can go through whatever matters to anybody. And so if you’re a property in coastal Florida, what matters to you is your lifestyle and your property and your property value. And so what matters to that person is what’s going to happen to sea level rise, and flooding and the property value and as the community looking out for, for those individuals, you know, and I’ll give you another 5,10, 20 different segments, and everybody’s got everyone really does have a reason to care about the issue.

And so, we most most issue based marketing starts with the issue and tries to push it at the at the buyer a little bit. Whereas we’re trying to bring in discipline of let’s understand all these different segments, why might this be relevant to them. And if you’re a group of people who are really interested in national security, and, you know, safety of our forces, and our veterans and so forth, there’s a national security reason to care about this. If you’re interested in, you know, making sure you’re feeding your family and your in shipping the price of things.

There’s a reason for that, if you’re inserting cool new technology, there’s lots of great reasons for that. If you’re interested in more jobs, where your career is gonna go. There’s many reasons so we’re trying to go for the like consumer first, like what do people care about, then how do we actually package this issue up in a way that’s relevant to them in their lives?

Yeah, I was just talking about this last week with somebody from the NRDC, about the national security issue and the fact that clearly from a national security The issue if we take away the use of fossil fuels, countries like Russia, which is a strategic competitor of ours would be at a disadvantage countries like Iran would be at a disadvantage because they have less revenue and less power in, you know, global politics because they can’t hold that over our head.

So just from that standpoint, the the United States have been very myopic, and not seeing this as a national security issue for the last 50 years. And, and switching over.

Yeah, well, and that’s exactly right. I mean, our our reason for being is that climate change affects everything in life acutely. And it isn’t. It isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a it’s an everybody issue. And so we can use our skills as marketers to help people understand it better.

And we could really accelerate the pace by which we’re demanding change, because the percentage of people who are demanding change right now to spa, so I’m getting crass marketing terms. I want to grow the market for this particular product in a fast and aggressive way, in order for us to get the quicker change.

Well, that’s great work you’re doing, John and you’re what’s needed. John Marshall of Potential Energy Coalition, CEO and founder and this is Matt Matern with Unite and Heal America. KABC 790. We’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern and my guest today, John Marshall with the Potential Energy Coalition. John, we were just talking about how you can discern different market segments in in communicating this message regarding climate change. And one of the things that struck me as you were talking was kind of the important but not urgent, box.

And we’re all familiar kind of with the four with the box that has the urgent and important and the urgent but not important. And and I think that for a lot of us, we don’t do things that we know are important, but they’re not kind of like the houses on fire yet. And and how do you kind of get people to see that? Yes, this is requiring immediate action. When they look outside. It’s a beautiful day, it doesn’t look too hot to them. Global warming doesn’t seem to be an issue today. We’ll put it off till tomorrow.

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. And it’s up. To be honest, it’s a hard challenge. I mean, it’s not easy to talk to people about something that can happen gradually that they don’t necessarily always see in their daily lives, that actually kind of makes it more important. We will since we started, we’ve done a pretty massive amount of data analysis to try and figure that out. And so we’ve done hundreds of polls. And, you know, a typical marketers toolkit, you know, you test messages in a digital environment, you see what resonates with people you do the focus groups, you do, what we call randomized control tests, where we test the message and we see if, if it affects the person.

And so we’ve, we’ve deployed, you know, all that full toolkit to figure out like, how do we how do you get people to care about this issue? And we’ve learned a couple of really interesting things. The first one is, people hardly ever talk about it. So the percentage of Americans who talk about climate, quote unquote, often is 7%. And so it’s really hard for an issue to be important to you, if it doesn’t come up in conversation. And so one of the things that we’re trying to do is make it easier to understand and more approachable.

You know, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, it’s a great day for some decarbonisation or can’t wait to get to net zero. We, you know, the policy world has somehow imposed all of their term terminology, even greenhouse gases, or methane, or CO2, or emissions don’t really make a lot of sense to people, you know, in regular talk, so the first thing that we’ve been trying to do is figure out what what’s a way to talk about climate change that can make people actually care about it.

