We Can’t Address Climate Change If We Don’t Know How to Talk About

When I first focused on climate change, I was insufferable. Outside my children’s school, I talked about it everywhere. And over hundreds of attempted conversations, people rarely knew how to talk about it. Sometimes, people walked away without saying anything. 

This was not unusual. A Yale Center on Climate Communications study recently cited in The New York Times found that even though most people are concerned about climate change, only 35 percent of people surveyed talk about it. And only occasionally. 

Why?

Climate change is not easy to talk about! It’s complicated. It can be polarizing. It’s much bigger than us. Bigger than our brains can process, as several neuroscientists have told me. It triggers challenging emotions. And many of us feel powerless when we ask that inevitable question: What can we do? 

This is why businesses that want to seize the many opportunities that come from addressing climate change need to address the elephant in the room – and help their employees talk about it. 

To be sure, having productive climate conversations takes some emotional and social intelligence. But we can meet this challenge, whereas we can’t fix a problem most people don’t know how to discuss.