Strategy

The Pew Environment Group and the Pew Center on the States retained Joel Finkelstein and Fenton to create a messaging and 50-state outreach strategy for a landmark analysis of the Clean Energy Economy.

Messaging

The National Geographic Society is a powerful global brand for exploration and discovery, but most people think of it as a media company. Enter the Greendex – a global survey of sustainable behavior. When first launched, Greendex was intended to show how NatGeo can powerfully inform ongoing policy and cultural debates like those around sustainability. But despite an initial splash, in recent years the Greendex has received limited attention – and its impact on the National Geographic brand was minimal.

Corporate Engagement

Speed is essential to effective policy engagement, and no occasion proved that more than the 2013 Southeast Asian forest fires that blanketed Singapore with haze. The fires caused unprecedented toxic air pollution. The driver: the massive demand for palm oil.

Grassroots Advocacy

Appalachian Voices and a broad coalition of coal-field groups had been working for years to stop mountaintop removal mining. This extremely destructive form of strip mining has catastrophic consequences, but the issue was facing a logjam in Congress. The reason: no one outside of the region cared.

Stopping Pollution Emissions

In the early 2000s, the policy fight over America’s oldest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants became a confusing morass of competing claims and counter-claims. Though clean air advocates had plant-by-plant and city-by-city health data about asthma attacks and deaths caused by emissions, this solid epidemiology was complex and could never break through into the debate. Worse, the Bush administration was pushing a plan called the “Clear Skies Initiative,” which sounded good but in fact was weaker than simply enforcing the current law on the books.

Starting Pollution Removals

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is no longer an option – it is a necessity. Limiting warming to 1.5˚C will indeed require a rapid and far-reaching energy transition, and taking carbon pollution out of the air. The debate about doing one or the other is over, as time has passed and other solutions have dropped off the table. We need to everything we can.