So one of the one of the interesting things that we learned when we studied this was people really don’t understand the issue. More people think it’s caused by plastics, or not recycling, than they even do from, you know, from flights or, or, or using gas cars, and so forth. Nobody knows that it’s that having a plant based diet can have a big impact. And it’s only 12% of Americans think that, that eating meat and plant based diet has an impact. And so the amount of literacy on the issue is really, really low. And one of the reasons is that we make it too complicated.

You know, the books on this app, the 100 were 100 things that you can do to stop climate change, and no one wants to deal with that. So we’ve been trying to Think about ways to make it feel more accessible, you know, to use the marketer’s toolkit to pick language that people can relate to that’s more vivid, it’s more visceral. And we’ve learned a lot through our research, one of the things that we’ve learned is the language isn’t very approachable, like nobody wakes up in the morning and says, like, boy, I’m really worried about climate change.

On the other hand, people experience extreme weather all the time. And so if you, when we’re talking about climate change, we would much rather talk about the extreme weather that’s happening, as opposed to something that feels like a very gradual process of global warming. And so we’re developing a library of language that we think is much more approachable. People can relate to the fact that there’s a blanket of pollution surrounding the earth, that’s a lot more understandable than there is this accumulation of, of co2 and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And so we’ve created a body of internet videos that sort of explain it really simply. And we found that they raise concern and activism on climate change significantly, when we use the term pollution blanket. Instead of global warming, we actually find that people like well, I don’t want to pollution blanket over we say a pollution bike, it is overheating the Earth, it has a much higher impact on people than we say there’s climate change going on out there. So there’s a there’s a whole series of sort of People First language that we’re trying to deploy on this.

I’ll give you another example. Why would we possibly in the United States of America spend all of our time talking about 1.5 degrees centigrade to meet the thing called the Paris accord? First of all, we pick centigrade, we use centigrade in our daily life, we use Fahrenheit. So I’d much rather say in your kid’s lifetime, it could be nine degrees warmer, rather than say, Let’s do things to meet 1.5 degree limit in order to reach parents.

So we’ve let the policymakers define what the language we should be using on this, like real human beings would be concerned if it was going to be eight or nine degrees warmer in the, in the lifetime of their kids, all of these little little ways to raise it and talk about it differently, are things that we should be using in order to make it more relevant and more real for your average American?

Right. I along those lines, I was I was thinking regarding addressing, you know, climate deniers points of view is 19 in the last 20, or 19, of the hottest years on record have been in the last 20 years. I mean, that to me just kind of hits people right between the eyes, it’s kind of hard to believe that we just randomly head 19 of the hottest years in recorded history, right?

Back to back to back. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. So it’s a simple stat that that cuts through a lot of garbage, or at least I would hope.

Well, it’s great. You mentioned exactly that very fun, is one of the best testing messages that we’ve tested the 99 last 20 years, because it makes it feel people can relate to them laughs like, yeah, did spill a little warmer. Wow, that’s pretty extreme. And so it’s much more relatable as it as another example, we we tested a bunch of messages in Florida.

And you know, the typical, the typical environmentalist organization will say, sign a petition to get to net zero emissions by 2050. And like, first of all, I’m not sure what the mission is or what Net Zero is, and 2050 sure seems like a long way off. And I’m kind of kind of worried about what I’m going to do tomorrow. And then we compare that to another simple petition was sign a petition to stop my flooding.

And so the second petition is a few times more effective than the first because what people are experiencing, there is an increase in sea level rise in a way that’s meaningful. If you live in Miami Beach, or you live in Illinois, I’m in row Florida, and so forth. And so if you come at it through what people see what they see and what they’re worried about, then you you, you get a lot further and local flooding is a lot more relevant than global warming.

