What's Ahead for Climate Comms in 2025
Storytelling becomes more important as 'climate' messaging recedes.
Here at The Cooler, we’re trying to build a framework for climate storytelling as publicly as possible.
Drawing on our own experience and the expertise of the climate communicators and storytellers who spend countless, tireless hours bringing the message of an energy and industrial transition to the world, we hope to help everyone create new ways of engaging audiences.
As we look ahead to 2025 after a year of experimenting with our meta-project of storytelling about storytelling, we find there’s no real difference between a climate story in 2024 and 2025… and yet there’s every difference between how we will tell them.
Weather-related catastrophes continued to sweep the globe in 2024. Electricity demand reached a critical inflection point driven by insatiable demand for AI/data centers, with projections for energy use trending up and to the right. The world burned huge quantities of fossil fuels. And greenhouse gas emissions increased.
This drumbeat of disaster and development can’t stop and won’t stop in the coming year. Los Angeles is still burning. And the fires there, which already rank among the most damaging and deadly in the state’s history, are a grim harbinger of what may lie ahead for global communities in 2025. Climate disasters make the reality of global warming tragically personal, while far too often climate solutions are framed politically—systemically, impersonally, and bureaucratically.
Moving into 2025, that’s the key difference we see coming: this will be the year that climate solutions storytelling finally gets granular, grounded, and gratifying.
Getting Granular.
For our purposes (and to make the slightly labored alliteration work for our neat little list), getting granular means focusing on the actual benefits of the sustainable energy and industrial solutions on offer. The green premium for climate tech is gone (if it ever actually existed) and these days telling a specific story around the benefits for industry needs to be paramount. As we noted in one of our most-read stories of 2024, climate solutions aren’t solutions if no one uses them.
“The solutions are out there for many of the most pressing problems that stem from global warming. But a solution isn’t a solution if no one buys it. And right now, finding a way to entice buyers and project developers is the biggest obstacle to continued climate innovation.”
Driving the point home was our conversation with Umair Irfan, who talked about the evolution of climate journalism over 2024. For Irfan, a longtime reporter with Vox News whose coverage of the climate crisis has helped clarify the issue for thousands of readers, it’s the personal relevance to an everyday audience that resonates the most.
“The main arguments related to climate change that do move the needle are things like jobs, economic growth, and development. So you're seeing the messaging converge on that. That's not too surprising. The messaging is sort of reverse-engineered from the polls. It makes sense from a political strategy standpoint.”
That granularity also helps break down what is a multivariate and all-encompassing issue into pieces that folks who aren’t immersed in climate science, policy, and politics can latch onto. We chatted about this in our very first podcast with Pique Action founder and CEO, Kip Pastor. In conversation with The Cooler EIC, Shami Barooshian, Kip talked about the need to make climate conversations digestible.
“I have found that a lot of my very close friends never talk about climate change and they are very well-read. They're very smart, they're very capable, but it doesn't factor into their daily lives. They have normal stresses, they have normal pleasures…their lives are full. This is another thing on top of another thing and it's almost too much all the time. So that's where it's like, like any big job. You have to break it down into the digestible chunks.”
Granularity is both talking up the discrete benefits of your climate solution in the near term and breaking down the broad sweep of climate change issues and impacts into something easy to identify.
Getting Grounded.
Discussing these real-world positive impacts involves understanding the place where these events will have the most noticeable results.
To the extent that a company is hiring workers (benefiting a local economy), solving a local or even personal problem—think cleaning drinking water and increasing water availability, reducing plastic waste, removing harmful chemicals, improving resilience in communities against climate shocks, or creating the foundations for a stronger domestic economy—the more a story can resonate.
Amanda Eggert, climate reporter at The Montana Free Press, made that very point in another of our most-read articles this year, “Local journalists report the state of climate coverage”.
“The idea that telling a story through the experience of one impacted individual will resonate differently with readers than telling a story that's exclusively focused on policy or research has stuck with me ever since. Now, I aim to bring both a human perspective and trustworthy data to climate issues. I think both help demonstrate impacts in different ways that will—hopefully—help my stories reach a broader audience.”
