Irony of Reid's Move: Latinos Want Climate Action

Seems like Senator Reid can’t manage more than one issue at a time. He’s decided to push the bipartisan effort on climate and energy legislation to the back burner and instead focus on immigration reform. If you smell a rough re-election campaign, you’re on the right track. Ironically, Senator Reid is missing a big opportunity to address something that Latinos care a lot about – and that’s climate change.

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change (NLCCC) released a study on the attitudes of Latino voters on climate change in three key states –Colorado, Florida AND Nevada. The findings? Latino voters want global warming action.

What’s more – the overwhelming majorities of Latino voters in Florida (80%), Nevada (67%) and Colorado (58%) say they are more likely to vote for a U.S. Senate candidate that supports proposals for fighting global warming. And 8 out of 10 voters reject the idea that fighting global warming will hurt the economy. In Nevada, 72% of those polled said that focusing on clean energy will create jobs.

NLCCC’s Vice-Chair Lillian Rodriguez-Lobez tells us why: “Latino Americans are on the front lines of climate change. We live where we feel the biggest impacts of droughts and hurricanes. We suffer disproportionately from asthma and air pollution, which will get worse under global warming. And, in huge numbers, we work in agriculture – of all industries the one likely to be hardest hit by climate change. The fact is that Latino Americans have every reason to call for an Earth Day revolution.”

Looks like Senator Reid is now saying, you can’t have it all. You can’t live freely in America and at the same time, be safe from the impacts of global warming.

Of course, let’s not just point the finger at Senator Reid. If there were more than one Republican Senator willing to do the work of protecting all of us from the impacts of global warming, then we wouldn’t be in the middle of this mess. In the absence of leadership, we all lose.

Leadership: What Matters Most

I doubt if there will ever be enough written (and certainly learned) about what makes a successful leader. In the category of leadership, we have all experienced the good, the bad and the ugly.

An inspiring article about the first woman president of Chile tells us that Michele Bachelet while mocked for her “overt emotion and talk of intuition,” ended her historic presidency with a 87% approval rating. Now, according to the article, “those who criticized her supposed sentimentalism are taking classes in emotional intelligence, while Chile's politicians must all pass the "Bachelet test" -- that is, having "heart" and being close to the people.”

A timely article to read after recently devouring Leadership and Self Deception. The book’s message: successful leaders treat people like people, not objects. Yes, in 2010 there’s plenty of “leaders” that still need to learn this lesson. The book also does a brilliant job of calling out the habits of self deception and self betrayal as the root of most conflict.

Truly great leaders, Ben Horowitz notes in his recent post on leadership, “create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares much more about the employees than she cares about herself.”

Horowitz also lays out three key traits a leader needs to have:

· The ability to articulate the vision

· The right kind of ambition

· The ability to achieve the vision

Horowitz understands that these are traits that every real leader needs to continually work on. Being committed to life-time learning, enhancing your emotional intelligence, and I would add, seeking out feedback from those you lead separates the true leaders from the wannabes.

Back in 2001, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzi and Annie McKee wrote about “Primal Leadership” and the impact a leader’s “emotional maturity” has on the organization. Their research demonstrated that when leaders exhibit emotional intelligence, they ”create environments where information sharing, trust, healthy risk-taking, and learning flourish. “ They note in Primal Leadership, The Hidden Driver of Great Performance, that “tense or terrified employees can be very productive in the short term, their organizations may post good results, but they never last.”

There’s still far too many organizations filed with “tense or terrified employees.” Employees who are terrified to tell the truth about what they see, how they are treated and where leadership is failing. Far too many leaders continue to fly under the radar screen, lacking any measure of evaluation and feedback – from the people they lead. This lack of evaluation is now at epidemic levels – in financial markets, in Congress, in organizations and board rooms all over the country. To Horowitz’s list above I’d add a fourth trait of leadership: “The willingness to seek out and listen to feedback. “

Heart and Head

One of my standard slides in presentations to groups on how to talk about climate change is a picture of a brain and a picture of a heart. Another favorite, is a picture of the Wicked Witch of the West, with the caption, Cursed with the Curse of Knowledge – borrowed from the Heath brothers who first coined the term, Curse of Knowledge in their book, Made to Stick.

My point to groups of policy wonks trying to get the public engaged in climate change is that the data can only take you so far. For example, skip the “by 2100” and go straight to “in the lifetime of a child born today.” Give me something I can see and feel.

Thankfully the Heath brothers are back with a new book that delves even further into this integral balance between the rational and the emotional. It’s called Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard.

Kevin Huffman, the enviable winner of the Washington Post’s Next Great Pundit contest nailed it today when he wrote about how the lessons of Switch can be applied to the current health care debate.

Change comes, as Huffman aptly notes, “only when we appeal to both logic and emotion.” Getting that balance right is an art. And we haven’t found it … not with health care. And it’s going to be an even tougher challenge with climate and energy legislation (see my previous post, Climate Change and Change Management).

Opponents of action on climate change have done a masterful job at using emotion and logic to scare people. Scared about the economy? Scared about keeping your job? Well then you better be scared of this monster thing called cap and trade. Environmentalists have tried to scare people with the unfortunate facts of what global warming will do – in the future. Logic takes over and the here and now of the economy makes more sense than future predictions of doom “at the end of the century” or melting glaciers in a place they can't even find on a map.

While climate change realists have gotten better about moving away from the policy wonk trap of “cap and trade” and toward emphasizing what action on climate change can do for American leadership in the clean energy economy and job creation, we’re not balancing that logical message about leadership with the emotional message about what what kind of planet we’ll leave our kids. We’re not in alignment on both the logic and the emotion.

It’s that alignment, the Heath brothers advise us that will be essential to changing things when change is hard. And there’s nothing going to be harder than getting strong climate and energy legislation passed.

Fit to be Outside

Last week I had the enormous pleasure of spending time with my 10-year old nephew at our cabin in the woods in Garrett County, Maryland. When checking in with his parents on his return, I told them that almost all of his clothes were coming back clean. This kid went from his PJs to long underwear and snow suit every day. Exhausted from the day’s adventure, he’d be back in his PJs for the evening. No “street clothes” for this kid.

We found ourselves whispering as we explored the woods by snowshoes and cross-country skiis, respectful of the immense silence that surrounded us. My nephew was in his element, with words like “amazing” and “beautiful” and “wonderful” filling his sentences.

As an outdoor kid, he’s fit to take on the kind of adventures his aunt and uncle always have planned for him. Yet, unfortunately, he’s more of a rarity among his peers. Kids these days spend close to 8 hours a day in front of some kind of screen – tv, computer, video. One out of three kids is obese. And for the first time in our history, kids are growing up with the probability they will be less healthy than their parents.

And that’s a really scary idea given the current health of Americans. Kevin Huffman lets us know that Americans have won the Couch Potato Olympic Gold thanks to a statistics compiled by the Daily Beast. He gives kudos to Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative, and notes how the right-wingers don’ t like progressives messing with their right to be fat.

I welcome the First Lady’s efforts while encouraging her to insist that ‘moving” needs to also be about unstructured play outside rather than just orchestrated play inside or on a soccer field.

Let’s not give up so easily on getting kids to get outside to just play. They need it. We need it.

Let’s get moving -- outside! Recognizing that there are too many kids living in unsafe neighborhoods, let’s be sure that being outside becomes part of their educational experience and after school activities that promote a green hour. Being outside needs to be part of the fitness and education equation.