Not that many people are sort of thinking about the globe on a daily basis, but they sure are thinking about their kids and kids nutrition and health and the pollution that they’re breathing in, or the value of their property, all of those kinds of things. Well,

you definitely see it out here in California in terms of the wildfires, and that we’ve had some of the worst wildfire seasons over the last decade. And many scientists believe that it is in part due to global warming. And so that’s something that gets people’s attention out here in a very visceral way.

Yeah, it does. And that’s not a that’s super, super not a political thing. I mean, there’s there’s people from all across the political spectrum whose houses are at risk or whose insurance rates are gonna go up or you’re experiencing this. And so I think showing showing the real implications in a way that there’s not a political agenda associated with it, there’s a human agenda, like we all care about protecting our community. It isn’t protecting our neighbors and protecting our property.

And so another thing, that one of the interesting things we’ve we’ve noticed is, I mean, there’s, there’s not a less political issue than then you could possibly imagine. And then climate change, it’s gonna affect all of us, regardless of who we vote for, but it comes across as a political issue when you bring it up. So we found it very interesting in our work to just say upfront, it’s not politics. And it makes a really big difference. Like if you just if you just basically say that.

And so our our group of science moms that we’re working with, you know, across the political spectrum, and we’ve been working with a bunch of young conservatives, from the American conservation coalition and other campaign who are, who are conservative, you know, young Americans. And if you just at the very beginning, let people know, this isn’t a political issue.

This is an issue for all of us today, it makes a really big difference. Because I think a lot of people may be fairly interpreted as you’re coming at me with a political agenda, as opposed to you’re coming at me with with something that’s different from that. Well,

I can’t help myself, but to ask you how effective this is, in red, red state areas, this messaging and have you tested it? And even though this kind of defies what you were just previously saying, which is trying not to make it political, but I can’t help but asking, is it effective, and in that way?

Well, if you approach it through a lens of here’s how a changing environment is affecting you and your family and the things that people that you love. It’s very effective for across the political spectrum. In fact, we’ve seen the folks who are most movable are actually equal parts Republican and, and Democrat, you know, for the, for the effort with science moms, because you’re approaching it as a human issue and not necessarily a political one.

Now, if you if you come at it with three or fours that are tells like signals that this is, there’s another agenda here, I think, that feels different. But it’s, it’s, it’s becoming much more of a universal issue, because people are noticing that these things are happening and people are relating, and their friends are experiencing it. So we we definitely have a big part of our mission to make sure that the messages are for everyone. And nobody feels left out. And it’s it’s important, and it’s working.

Well, that is I think, brilliant, to deep politicize the issue. And I think that there, you know, the left is certainly made a mistakes in terms of signaling that signals and the tells that you’re talking about to turn it into a political issue, which then naturally gets a counter response because it is politicized, versus trying to lower the temperature or the rhetoric and engage actually across the aisle to say, Hey, this is an issue that affects all of us. We’re not trying to win bullet points here.

But we will be back in just one minute. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern and my guest today, John Marshall with the Potential Energy Coalition. Great conversation look forward to having you back in one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, back with my guest John Marshall, Potential Energy Coalition, founder and CEO. We’re just talking about the some of the interesting stats that you found from doing the research on this.

And my understanding, John, is that you did a TED talk the other day, and it’s trending quite well. So maybe you can give the listeners a bit of information about what you had talked about in the talk and where they might be able to find the whole thing. But they’re so inclined. Thanks, man.

Yeah, the TED Talk, which was just launched yesterday on Earth Day is called How to talk about climate change. So people actually care. And what we go through is, you know, some observations about why people don’t necessarily engage in the issue as much as they can and try and give what we call small but mighty language adjustments that can get people to understand and care about the threat.

