Broad Framing Climate Change
Part of the Broad Framing Initiative series
This is the fifth in a series of posts exploring my preference for broadly framing any issue/news story/trend/development in our world. As I am now on vacation, no follow-up to any comms right now.
Throughline Inc. interacts a great deal with the world’s major management consultancies, and we’ve spoken with them quite a bit about America’s New Map. One question we have posed to them at various times is this:
In our vision/messaging, do we really need the whole climate change thing and its linkage to migrations and — by extension — the white-hot-button issue of immigration?
In other words, Does our argument about North-South integration stand on its own economic logic?
The answer we’ve consistently received is No, you don’t need to add climate change and migrations to this argument to make it compelling in an economic sense — and yet, you should.
Clearly, business concepts like DEI and ESG are in public retreat right now even as businesses are clearly sticking to their guns on policies/visions related to them. Business leaders are just trying to defuse and survived today’s polarized politics while doing right by their shareholders in terms of long-term value and growth.
So, yeah, I get the need to hedge, particularly in an election year.
But we can’t allow that sort of ambiguity to seep into our Broad Framing Initiative. As I have learned throughout my career, nobody likes — much less pays for — a wishy-washy visionary.
And so, we choose to frame climate change in the broadest possible manner, not just to cite our nation’s current political vulnerability when it comes to immigration and aging (because of the later, we need more of the former) but to emphasize our national, continental, and hemispheric strengths (i.e., where the money is to be made!).
So yeah, hit ’em first with the stick and then point out the carrot over there.
Here’s how I most succinctly broad-frame the logic in America’s New Map in the last throughline entitled, “The Americanist Manifesto: Summoning the Vision and Courage to Remap Our Hemisphere’s Indivisible Future,” starting with recognizing the driver:
Climate change is driving species away from a Middle Earth [lower latitudes] that grows increasingly hostile to sustainable economics and thus eventually impractical in many instances for independent political statehood.
That alone creates a strategic conundrum, which I then define as:
High-latitude powers have three choices:
First, they accept these growing waves of climate refugees out of a moral responsibility, suffering their disruptive social impact while profiting from their economic contributions.
Second, they wall themselves off from this disaster zone, condemning some measure of those so geographically cursed to a harsh, marginalized, and resentful existence certain to breed violent extremism.
Third, they extend to these peoples and their states new forms of economic and political belonging, the material benefits of which enable a certain local resiliency that limits the poleward flow of climate refugees and contains any ungovernable spaces that may emerge.
Guess which path portends the greatest profitability? Opportunities for national greatness?
Or let me put it this way:
Do you think a 50-state American Union forced to wall itself off from Latin America’s devastation at the hands of climate change over this century will have a better and brighter economic future than an expanded United States (say, 75-100 stars) that admits several dozen Latin American and Caribbean states into its growing, demographically vibrant Union whose collective demand power rivals our top competition at midcentury?
Where do you spot the money? The investment opportunities? The fortunes to be made?
Hunkering down in this climate-changed future, shooting them as they come across the Rio Grande?
Or going big across our hemisphere, rushing forward to embrace the resulting challenges as they emerge?
Which path sounds more American to you?
Which sounds more like our history?
Which trajectory do you think will enlist the patriotism and sacrifice of coming generations?
Now … consider the advantages we in the Western Hemisphere possess relative to the Eastern Hemisphere and our rivals there:
Our winning throughlines include:
A long history of interstate peace and stable, undisputed borders
The world’s #1 military power, with no peer on global reach and power projection
Expanding resource advantages in energy, water, and agriculture
All the attractions and benefits of nearshoring global value chains
Shared origins and histories fused into a unique hemispheric civilization that has far outgrown its source continents
High-latitude states featuring low population densities, high-income
economies, and reasonably well-run governments
Core diversity factors (languages, religions, racial/ethnic identities, etc.) numbering far lower than those bedeviling Asia and the [Eur-African] Center
North-South economic match that makes demographic sense labor-wise, while elevating our hemispheric market to better approximate the demand signals of midcentury behemoths China and India
North-South political match between continents where high measures of political and economic freedom are the norm
Of the three vertical zones [West, Center, Asia] created by climate change, the Western Hemisphere is the only one not to feature two rivalrous superpowers.
To me, this logic train is a great example of how broad-framing a scary dynamic (climate change) alerts us to its logical upside potential — as in, adapt to climate change and set in motion a second American Century.
Crisis and opportunity naturally go together, but those connections often remain hidden unless you widen the aperture of your strategic vision.
That is what the Broad Framing Initiative is all about.
