Building Climate Accountability From the Ground Up With Ingmar Rentzhog
This episode features a conversation with Ingmar Rentzhog, founder and CEO of We Don’t Have Time, the world’s largest media platform dedicated to climate action. It was recorded in March 2025.
Ingmar is a serial entrepreneur in finance and communication, as well as a climate changemaker who’s been recognized internationally for his impact. He’s a European Climate Pact Ambassador and a member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, and through his work at We Don't Have Time, he’s mobilising millions to hold businesses, leaders, and governments accountable and drive genuine progress.
With a mission to democratize knowledge about climate solutions and mobilize global action toward a prosperous and fossil-free future, We Don’t Have Time boasts a community of more than 120,000 climate professionals and influencers spanning 180 countries, as well as partnerships with more than 450 companies, governments, and civil society organizations. We Don’t Have Time reaches 200 million people each month on social media!
Amongst other things, Ingmar and I discussed the ways that technological infrastructures like media platforms and social networks can support grassroots action, the importance of both sticks and carrots in engaging companies, governments, and other actors on climate issues, and how understanding financial flows can help us propel our much needed societal transformation forward.
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Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practises and the worst offences, always looking for ways to help you - and me - improve our abilities to engage, empower and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues.
This episode features a conversation with Ingmar Rentzhog, founder and CEO of We Don't Have Time, the world's largest media platform dedicated to climate action. It was recorded in March 2025.
Ingmar is a serial entrepreneur in finance and communication, as well as a climate changemaker who's been recognised internationally for his impact. He's a European Climate Pact ambassador and a member of Al Gore's Climate Reality Project, and through his work at We Don't Have Time, he's mobilising millions to hold businesses, leaders, and governments accountable and drive genuine progress.
With a mission to democratise knowledge about climate solutions and mobilise global action towards a prosperous and fossil free future, We Don't Have Time boasts a community of more than 120,000 climate professionals and influencers spanning 180 countries, as well as partnerships with more than 450 companies, governments, and civil society organisations. We Don't Have Time reaches 200 million people each and every month on social media.
Amongst other things, Ingmar and I discussed the ways that technological infrastructures like media platforms and social networks can support grassroots action, the importance of both sticks and carrots in engaging companies, governments, and other actors on climate issues, and how understanding financial flows can help us propel our much needed societal transformation forward.
So let's get on with it. This is Communicating Climate Change with Ingmar Rentzhog.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Ingmar: In every sense, because that's where the challenges are. We know the problem, I mean, we know enough, is no question about it. a lot of scope to know more, but we know enough. So, that's not where we lack the knowledge. We also have most of the solutions. There's so many solutions out there. But we are not acting on this problem enough and I see it as 100% communication challenge. And that's also why I engaged in the climate issue eight years ago.
Dickon: For those who perhaps aren't already familiar, could you give an introduction to We Don't Have Time, both in terms of, yes, what it works to achieve, but also more practically how it functions, how it works as a social media platform?
Ingmar: We Don't Have Time, we are the world's largest media platform for climate action. The way it works is that it's kind of a combination between a traditional media and a social media. So, we use the community we have today, 120,000 users in 180 countries and it's people acting on the climate, people working on solutions every day, everything from policymakers, from business leaders, from journalists in media, to investors and activists, and all in between. They are using our platform where they can communicate directly with leaders and corporations, nudge them to say this is what you do good or this is what you do bad, that you need to change. And we step in, our team step in, and try to get answers from this dialogue that are created by our community.
We have created a tech platform to support this that we are also actively broadcasting live broadcasts with the help of other platforms. Everything from other social media platforms to also traditional TV and other media, where we broadcast those conversations live to millions of people so that we don't only reach the people already involved. What differs us from other climate organisation and other climate media is that it's the crowd that are setting what is to be discussed and we are supporting it, creating an infrastructure behind it.
So that's the media platform. And what we try to achieve is in our name, we try to speed up change. I mean, the world is actually acting on the crisis. But not fast enough. So we don't have time to wait. Everything we do can be discussed on how to solve things, but what we'll never back down from is this urgency and that we need to speed up.
