Green Podcasting Tidbits

I got caught up on some podcast listening over the weekend and came across a couple that contained some good tidbits for green communicators.

The first was the Ethical Corporation Podcast which featured an interview with Ian Welsh on a report he authored for Ethical Corporation on embedding corporate responsibility throughout the company. A summary can be read here. The full version costs a lot more than this blogger has made in nearly three years through Google Adwords.

Anyway, near the end of the podcast, Welsh relaid a message from the VP of Corporate Responsibility at Campbell Soup:

When dealing with your colleagues, make sure to drop the corporate responsibility jargon. While CR departments and functions obviously need to look at things through a CR lens, when they're explaining these to their colleagues, it's very important to use standard business language as that is how to get the message across most effectively.

The latest ecoalign report - Green Gap Redux: Green Words Gone Wrong - made a similar point regarding the use of jargon to communicate green energy choices. Not only does the public not understand the term demand response, they also displayed strongly negative associations with the word or simply did not know what it meant. Words matter and jargon is almost always the wrong choice.

The second podcast with an interesting tidbit was the October 24 edition Sierra Club Radio, which ended with host Orli Cotel interviewing Amanda Little, author of Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells -- Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Near the end of the interview, Little had this sound advice:

We can't move forward until we look back. We really can't solve our energy challenges until we understand how they came to be. It's an extraordinary story. There's a lot of good in the traditional energy systems. Granted they have produced a lot of unintended consequences and a lot of very damaging and dangerous pollutants. But, I think having a certain understanding and appreciation of the benefits of our old energy systems makes it easier to move away from it and makes it easier to talk to the people who have been a part of that system...The conversation about how we're going to solve our energy crisis is so combative...There is a way of talking about it that is both appreciative of the problems of our energy past and optimistic about the opportunities of our energy future.

I think Little is right on the money with this. So much of the debate over clean energy and climate change has become extremely polarized and politicized. Maybe that's why fewer people are buying the messages we're selling.