And the, the way I opened the talk, which is always gets me gets me thinking about this is a little thought experiment, like if you were an alien, and you came down to the planet, and you you talked to 100 scientists, and you realize all of them are saying, You guys are in serious trouble. You got you’re gonna have a hard time living on this planet. And then you randomly pulled 100 citizens, you’ll quickly find that, interestingly, more than 30% of of people on the globe have never even heard the term climate change.

And only one in four Americans are seriously concerned about it and you know, less than 10% of that people talk about it often. So the alien would be like, well, something is wrong. The problem that we’re trying to solve is how do you figure out a way to package it up in, in a simple way that that people understand. And so the talk goes through three rules that we try and use in our work. And if you’d like I can, I can share. I can share some examples of that in a minute. I always be great.

Yeah, please.

So the first rule is we call it the people first approach to climate communications. But first rule is plain obvious and universal language. Because if you don’t care about it, you don’t care about it if you don’t get it. And so we go through, you know, the need to not talk about things like anthropogenic and decarbonisation, but the idea of using concepts that people are already wired to understand, like pollution, like overheating, instead of warming, you know, the idea of irreversibility you have the word irreversible really gets people’s attention.

So there’s a series of terms and words that that tend to have people be able to understand it a little bit better. The second lesson is, you’re not going to succeed without making it relevant to people’s lives individually. And personally, I gave the example earlier on the show about how Floridians care a lot more about their local flooding than they do about global warming. And for everybody, there is there is something like that. So for the group of science moms, that we are running the campaign around, it’s really about their daughters and their sons, but everyone has a has a reason to care.

And it really needs to be about our lives and not future lives, about our world, or our communities and our values. And so getting making it very specific. And then the third thing that we talk a lot about is it really has to be an issue, not just for me, but for people like me. And we found in communications that when it comes from somebody who is you know, someone you can relate to someone with a similar accent, someone with similar backgrounds, someone who feels like they’ve had similar experiences, you see significant increases in people’s understanding and engagement in the issue.

He ran a we ran a funnel campaign in Florida from a guy who got a little trouble with the law, because he brought an alligator into a convenience store on a beer run. He’s it’s got it’s got saved Florida man. And the campaign basically has this guy talking about why he cares about climate change. And it was really effective, because he was a relatable, funny guy who got, you know, gotten a little bit of a fix in Florida.

And so what we are always trying to do is trying to find people who you can relate to, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be environmentalists. Most people don’t necessarily even see themselves as quote unquote, environmentalists. And they see climate change as an environmentalist issue.

When we find messages that rise above those sort of narrow identity markers, those those those messages do much better. So simple language for people like me, in a way that’s relevant for me tend to be the three rules that that we like to try and follow.

Well, John, you were telling me about a an ad that he would run and we’d love to hear it because I think it would be great to to hear an example of of what these ads sound like and you can walk us through it a bit.

That sounds great. So this ad just started running this week for Earth Week. We call it by the time and it was really designed for one particular audience, which is the mom and it tries to put the timeframe of climate change, which usually is feels distant and long and something that can wait in the context of the raising of a child and so I will play for you. The ad by the time which ends with the tagline later is too late.

As a scientist, I know by the time she takes her first aura. 9 billion more tonnes of carbon pollution will be in the air and she takes her first steps. Wildfires will have burned millions more acres she could have explored. The day she gets her first pet. There are 1000s of newly extinct species she’ll never meet.

And he forgets to call the night of her first heartbreak or future home floods are the first of many times

or the time a child born today goes to college. It may be too late to leave the world we promised our window to act on climate change is like watching them grow up.

I blink and we miss it was a beautiful ad and just goes right to the heart of of why people should act and The urgency and relates to something that all of us and particularly parents can can understand that, you know, within a matter of a moment, 30 years can pass by?

Yeah, well, I think we’re trying to find ways to make it feel relevant to people. And you know, it is, I think one of the things that most people don’t realize is it isn’t, it isn’t an irreversible phenomenon. And so most environmental issues, we are actually able to back away from right, like we have a polluted stream, we can clean it up, if we have, if we have trash on the side of the road, we can pick it up, that’s really been been our history with.

