The Gap Nobody Is Talking About

The scientific consensus on climate change sits above 97 percent. In the United States, 72 percent of the population believes global warming is happening. Only 45 percent expect it to harm them personally.

That gap is not a knowledge problem. A University of Chicago analysis of climate communication research makes the failure visible. People do not process environmental information neutrally. They process it through ideological filters shaped by identity and values.

Presenting scientific consensus to someone who distrusts scientific institutions can produce further entrenchment. The data lands as a challenge to identity, not as evidence.

Value-based messaging, calibrated to the audience, consistently outperforms consensus messaging across political lines. The message has to land somewhere the person already lives.

Kim Grob has been arguing this for more than a decade.

Formation

Kim grew up in Louisiana, outside New Orleans. Her mother would take her on walks to what they called “their special log,” pointing out plants, stopping to look at banana spiders and snakes.

“We would stop and admire them,” Kim said. Nature was not a cause. It was, from early childhood, magic.

She studied communications at Loyola University New Orleans, then completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. She taught English, edited cycling publications and a newspaper for California prisoners, then spent years writing for clients including Intel, InFocus, and Barclays at Euro RSCG. In 2011 she co-founded Right On with her sister, Jen Jackson.

The career is not a straight line from nature to sustainability. It is a straight line from language to persuasion.

The Turning Point

What Kim found in sustainability communications was a sector that had confused urgency with effectiveness. Doom framing is accurate. It does not produce action.

“You cannot motivate someone through despair,” she said.

The sector had also inherited a suspicion of marketing, associating it with greenwashing and the commercial apparatus that contributed to the problem. Kim’s position is that this reluctance has been costly. “The same principles that we use across all of these different types of marketing campaigns have to be applied to our sustainability communications,” she said.

The missing link was not more information. It was understanding that how a story is told determines whether it changes anything.

The Work Today

Right On works across corporate sustainability, nonprofits, and foundations, covering message development, content creation, design, and internal training. Kim builds capability rather than dependency: the goal is for organisations to continue without her.

The approach starts with the audience, not the cause. She points to messaging around Great Salt Lake as an illustration. The lake is in ecological crisis. The message she encountered from a local organisation reframes the situation precisely: nobody in the world has ever brought a terminal lake back from collapse. Salt Lake could be the first community to do it.

“It admits that the lake is on the brink of collapse,” Kim said, “but it also says that we have a chance to do something no one else has done before.”

The audience moves from bystander to potential protagonist. That produces motivation. Despair does not.

The Unresolved Tension

The tools Kim describes, aspiration, desire, identity-led messaging, are not neutral. They are the same tools that built the consumer culture now requiring urgent reversal. The playbook that sold luxury goods through aspiration is, in her framework, the one sustainability needs to borrow.

Her response is to redirect the object, not the mechanism.

“I want to change the objects of desire,” she said. Secondhand clothing as status. Plant-based eating as sophistication. Sustainable behaviour as the aspirational choice.

She sees this shift beginning, particularly among younger consumers. Whether it can move fast enough, and across a wide enough demographic, to meet what the science requires is a question she does not resolve. “I’m hopeful,” she said. “I think that we are getting there.”

The marketing apparatus is capable of selling anything, in either direction. That is precisely why it matters who is using it, and what they are pointing it at.