Brand Grab: Gassing off

Carbon is back on the agenda.

Mr 'No' (or should I say Abbott) is back out there with his Great Big New Tax spiel and has followed it up with another gem for the Talk Back jocks 'A threat to the Australian way of life'.

You have to hand it to our Tony. He, or someone in his team, is absolutely brilliant when it comes to identifying the hot buttons to cast doubt on whether to put a price on carbon.

Then you have the government. Yet again making a bit of a dogs dinner of their message. I feel sorry for them. They are up against formidable forces in the shape of right wing politics with an agenda, headline hungry media owners and big business with both eyes on the next quarter's profit margin.

It's easy for the government's opponents to reduce things down to black and white. 'If it looks like a tax, works like a tax, it is a tax'. Clever.

Vocal sections of the public will happily get emotional when they are arguing against a tax (www.nocarbontaxrally.com) but much harder to convince people to get excited about wanting one!

So consequently the government is forced to take a serious, pensive and defensive position in an attempt to counter the irrational hysteria being whipped up by the skeptics and naysayers.

Every time a minister comes out to defend the pricing of carbon they are made to look like they have got something to hide.

Alternatively a bloke with a megaphone, and some spurious scientific research, manages to look like the one with all the common sense and best interests of the Australian economy (and way of life) in mind.

So the debate descends into seriously boring rational debates about the mechanics of how to price carbon instead of focusing on the really interesting stuff.

So what's interesting about carbon? Well take an article written in October last year (while recession gripped the US and European economies) for example.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/11/us-climate-usa-deutschebank-idUSTRE67A3JK20100811

The standout sentence for me is this one:

"They're asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry," Parker said of Washington's inability to seal a climate-change program and other alternative energy incentives into place.

This is a quote from Kevin Parker, not a VP at Greenpeace, but global head of Deutsche Asset Management Division, who oversees nearly $700 billion in funds that devote $6 billion to $7 billion to climate change products.

Now if anything should get a shock jock excited you would think it would be the prospect of the Australia missing out on squillions of investment dollars pouring into the economy?

The problem is one of communication of course. The carbon debate seem to consistently suffocate itself in a descending and negative economic argument preventing any of the positive messages from rising to the top.

The result is that the government is faced with an electorate thoroughly confused and highly cynical about the motivations behind, and benefits of, a price on carbon.

The message that pricing in carbon will also unleash an incredibly powerful and positive economic force seems to get lost somewhere.

Last week I saw Jill Duggan speak. She is the European Commission's Directorate-General for Climate Action and expert in the European Carbon Trading Market.

It was refreshing to listen to someone with first hand experience of pricing carbon across 55 countries, and over 550m voters, be so positive on its economic and social benefits.

She too was surprised at the level of negativity here on the subject and, whilst accepting that there are challenges ahead, her view seemed to be that the positives will far outweigh the negatives.

It struck me that style of communication is as important as the substance when it comes to getting the carbon pricing story out there in the right way.

The search is on for a communications circuit breaker that can wrench the argument back to the centre and at least allow for some balanced airtime.

The government needs to move the communications agenda away from the mis-information and gassing off of the cynics, towards something that is far more positive and inspirational, if it is going to have any chance of  getting its message to cut-through.