The tricky part about climate change is once the molecules in the air, it stays there for 1,000s of years, and the heating of the Earth is baked in. And so one of the things that we’ve been trying to get across in our messaging is later is too late. Like we actually we can’t reverse the phenomenon. And we have to stop the accumulation of the pollution that surrounding the earth.

And it turns out that people’s concerns about I’m going to lose something permanently, whether a species that I love or a beach that I went through as a child or the skiing, that the skiing season that I enjoyed in Colorado, when you start to convey that you’re not going to get those things back. You can’t stop the process, people really look it really gets people’s attention. And it feels it feels much more personal if you do it in that particular way.

Well, I think that’s brilliant, because quite frankly, environmentalists have been doing a pretty poor job at communicating the message. I mean, it’s really lost in over the last 50 years, so much ground. And when you consider that in 1970, every member of Congress, but one voted for the Clean Air Act. And now we’re having a hard time getting any environmental legislation through the Congress.

We made it we made our spot with the American conservation Coalition, which is a young college based youth group that are of conservatives, which took snippets from George Bush, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, and a whole series of conservative leader speeches over the course of the last 30 years all talking about addressing these challenges in a way that really appealed to conservative values. Because there there are free market ways to approach it.

And it really is an interesting, it’s interesting to reflect on the last 40 years, and how many great conservative leaders have actually stepped up to, you know, to these environmental challenges. And so we’re hoping that the youth in the conservative movement serves to inspire a new generation of conservative leaders to do the same thing, because conservation is really a core conservative value. And it should, and is not that tricky to actually appeal to people with different values.

And have them you know, have them step up to climate change. And we have a lot of hope that we can do that.

Yeah, I see it that way, too, is that it is and should be a conservative value. And that’s one of the things that drew me to the Republican Party was that I saw people like George HW Bush, say he wanted to be the environmental president.

Which is kind of shocking, looking back at if you look at the Republican party today, but it was not earth shattering at the time, and something that he won in 1988, running on that message, and then signing into law Clean Air Act, part two, with also many Republicans in Congress voting in favor of that ball. Well, for according to the National Geographic 230,000 lives every year, since it, you know, this last year because of taking pollutants out of the air. So it’s, it’s kind of an obvious no brainer, that this should be something we should all be for.

Yeah, and there are conservative market based solutions, you know, pricing, you know, pricing carbon, there’s a there’s a, there’s a really incredible approach the carbon dividend where you can put you can put a price on a pollutant and actually write a check back to Americans who do that. So you you you actually create a market based solution in a way that is not, which is revenue neutral.

So the conservative solutions exist, you know, they need some more advocacy to move through the system. I mean, I think it’ll happen when we look at our data that the big gap is on the conservative side is between young and older people, like the future of the conservative movement cares a lot about this issue. And so they’re going to, you know, hopefully, grow their power and grow their voice as as time goes on.

Well, you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern my guest again, John Marshall, and we’ll be back in just one minute. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern. returned your host KABC 790.

Again, we’re back with our guest, John Marshall, Potential Energy Coalition founder and CEO. And John wanted to pivot with you to another topic, the infrastructure bill that President Biden is backing. And your thoughts as to how this might affect environmental communication regarding how we should be improving, you know, our, our infrastructure that will positively affect the environment.

Right, great question. I mean, we, we’ve talked a lot about in about the risks and the fears and the problems associated with addressing climate change. But the big untold story is the prosperity boom, that can come as a consequence of that. So one of the things we’ve been also working on, is this. This idea called The Great American build, where if we, we need to tell people that if we actually tackle this effectively, there’s a massive amount of opportunity for Americans.

And it’s not just with, it’s not just with windmills and power plants, it’s, you know, it’s electricians and plumbers and steel workers and Boilermakers, it’s with a whole group of Americans who, you know, if we really step up to upgrade our infrastructure for the future, there’s a significant amount of job question that comes along with it. It’s been, it’s not been well understood in the past, how fighting climate change is actually a job opportunity.