I can tell you a little bit how this platform came about and my own background. Before I found that We Don't Have Time, I was running a financial communication firm in the Nordics. We were working with everything from big banks. Everyone from, you know, the global players like Black Rock, JP Morgan and those companies, down to public traded companies active in the Nordic market. And we were helping them to communicate to the investor market, and when you communicate to the investor market it's not about bragging or telling everyone how good you are. In order to do that in a good way, you need to earn trust. You need to get people believe in what you're saying and trust what you're saying, because otherwise they will lose trust and they will sell the shares in your company in the future. And the worst thing you can do is to say something that is not true because in a couple of quarters the numbers will tell the truth, and if it's not matching what you promised before, people will lose trust in you.
So I see that creating this dialogue between investor and companies. That is something that is working in the finance industry. Public trading companies, not many people knows this that are not working with it, but if you're responsible for a big public traded company and its investor relations, you don't only care about the largest institutional investors, those that have the most voting power, you're also caring a lot about the smaller shareholders, what they say, because if they are not happy with you, they will go to Internet and they will start writing things about you and they will turn a lot of other. Small shareholders against you. You don't want that. So you need to have a good relationship with big shareholders and small shareholders and that's why all the financial players that are doing this in a good way are knowing that they need to take criticism feedback from their shareholders, even if they're not the biggest ones, they also need to listen to the smaller ones.
So what I have tried to replicate when I started We Don’t Have Time was this infrastructure. But instead of talking about your share price, talk about your climate action and sustainability. And it's not about bragging. It's about telling that you have the ambition you want to change, but also what you need to improve and what the challenges are.
Dickon: What do you see as the biggest strengths and also the biggest challenges of using social media as a means for climate advocacy?
Ingmar: The biggest strength for using social media now, I'm not talking about our own platform only, but social media in general, is that it's where most people are spending their time every single day they consume news, they see what other people thinks about issues and that's where you form your opinion. We humans are programmed to form our opinion, how we see the reality, very much based not the news, but how other people react on the news. That's what social media is tapping into.
If you watch the news, you don't know what other people thinks or what the news are broadcasting on TV. But if you're on social media, you see it like this, “What are my peers thinking? Are they also upset about this etcetera? And that is forming your opinion. This is how we human works it, it will happen even if you don't want it to happen. That's the strength and of course if you can get the climate agenda on social media, that's how you can reach people.
But here is the big challenge. Social media as it's built today, by a few big, big platforms, are programmed in a way that is really bad for humanity. Because it's programmed in a way where you are not seeing what other people thinks about an opinion. It's programmed about how you would like other people to react on the opinion. So, you don't see reality. You see a fake reality. Many people know that what you watch on social media is because of the algorithms, so you don't see everything in the algorithm in the first place. That's not the worst of it.
The worst of it is when you see the post on social media, you go to the comments and you see what are other people thinking of this post? And not many people knows that the comments often are also algorithm based. So, that means that two different person will see different comments on a post. If you don't like Donald Trump, for example, you will see a lot of posts with other people don't liking Donald Trump. You will see a lot of comments with a lot of people don't like Donald Trump, if he shares something. But if you like Donald Trump, you will see a lot of other people that thinks the same. This is really dangerous and it's also used by the people that wants to have absolute power. It's not a coincidence that in United States today we have two individuals that have most of the power in that country. Donald Trump, he has his own social media, Truth. He's still using that. That's how he has the power. It's extremely powerful to have those social media. And the other guy, Elon Musk, that bought Twitter for an absurd amount of money will never pay back financially, but it has given him this much power. Not only in the US, but globally, because those platforms are global. So this is the reason why I started We Don’t Have Time. I saw that the climate issue is not really getting through the noises on social media. So we need to build something where the algorithm is not working against this, but actually working for the climate discourse.
But unfortunately I didn't have $44 billion to buy an existing social media and turn it to something else. So, instead we have gathered 750 shareholders that have invested €10 million and we have built We Don't Have Time. That is not the biggest social media in the world, but we are the biggest social media for climate in the world.
Dickon: Some people may argue that online activism doesn't always translate into real world impact, and perhaps we can look to the likes of Trump social and Twitter to show that control of media ecosystems like this really can have an impact on the world. But how do you measure whether We Don't Have Time is truly moving the needle on climate action? And if you have some, perhaps you could share some success stories.
