‘No one cares about YOUR climate emergency’

Fully Charged’s Dan Caesar says we must ‘give up or get smart’ as we face the climate crisis

Home » ‘No one cares about YOUR climate emergency’

Published: February 14, 2022
This Article was written by: Contributor
electric cars, energy, renewables, transport

0 Shares

Find out why EVision Electric Vehicle Hire is a My Green Pod Hero.

This article first appeared in our ‘Love is all we need’ issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published on 14 February 2022. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox

When you’ve obsessed about climate change for many years, the almost daily apathy is borderline intolerable. Why don’t they get it? Why won’t they act?

Those who watch the Fully Charged Show and read My Green Pod care more than most, but beyond those bubbles there is a strong sense that the average person is disengaged.

As communicators it’s our job to persuade people that ‘another way’ is indeed possible, but our experiences around COP26 felt like several buckets of cold water in the face.

Time to get smart

In advance of our electric trip to Glasgow, we aired two specially commissioned pieces of content – #StopBurningStuff and Talking About Our Generation.

From a viewership perspective the latter, in particular, performed poorly.

While the ratings for these episodes were high, and the praise received was fulsome, far fewer members of our audience watched these episodes than would watch an episode on electric cars.

This was a depressing reminder that if we are expecting humanity to act en masse to abate the climate catastrophe, we might be waiting an awfully long time. Time that people – especially in the subcontinent – simply do not have.

There are two options, then: give up or get smart.

The biggest gift we’ll get

Having promoted cleaner, greener energy for two decades, I can say with absolute certainty that electric cars are the biggest gift that we will ever get.

They represent the greatest opportunity to change minds and to get people to engage with energy.

I should say at this point that we believe in smaller, lighter, longer-lasting, more shareable and critically far fewer cars, but they must be battery electric.

Electric car converts

As superficial (and preposterous) as cars are, they are arguably the most ‘moving’ purchase people make.

Car advertisements have long traded on our emotive instincts, and it seems to us that better (electric) technology, not climate concern, is the thing most likely to move the needle.

The engagement Fully Charged receives around electric cars eclipses everything else, and by a distance.

But the journey Fully Charged has seen a thousand times before is of an electric car convert, inspired by their purchase, who radically rethinks their relationship with energy.

A group receptive to change

We’ve lost count of the electric car owners who have installed a car charger (often solar powered), switched energy tariff and then sought to transform the impacts of the transport they use and the energy they consume.

In December 2021, more than 26% of all cars sold in the UK were pure electric, and this change is only accelerating.

We should do everything to encourage this switch and to get in its slipstream. And for those who promote sustainable technologies, we would say identify the electric car owners and you will find an audience of people who are extremely receptive to change.

Tomorrow’s consumers

Whether we’re talking about the shift towards heat pumps or meat alternatives, the early mainstream group of electric car owners will be the next wave of sustainable consumers.

Let’s harness the energy of the electric car revolution, and put it to positive use.

The Fully Charged Show releases one podcast and four episodes a week on its YouTube channels (Fully Charged and Fully Charged PLUS), and hosts Fully Charged LIVE events around the world (Europe, UK, USA and Australia). Discover the content at fullycharged.show.