Fixing Climate Communications – CleanTechnica

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Part one of a two-part series.

The Potential Energy Coalition just released Fixing Climate Communications 2026, which deserves more than my LinkedIn post. Commissioned by The Rockefeller Foundation and grounded in data from over 83,000 survey respondents across six countries, six years of message testing, and more than 1,350 randomized controlled trials, it is the most comprehensive diagnosis of climate communications failure I have seen. It should be required reading for every CSO, CCO, and communications strategist working in this space.

I agree with the core findings, but I have significant disagreements with the diagnosis underlying them. Both are worth working through.

Takeaways from the data

The report opens with an interesting paradox. Although public support for government action on climate change has held steady, global media coverage of climate change has dropped 38% since its peak, and consumers report seeing significantly less sustainability messaging from brands than in the past. 

Troublingly, the movement has gone mum at a moment when the material impact of climate change, including insurance costs, billion-dollar weather disasters, and heat records, is becoming impossible to ignore. The report assigns responsibility to communicators who use the wrong messages and to leaders who misread audience silence as disinterest.

Six years of message testing have surfaced five specific ways the current playbook is failing. Climate messaging has become too complex, too conceptual, too extreme, too global, and too ideological. 

The solutions the report offers are both insightful and, at times, counterintuitive. Eleven distinct messages were tested. Messages that employed direct consequence framing, such as linking climate change to personal financial harm or health impacts, outperformed indirect frames, such as those focused on jobs and innovation, by nearly 2 to 1. 

The finding that caught my eye most, but was for some reason not highlighted, is that right-leaning audiences moved the most in response to well-framed messages. That data showed that the best-performing messages shifted this demographic by 12 percentage points. Consensus among communicators had been to target the persuadable middle since the right and left poles had ossified opinions. The report undermines that consensus and finds that the persuadable audience is larger than the movement behaves as if it is.

The report’s three prescriptive shifts build on this foundation. Make consequences such as your insurance bill, your home, and your children’s health urgent and tangible; make the cause concrete by anchoring every message to pollution rather than climate change; and make the cure feel expansive rather than restrictive.

The globalism misdiagnosis

The report treats the current era of nationalism and insularity as a new variable that has destabilized messaging that was working. I think this misrepresents the history in a way that matters.

The global community on which the climate movement was built was always thinner than assumed. This is certainly true for the US. The post-Cold War consensus on multilateral cooperation, exemplified by the institutional architecture of Paris and Kyoto, was never as durable as it appeared. The rightward political shift over the past two decades revealed insularity that had always been latent. America’s forfeiture of global leadership, an accelerating trend across both Republican and Democratic administrations, cemented an evolution already in motion.

The most clarifying evidence is the pandemic. A shared existential threat with immediate and visible consequences, arriving simultaneously in every country on earth, produced a brief moment of rhetorical solidarity, followed by a rapid retreat into national and personal self-interest. If that couldn’t generate durable global cooperation, it was unrealistic to expect a slow-moving, unevenly distributed climate crisis to do so, especially when the global West expects the global South, the countries that can least afford it, to sacrifice industry-driven productivity in the service of emissions mitigation. 

The climate movement erred by building on a foundation of assumed globalism that was never fully in place.

Personal economics needs an adversary

The report correctly identifies personal financial consequence messaging as the highest-performing frame. What it doesn’t adequately address is why that frame has been so difficult to establish. Fossil fuel companies have spent decades and billions of dollars successfully framing climate mitigation as the primary cause of high energy costs. Higher gas prices, utility bills, and appliance costs have been linked, with considerable success, to the costs of the energy transition rather than to the costs of climate inaction. Reversing that requires a direct, sustained counter-narrative and accountability for the offending parties.

The affordability finding deserves a geographic asterisk

That the report found, by a 4-1 margin, that people across countries believe clean energy is a better path to affordability than fossil fuels is striking. It is also almost certainly driven disproportionately by European respondents, for whom energy insecurity following the Russia–Ukraine war has made the clean energy independence argument feel intimate and real. A meaningful segment of the American public, particularly in energy-producing states, holds the opposite view. Communicators who deploy this finding without that caveat will run directly into credible pushback in the markets where it matters most.

Future discounting may explain the data, not contradict it

The report shows that people are most motivated to care about the environment by, among other things, protecting family and future generations. Behavioral psychology research uncovered a heuristic in which people discount the future without realizing it. In other words, people express concern about the future but respond to present-tense framing. The implication is that the report may be confirming behavioral science without fully recognizing it. The climate movement has spent years crafting messages aligned with the values people say they hold, but the more productive design challenge is to build messages around the cognitive shortcuts they actually use.

Conclusion and Still to Come

Fixing Climate Communications 2026 is a serious piece of work. The core finding that direct, personal, consequence-driven messaging is both more persuasive and more durable than abstract economic or ideological framing is supported by rigorous evidence. The three-shift framework of human consequences, pollution as the root cause, and energy abundance as the cure is a good start to fixing a flawed strategy.

But the report’s strategic framing underestimates how deeply the structural problems run. The movement is confronting a fundamental misalignment between a global solution architecture and a world that has never been as globally cooperative as the movement assumed. Better messages will reach more people. Reaching enough people to sustain the transition will require a delivery infrastructure built around genuine community engagement, economically grounded wins, and a willingness to hold accountable the interests that have made this conversation harder than it needs to be.

That is the subject of my next post.

By Keith Zakheim, CEO of Antenna Group