Ingmar: It was two questions there. One was that online activities doesn't necessarily lead to change in the real world. They do. If you control the platform where you do it. They don't if you don't control the platform. Maybe they do if the ones controlling the platform are OK with it, if you crack the code to get through the noise of the algorithm so that you reach the people not already rengaged in the issue.
Some are doing this in a very good way and it works. Some are just posting things that will never reach anyone new that are going to change their mind. So this is the reason why social media is so dangerous. Because you think you have the power, but it's a power that you only have if you control the algorithm. That's why we have built We Don't Have Time.
Here's the tricky thing. How can we change the world? And how do we know when we have had an impact? It's $1000 question. When I made impact investors, they're always obsessed with measurements. If you try to measure everything you will not achieve as if you are doing things that are unmeasurable, and if you do communication that really cut through the noise and really have an impact, it's impossible to measure it in numbers. You need to measure it in other ways.
One way to measure it is if you have an idea that some suddenly others are picking up, replicating, using. And one example of the impact We Don't Have Time have had is the name We Don't Have Time.
When I got the idea to create a platform named without time was actually the day of the Donald Trump won the US election in 2016. I came up with this idea to create a platform to use my skills that I learned in finance and communication for the climate. And I wanted to have a name on the platform. And I suddenly woke up and We Don't Have Time, that's the name. Let's go to Google and see if the name is available. No one was using this.
So, one interesting thing is that since the first half year We Don’t Have Time, we started to use a service that is measuring how many times the phrase We Don't Have Time are used. And it started with couple of tens of thousands per month and now we are beyond 300 million per month. And one interesting thing is that in January, we saw a spike where it's gone up from 150 to 300 million. So, something that Donald Trump actually acheiving is that he's creating an urgency, people can’t avoid that we are in a crisis mode anymore and suddenly We Don't Have Time is something that is on top of mind because We Don’t Have Time is at the centrepiece, not only for the climate crisis, it's a centrepiece of many crises.
So you can measure things but what is the real impact of things? The real impact of things is when you see that something you do really have an outcome. I name a few examples, but I mean one clear example is this small girl Greta Thunberg. I was the first person, We Don’t Have Time was the first platform that helped her reach out to a wider audience and that led to a lot of things that made her viral. Would that have happened without us? Maybe. Probably if someone else had had done it, but we don't know that. But I know deep within that we contributed a lot. And I also know that a lot of other people see what we did because suddenly we were on a shit list or people don't liking climate action.
Another example was COP26 in Glasgow. Together with UNDP, we managed to contribute that fossil fuel subsidies were in the final negotiations. And one thing that we did, many were doing different things, but we did it synchronously, was that we had this big count up.
So every day we broadcast from COP with a lot of knowledgeable speakers, everything from you know, country leaders to business leaders, to NGOs, to politicians, to negotiators, we had this big counter on the backdrop that we're counting up the fossil fuel subsidies per minute during the meeting. And what was discussed during this meeting was the climate funding that were supposed to be $100 billion, that were kind of the argument of that meeting. The first week, the world was giving the fossil fuel industry $100 billion. And two weeks, it was giving $200 billion. So what the meeting were all about was to talk about how to get the funding for climate and at the same time, the governments were sponsoring the fossil fuel industry with like $11 million per minute. And that was an extremely good talking point. So, that was one thing where you can see communication leading to change. Will that have happened without us? You never know. This is the thing, you never know.
But we do know that if Donald Trump would not have been using Twitter and Elon Musk not buying Twitter and Breitbart Steve Bannon will not have supported him, etcetera. I don't think we will have seen this support for Donald Trump. But will that happen anyway? Maybe.
With communication you can never change something by going against the wall. You will only get hit by the wall. But you can amplify the wind blowing and you can get people to blow the wind in the same direction instead of different directions. And when you do that you get impact, but it's very hard to measure because you need two realities to really know if you were the one doing it, or if it would have happened anyway.
Dickon: It's fascinating to hear someone with the finance background saying you can't measure something. Love that.
