What if the biggest problem with climate messaging isn't that people don't care — but that we're talking about it the wrong way?
A massive new study suggests that's exactly what's been happening. The Potential Energy Coalition just released "Fixing Climate Communications 2026," the most comprehensive look at climate messaging failure ever assembled. It draws on six years of message testing, more than 1,350 randomized controlled trials, and surveys of over 83,000 people across six countries. The Rockefeller Foundation commissioned the work.
The findings are both troubling and surprisingly hopeful.
Here's the paradox: public support for government action on climate change has held steady in recent years. Yet global media coverage of climate change has dropped 38 percent since its peak, and consumers say they're seeing far less sustainability messaging from brands than before. The researchers say communicators sent the wrong messages, and leaders misread people's silence as disinterest when it really wasn't.
The study tested eleven distinct messages and found five ways the current approach is broken. Climate messaging has become too complex, too abstract, too extreme, too focused on distant parts of the world, and too tangled up with politics.
But the most striking discovery was about who can actually be persuaded.
Messages that connect climate change to people's wallets and health — like higher insurance costs or air quality harming their kids — moved right-leaning audiences by 12 percentage points. That's nearly twice the impact of more indirect messages about jobs or clean energy innovation. For years, climate communicators assumed the political left and right had hardened opinions and that only a small "persuadable middle" existed. This report challenges that assumption directly.
"The persuadable audience is larger than the movement behaves as if it is," the report states.
Researchers identified three key shifts that work. First, make consequences feel urgent and personal — your insurance bill, your home, your children's health. Second, tie every message to pollution rather than the abstract idea of climate change. Third, make the solution feel expansive rather than like a sacrifice.
Of course, there's a catch. Fossil fuel companies have spent decades and billions of dollars linking climate action to higher energy costs — higher gas prices, bigger utility bills. Reversing that deep-rooted narrative won't be quick or easy.
But the data suggests the opportunity is real. Climate communicators may finally have a roadmap for reaching the people they've been leaving behind.