I want to tell you a little bit about myself and my family. We do not own a car. I haven’t owned a car in twelve years now. We also do not have air conditioning. Again, it’s been twelve years since I’ve had this. I take almost all my local trips by bike, and I recycle nearly everything. Why? because it’s so damn convenient to do all of this where I live. I live in San Francisco, of course, where public transportation and parking sucks, thus the bike, recycling here does not need to be separated, thus recycle nearly everything, and air conditioning is climatically built in, thus no A.C. If I didn’t have all of these things being incredibly convenient then I would be a gas guzzling landfill kind of guy.What am I getting at? What’s the point? It’s convenience, stupid. It’s not action, or even seeing Pat Robertson having to associate with Al Sharpton for 30 seconds that is going to make me change into someone who cares about climate change. So, what I’m saying is it breaks my heart a bit to see the “We” campaign spending so much money to be the marking arm of the Greening of America when in the end it’s going to begin to feel disingenuous to people after being bombarded so much with the ads.

Here is a much more powerful model for climate change that requires a much smaller advertising budget: ZipCar. Zipcar is a for profit company that provides cars that are shared by multiple people and can be rented by the hour at reasonable prices. For instance, I use a car 3 hours per week, so instead of owning a car I pay 18 dollars a week to run all of my errands. If I want to take a trip, then I may pay 80 dollars for the weekend. I never pay for gas, insurance, nor do I have to fix the car if it breaks down. I can drive stylish cars that I would normally not have access to, and I can rent the car within seconds. The point is that this service works conveniently and cheaply while keeping hundreds of cars off the road.

What is ZipCar’s most sucessful marketing strategy? Word of Mouth. Make an innovative, cheap, and convenient service that eliminates major headaches in people’s lives and you have an easy way to spread the word quickly on almost no budget.

So back to the question: Can we solve it (the climate crisis, that is)? Yes we can, but probably no with more television commercials.

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