fbpx

How to Talk to Your Friends and Family

Last Big Push —  Get Out the Vote!

You have the power to make a difference between now and Nov. 5:  Commit to being a Climate Voter. Talk to your friends and family and make sure they vote, too. 

Why conversations matter

  • Our voices are powerful: research shows we’re more likely to care about things our friends and family care about, and to take actions like voting when we hear about it from our peers.
  • Currently, only about 32% of Americans are alarmed about the climate crisis—a smaller percentage than most other top climate-polluting countries.
  • We can grow change, starting by talking with our community about climate change and the need to Vote Climate in this election.

What we’ve found works well when starting political conversations

  • We listen to others without interrupting them, allowing them to be heard in full.
  • We don’t argue with others—we may even agree. Instead, we empathize with their valid concerns while also emphasizing the importance of voting for candidates who will address climate change… and the importance of making sure a candidate who will demolish our chance of addressing the climate crisis is not elected.
  • We talk about how we’re running out of time to address the climate crisis and the fact that the Democratic candidate is the only presidential candidate who will address it. (It will be Harris or Trump as President—no one else has a chance of being elected this year. While Trump has promised to roll back all the progress we have made, Harris has a relatively good record on climate and plans to take further actions.)
  • Instead of pressing them to agree with us or vote a certain way, we emphasize the reasons why this matters to us, and why it’s so important to us that the country doesn’t elect a candidate who could lock us into a climate catastrophe.
  • The world’s top climate scientists agree that we only have five years to drastically lower emissions before we’re locked in to irreversible and deadly climate impacts. They also agree that voting climate is the most important action people in the U.S. can take right now.

Talking Points

The climate—and the people and countries most impacted!—cannot wait any longer.

Main point: We’re already living through climate disasters. If we spend the next four years under a president determined to demolish federal progress on climate change, we may actually be too late.

  • We’re running out of time to address the climate crisis and the fact is that the Democratic candidate is the only presidential candidate who will address it.
  • This is our decisive moment—with consequences for humans everywhere, not just for the United States. As one of the world’s biggest climate polluters, the U.S. must be led by a president who understands our responsibility for taking serious climate action now, before it’s too late.

Discussing the election and Trump

Main point: This election is one of our most important and immediate opportunities to take collective action on the climate crisis.

  • Time is scarce and we’re already behind. We cannot afford four years of reversing the progress we’ve achieved and making things even worse.
  • Trump’s values are clear: he is willing to sacrifice our lives and the environment to pay for his campaign. In a meeting with top U.S. oil executives, he vowed to reverse dozens of environmental protections when he asked them to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign.
  • The Guardian predicts a Trump administration would result in an additional 4 billion tons of emissions generated in the U.S. by 2030. That’s going far backwards when we need to be moving aggressively forward.
  • The Democratic program will not solve the climate emergency, but it will give us a chance over the next four years to continue moving forward instead of losing all the progress we have made. Four years of inaction will create more heat, more chaos, and more climate disasters.