And I think it’s been positioned improperly and poorly, that it’s a job killer, when in fact, we all know that progress is a job creator, we know that when we move from the, from the horse and buggy to the car, we’ve got a glut of cars to make, you know, today, there are a billion gas cars on the road, I wouldn’t mind building the billion electric cars, which we know are going to get built in America.

And so take every single industry, and you’re going to have a similar opportunity, it’s going to happen, like we’re going to convert to the next generation of technology. And just like we upgrade our phones or our computers, we’re going to upgrade our energy systems. And so trying to have people understand that America can win with the technologies that that also fight climate change is, is a pretty powerful, untold story.

So we’re very interested in getting the word out on that. And making sure people realize that this was actually this is actually the, you know, what we say fighting climate change is the job of our lifetime. And this was tremendous amount of opportunity. Right?

It’s something that I’ve often says that people say, well, environmental regulation is going to be a job killer. Well, look at the California economy, the California economy has outpaced national growth for a number of years. And we’ve added 12 million people, the time that I’ve been here since 1988. It’s it’s certainly a job creation engine. And during that period of time, we’ve have cleaner air than when I got here in 1988.

So there has been fairly stringent environmental regulation visa vie the rest of the country, and yet it’s still outperforming the country. Another area that you touched on was the electric cars. And I have, I always like to chime in that I have a hydrogen car. And so you know, I really think that hydrogen is the way of the future. And I think that it’s, it’s even cleaner, you don’t have to mine for batteries, and you don’t have to dispose of battery. So we may, we may have it out on that one.

But I think it’s competing technologies, then let the marketplace kind of sort this out to a certain extent. But I think the the overall trend of where you were leading on this issue is the US can be a leader in these issues in order to certainly have job creation around the country. And to the extent we see these issues to China or other countries, we will we will lose jobs and those jobs will go overseas. So we certainly should be leading we have all the technology to do so.

And for anyone who invested there’s an opportunity here a few weeks ago, a guy named Elon Musk became the richest man on the planet and he tends to admit he does to make a product that’s a better for the future but the pretty fun to drive. I’ve had one for seven years now. The and so you know I’m I’m with Bill Gates on the fact that the innovation is what is going to solve this.

I think if you don’t put a price on the pollutants and you make it more expensive to pollute, but more more rewarding to innovate then you’re not going to get there quickly and I And so that the advantage of you know, putting the right incentives in place is that we can win. And there’s a tremendous growth, economic opportunity, but the products are cooler and better and more fun and safer and cheaper.

And so, you know, you’ve seen, you’ve seen the cost of renewable energy go down, solar has gone down by 86%. Over the course of the last decade, you know, how many Americans know that that’s true, less than one in five Americans know that the price of silver has gone down by 86%. And so the, the trajectory of America is to innovate, to drive costs down to create better products.

It’s happening, but a little bit of a little bit of a kick on that so that the polluting industries are paying more and the innovating industries are paying last, you know, can not only solve society’s greatest problem, but it actually can come across America really to prosper. And there’s, there’s a lot of opportunity here.

Right, and, and for those who are free market fans, which I certainly support having a free market, we have to recognize that our markets have always been regulated and regulation is good for consumers in the market. We look at the SEC. Well, of course, we want the securities that were buying and selling to be regulated to have proper disclosures and so on so forth, that regulation by the government protects all of us as investors and makes our company stronger and more transparent.

The same is true for the environment. In terms of it, of course, it took the government to step in and say in the state of California, we’ve got to cut pollution, and we’ve got to put in catalytic converters into cars to cut the lead, or to cut the pollutants out of the exhaust. And when they did that, the car companies adapted as they should. And we have cleaner air and all the car companies survive that, because regulation was neutral.