Ingmar: I mean, but many, many people in finance and especially real estate and also marketing knows this. You can measure the amount of times people are clicking on an ad. You can measure how many times people are watching a broadcast or reading a piece, etcetera. But how can you measure the brand value? I mean, you can measure the value because you can see how many are buying products with a higher value. But how do you create that? How do you create that people wants to buy a Tesla that is more expensive than another electric cars? Or like a fancy handbag or whatever? It's all about creating this want-ness and that's what communication skills all about. And if you see those that are doing this in a very good way, I mean they use numbers for sure, but they don't only doing that.
It's like if you buy a real estate. Some shitty real estate somewhere. You can invest in that in order to sell it to another buyer. If you look at everything you do, is it worth it to renovate the kitchen? Is it worth it to renovate the bathroom? Is it worth it to fix the garden? You can calculate on all those things and if you see like what is most valuable for money is to renovate the kitchen, because that's what you see in the statistic, we skip everything else. You would probably not sell this property as high as if you will pay attention to the details so that someone looking at that real estate property will see that, “Here I want to live”. And that's all the actions you do, combined, that create that effect. Would you have been able to replicate that if you will have not changed the floor title or something that was very expensive? Maybe, but you will never know. And that's the skill of good communication.
And those people that know how to do this, those are the ones that are creating really profitable companies and those are the ones we need to engage in the climate fight because they can change things and create something that we want to engage in. And here I see the climate movement have failed.
Now I'm not talking generally. I'm also part of the climate moments in one way I'm in part of the failing. But to be a little bit self reflecting here because we have not really succeeded to drive the change we want. One thing the climate movement sometimes are doing that is not really working is to create anxiety.
When you see people in our climate demonstration, you don't feel that I want to be them. I don't want to feel anxiety about the future. You can't sell engagement by creating anxiety and feelings that people want to avoid. If you want people to do things, you need to create feelings that people wants to be part of. Angry can be a feeling that people want to be a part of, but people in general don't want to feel depressed, so they won't join a movement that will make them more depressed. So we need to get out of there, create positivist fighting, spiritualist fighting, angry can work if it's towards empowerment, etcetera. This is the feelings we need to promote and communicate and I think we can.
Dickon: We Don't Have Time provides users with a direct line to decision makers across various sectors, but how is this engagement, whether it's critique or support or celebration, how is it experienced by those decision makers? And how can it contribute to broader advocacy efforts.
Ingmar: We do two things. One thing that many do is that we amplify criticism. You need to do better. And that's something many climate and organisations are doing. The way we do it, a little bit different, is that we are saying that not us as, an organisation, are saying that you're doing bad. Our platform have people saying that you're doing that and there's many people around it. And what they are saying is very public, and you don't want to be criticised publicly without defending yourself.
So, we invite them to a dialogue, but the dialogue is not about saying that you're stupid. It's saying like, this is the criticism, how do you respond? How do you defend your position? Are you agreeing to the criticism or do you think it's fair? Or is it biased? And sometimes on our platform, many of our users are reading something in mainstream media, they are picking that up, they are sending a climate warning to a company and saying, “Why the hell are you doing this?” And the company responds with, “But it's not a full picture. We actually have those and those and those arguments, it's not black and white. It's a little bit grey. And we tried to say this to the journalist that made that big article, but he didn't quote anything of what we were saying because he was not interested in a dialogue. He was only interested in creating a piece that we're going to be shared and read and selling ads for that newspaper.”
So, what we add here is kind of fact checking. This is the criticism, this is the answer, and and the crowd can say that the answer sounds legit or not. So that's a little bit how we do things differently. We have actually a perfect example where one of those dialogues on our platform, contributed a lot, leading to change. And that was the largest pension fund in Sweden. Called AP7. It’s a state owned fund where half of the Swedish citizens, 5 million people, are saving for their future.
In Sweden, we have a system that you can choose who is going to manage your pension savings, but if you don't choose anything, the default option is this AP7 fund. And that's a fund that financially has performed quite well. They also have quite outspoken sustainability ambitions, but they are also heavily investor in fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel extracting companies.
So one of the criticisms on our platform was sent to this fund asking “Why are you investing in Saudi Aramco oil? In fact, why are you the 10th largest investor of Saudi Aramco oil? How is that related to your sustainability goals?” And there's a lot of criticism in Sweden about this. So we sent an invitation to the fund, asked them to join us for a dialogue. We did say to them that we can help you explain your position, your reason and your thinking because they were thinking that the media were only criticising them. They were not getting heard. So we said, “Let's do this.”
