A professor and a marketing professional take climate-change advocacy to the ballot box
By Jonathan Shaw
One day about four years ago, John Marshall’s youngest son came home from a class on climate change at Harvard Extension School and told his father, “Dad, you have to do something about this.” The 17-year-old (now a junior at Harvard) had been learning about rising seas—and countless other ecosystem impacts that will be locked in for thousands of years—from Hooper professor of geology Daniel Schrag. The prospect had shocked him. And the magnitude of the societal change required to deal with the problem was even harder to accept. It’s a disaster, he told his father, “and no one knows.”
John Marshall is not a scientist, a politician, or an engineer. He is an expert in the art and science of moving people. The former marketing executive, now a consultant, says his son locked him in the house for two days, and asked him to make some phone calls. “So I called a lot of my fellow ad execs and CEOs and said, ‘If I put an effort together on climate communications, would you dedicate resources on a pro bono basis?’”—the same way law firms donate a percentage of their legal services. “And I got a lot of yeses. And then I called Dan.”
That conversation led Schrag and Marshall to launch the Potential Energy Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to raising public awareness of climate issues in the United States. Surveys indicate that only between a quarter and a third of Americans care about climate change, says Marshall, lagging Europeans by about 20 to 25 percentage points. The goal of their nonpartisan organization is to change U.S. popular opinion by partnering with and providing marketing expertise to advocacy organizations aligned with their message.
The challenge is that climate change has become politicized: it is regarded as a progressive issue in the United States. “If I even say ‘climate change’ to conservatives,” Marshall explains, “visions of Al Gore [’69, LL.D. ’94] might start dancing in their heads and then I might not be able to make progress.” Popular opinion on the subject is like a barbell, he says. “For every message I issue that feels like it is part of a liberal agenda, I’m going to manufacture an opponent on the other side: all I’m doing is increasing the weight at the two ends of the bar, and I’m not changing the politics.”