Right? I mean, the key thing is a level playing field. We do things on a level playing field, I’m confident that American industry can, can thrive. I mean, we’re a bunch of former business execs who are working on climate change. We’re interested in growing markets and selling stuff in creating in creating, you know, a healthier economy.

That’s that’s kind of where we come from, and fighting climate change is a big is a big opportunity. You know, the question is, how do you position it so, so it feels that way, but we, you know, the electric car market is going to be massive over the course of the next few years.

So let’s lead. Let’s get people excited about it. And I think that’s because the products are better. And it’s not just because it’s a small green niche, it’s something that all Americans can get behind.

Right, I guess the question is, in terms of circling back to your, your messaging, and communication strategy of letting people know that this is important, and the infrastructure that we build, can affect them positively. Have you done any ads on this? Or what are you doing to communicate this message effectively to everyday Americans?

Yeah, so we have a campaign ad that came out a few weeks ago. And it starts with, with the line calling all builders, calling all roofers, calling all electricians calling all steel workers, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. And so we’re trying to get the message out that for everyday Americans, if we, if we invest in the infrastructure in the country, and we invest in clean infrastructure, there’s a massive opportunity and an opportunity for leadership as well.

So we’re working on it. I think, you know, with respect to the environment, it’s there’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle. We got to get people to understand, understand the issue better, we got to people get people to understand how it affects them. And then we got to get people to get excited about the solution. So we’re working on all pieces with us with a hope that, that we make some real progress in the next couple of years.

How do you see your your organization growing? And and where where do you see the future of your organization? Going over the next year, five years? 10 years? Where’s it headed?

Well, we have a big goal of trying to get the majority of Americans to make this a very high priority. And as I said at the beginning, it’s um, you know, about one in four, see this as their issue. And so I’d like to get that over 50%. I’d like to make it a non political issue. That means we’re going to have to do a lot of things we’re going to have to do work with suburban moms, we’re going to have to do work with Midwestern farmers.

We’re going to have to do work with coastal communities, we’re going to have to meet a lot of different people where they go so we’ll launch a series of campaigns that are, you know, zeroed in on like human beings are on the other side of them, and will educate them will make the issue real to them and then we’ll give them options. Thanks to do so I think I hope to broaden the number of efforts.

And so your listeners can check out science moms.com for one little sample, but we’ll have a, we’ll have a we’ll have several of those that will launch over over time and try and add a whole bunch of new new voices to the climate movement and move it beyond the the narrow group of more progressive folks into a bunch of Americans who care about the issue and want to solve it. And we want to talk to them on their terms, rather than rather than anyone else’s. Well, where,

John, I appreciate the great work that your organization is doing, where can our listeners go to, to learn more, and maybe join your movement help you out and support the work that you’re doing?

Right, yeah, that’s a great question. I think that the best, the best way to do that is to get involved in the campaigns that we’re helping to launch. And so the big one right now is science moms.com. But dads are welcome to so our uncles and nephews and nieces and kids.

But that’s that’s the first big public effort science moms.com. And it’s a it’s a fun site that that has a bunch of climate scientists are educating people on the issue. So that that’d be the first source that I’d recommend. And then check out my TED talk on ted.com. The, the name of the talk is, as I mentioned before, the name of the talk is how to talk about climate change, so people can actually care.

And I’d encourage you to share it with others, because I think the more we talk about the issue, the closer we’ll get to deep politicizing it and making it something that every American could get behind.

Well, I appreciate the great work that you’re doing. And I think it’s in the tradition of, you know, Abraham Lincoln, who set aside first park lands here in California to protect the sequoias and, you know, and starting the EPA under Nixon and, and then clean air to under George HW Bush, and, of course, many others that have led on this issue across the political spectrum, and we need to Unite and Heal America.

Your host, Matt Matern, and you’ve been listening KABC 790 with my guest, John Marshall, Potential Energy Coalition. John, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thanks, Matt. It’s been a pleasure to be with you.