NYT: Climate Policy’s Advocates Take Page From Same-Sex Marriage Playbook
“The reason there is all this focus is that this is arguably the most important environmental regulation ever,” said Richard L. Revesz, the director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law...
Two months ahead of a federal court hearing on President Obama’s signature climate change rule, a coordinated public relations offensive has begun — modeled after the same-sex marriage campaign — to influence the outcome of the case.
A national coalition of liberal and environmental advocacy groups, state attorneys general, mayors and even some businesses are adhering to the strategy that a network of gay rights and other advocacy groups began in the months before the Supreme Court heard arguments in the same-sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, last year. Those advocates cannot be certain, but they said they believed it had influenced the opinions of the justices, who ruled in June that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.
NYT: While developing the campaign, the environmental advocates closely examined the messaging tactics of the same-sex marriage efforts — particularly the message that the issue affects individual lives beyond the gay community.
“On gay marriage, it was that everyone has a friend, a neighbor, a sibling who could be impacted,” said Joshua Dorner, a strategist at the Washington political communications firm SKDKnickerbocker, who worked on the same-sex marriage public relations campaigns ahead of the Supreme Court argument. The same message could be applied to a campaign on climate change, “showing how it directly impacts people’s lives,” he said.
To that end, the environmentalists will deploy several mayors, like Dawn Zimmer of Hoboken, N.J., who will speak at news conferences over the coming months in support of the climate rule.
“After Hurricane Sandy, we had senior citizens stranded in their apartments who couldn’t get medicine,” she said. “Substations were flooded, and we were without power for two weeks. The threat to Hoboken from climate change and rising sea levels is very real, and the predictions are it’s getting worse.”
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