Daily Score Blog

At first I thought this was going to be a laundry list of boring policies with a lot of foot notes.  Instead, the recommendations, developed ahead of the 2010 Olympic Games, are kind of a catalog of interesting ideas to make cities more sustainable. Vancouver’s goal: to become the Greenest City on Earth by 2020.

Maybe we don’t say it enough, but we love British Columbia. Home of the world’s most comprehensive carbon tax (that some would call the best climate policy out there), smart planning to prevent sprawl, and, well, folks up there just live longer.

In honor of Cascadia’s northerly jurisdiction, here’s some of our finest writing on BC.

In a world where a big communications budget can pair two otherwise comically oxymoronic words in our minds -- think "clean" and "coal" -- it would be ill-advised to say that words don't matter. It would be even worse to assert that choosing the most effective words to convey smart ideas is somehow dishonest.

But that's basically what Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, an expert on environmental communications, told the New York Times this week about EcoAmerica's prematurely leaked research-based talking points intended for climate policy advocates such as government officials and environmental leaders. As he put it, social change makers shouldn't stoop to the level of marketing or advertising tactics: "You want to sell toothpaste, we'll sell it. You want to sell global warming, we'll sell that. It's the use of advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion."

You can call it manipulation, but if we left strategic wordsmithing like this only to lobbyists for coal and oil interests, we'd be doing the public a major disservice. Anyway, Brulle's choice of a loaded word like "manipulation" in the first place -- when I imagine he's referring to might also be called "persuasion" or "consensus-building" (or just communicating) -- itself reveals the difference just one word can make. Words matter. And, for most of us working toward climate solutions, words are some of the most important tools we've got. Just as a brain surgeon doesn't go for a rusty scalpel, we like to choose our words wisely -- sometimes even paying money to figure out which ones are best for the job. EcoAmerica has been doing just that, conducting extensive polling and focus group research for the last several years to find ways to frame environmental issues and so build public support for climate change legislation.

It's about making climate messages more clear, less wonky, and most effective at conveying the core values underlying the policies.