Making stories local, and reaching out to local reporters in the communities where companies will be building the next generation of sustainable manufacturing companies, sustainable materials companies, and clean energy companies will be a huge component of storytelling in 2025 and beyond as these businesses start to make real differences in the geographies they’re operating in.
And that geographical perspective—as we touched on in our much-read conversation with Jane Woodward and Diana Gragg, who co-teach a course at Stanford called Understand Energy—is also a critical component of understanding how people approach climate stories and solutions differently. Woodward said of her students:
“The people who come to Stanford from Ohio, Minnesota or Menlo Park…they're getting intertwined with people who have a perspective from Dubai, Cairo, Olso or Shanghai. This diversity of worldview, what’s normal and the different ways to approach things is expanding in terms of solutions and humility.”
Go for Gratifying.
With apologies again for the (probably too-labored) attempt at alliteration, the messaging from companies developing sustainable solutions should be solutions-oriented and enabling for an audience. By supporting the work companies are doing, even if it’s only tangentially, local and national audiences can ostensibly think of themselves as doing their part to clean up their communities, and by extent, the world.
The challenge, as Rewiring America’s Sarah Lazarovic pointed out in our conversation with her, is disseminating this information effectively—and getting audiences’ attention in a way that draws them in.
“Let's make it joyful. Let's make it fun and actionable and make it something you want to do…The idea that we're going to be able to pull people into our story when we have very little media to pull them in with and not enough resources to do the job is scary.”
What we need, Lazarovic said, are more “trusted messengers”—something the team at Yellow Dot Studios is in the business of finding. As Elijah Zarlin told us in an interview:
“A big part of our approach has been trying to utilize the personalities and the techniques of the entertainment industry. Which is good, compelling writing that makes you laugh or makes you think and draws you in. The incredible creative talents of celebrities, and creators, and people who have followings because they are incredibly good at their art and what they do, and so we want to follow them and we care about what they do, because they're interesting.”
In 2025, Every Story is (Still) a Climate Story…
…we just might not call it “climate.” Conversations abound on the need to “rebrand” climate change and related fields, with Heatmap going so far as to pronounce ‘The Death of Climate Tech.’ Without words like ‘climate’ or ‘green,’ we simplify, depolarize, and depoliticize climate strategies and solutions. But we also place on them a higher burden of proof, as it were. That means in 2025 thoughtful storytelling will be more important than ever to mitigating the impacts of climate change (or whatever we decide to call it going forward). At The Cooler, we’ll be doubling down on strategies—from the minute nuances of word choice to finding the best messengers to share these stories—to ensure climate storytelling in 2025 is granular, grounded and gratifying.
(Water) Cooler Talk
🔋 All Eyes (and Dollars) on Energy
Last week, Sightline Capital dropped its 2024 Climate Tech Investment Trends report. The report shows energy investment in climate tech has surpassed transportation for the first time since 2020— primarily driven by the growth of AI, as well as electrification and industrialization. While the number of investments in 2024 marked a decrease from the year prior, the Sightline team says this is the “new normal” for the climate tech venture and a sign that the climate venture market is maturing. Moving forward, said co-founder and CEO Kim Zou, expect to see the climate investments focusing on “sectors with viable and rapidly growing commercial pathways.” As the energy load continues to increase, there’s no doubt that the energy transition will be a topic of much conversation in the year ahead.🧑🚒 All Eyes on LA
Less than two weeks into 2025, the nation was faced with its first major climate disaster of the year. The fires, which have been raging across California since January 7, have us all in states of disbelief, horror, mourning. The fires have spurred a deluge of stories detailing everything from up-to-the-minute coverage of the fires’ progress, satellite imagery of the destruction, deep-dives into the rise of fast-moving fires in the U.S., and moving essays about the devastation. Another thread of the coverage is political, as the incoming administration levels accusations against California Governor Gavin Newsom about his inability to guard against, and manage, the disaster. Altogether, it’s a flood of misinformation, disinformation, and deliberation over who to blame that’s flowing faster than relief efforts—and threatens to drown out the real human tragedy and devastation that will be the legacy for the Los Angelenos who are currently living through it.