So I interviewed their Head of Communication and ESG director. We had one hour of very interesting dialogue. I gave him difficult questions. Because I'm have my background in finance myself, I were able to get beyond the cliches. And the cliches in this conversation was this, “We are an active investor.” “Yeah, sure. But how can you be an active investor in a state owned oil company that are controlled by the Saudi state? And the Saudi state were one of the heavily advocates against the climate migrations? et cetera.”
And we have a conversation around these topics and a lot of things. And AP7, they actually thought that this was a fair interview. So they shared it on their own LinkedIn. That meant that their employees saw this. At the same time, you know time we shared it to our global network and we have a lot of journalists in our network. So, we got international finance media, four or five outlets, writing about this. And they picked up that AP7 doesn't really have good arguments, because they didn't. Suddenly this became an international issue, and that's a little bit embarrassment for a Swedish state fund. So this contributed to that three months later, AP7 sold all their shares in Saudi Aramco oil. So, here is where you can see by not going against a company, but instead having a dialogue, it can lead to change.
Many people in the climate movement are still very criticising AP7 because they didn't sell all oil shares they owned. They only sold oil shares for this. So, there's a lot more work to do there.
But you can get victories by having a dialogue instead of going into conflict mode, and also give them praise when they do things right. So what happened on We Don’t Have Time is that after they sold this shares, was that they were given climate love so that they get praise of doing the right thing, not that they're doing everything right, but they doing something right. If you raise a child, if you say to them, stop doing this, maybe they listen. Probably not. But if they encourage them when they do something good, they want to do more good because they love to be encouraged. And the same thing with business. So that's the other part where we are also focusing a lot and that is giving climate love to companies and leaders not because they are perfect, but because they're taking the right steps.
So, often inside a company you have different wills. You have some people that wants to protect business as usual because they make a lot of bonus and profit by doing business with oil, for example. You have some people trying to make the company more sustainable and you have some people in between. If you give the people inside those companies praise then they win things, and they will not win everything, they will win like “OK, let's sell Saudi Aramco oil, but still invest in British Petroleum.” They will win that. If they only get shit about, “You didn't sell everything, so you're still an idiot. You're an evil corporation.” Those people doing good inside the company, they will not be listened to because it's worthless. “We will always be criticised. So it's better to just we don't give a shit.”
But if they get praise for their small victories, they will grow inside and people will listen to them inside and they will get more power and that will lead more positive effect. And to be serious, no one is handling the climate crisis perfectly with their own behaviour. We don't do it as individuals. I don't do it. No one is doing it perfectly. And the same thing with companies. And if you only are told that you're trying but you're not doing it good enough, you will stop trying. So instead of saying to someone “You're an idiot that are flying, you should say you're hero because you took the train this time.”
Dickon: But it's hilarious because in any organisation, I mean you'll know from your background as well in any organisation, corporation business, there is training to teach you how to give feedback and it isn't rule with the stick. That's not how things get done. It's funny that hasn't rippled out into the way that we, as climate advocates, tend to do things.
Ingmar: I think they need a stick, but we need a carrot. And the carrot can lead to faster way to change things. But the carrots will never work if you only have the carrot. And again, if you go to the stock market. You have the biggest carrot out there. I've been working as a consultant with large companies where I have been responsible for their investor relations. So, I was the one writing a press release for a public traded company framing that this is some big event that when we put it out, it was important that this stock market understood that it was very good, but it was also important that the stock market didn't see that it was too good, because that will trigger a lot of sticks in the future. So, what's so amazing when you do investor relations communication is that you get an instant value of how you express yourself, and that's a kick I can tell you when you release a press release and suddenly the share value of that company goes off with one billion. Imagine what you feel powerful because you know that if you have framed that a little bit different, the share price could have gone up only about half a billion. Or it could have gone up with two billion! But you don't want that because it's going up too much. It will go down tomorrow. So what's in the stock market is that you have the carrot and the sticks. Someone don't like what you do. They sell. If they like what you do, they buy. So we need the same thing for sustainability, we need to sell shit and buy what's good, and the same company that did something bad can also do something good. So maybe one day we sell. The other day we buy. That's how we change companies behaviour and that's how we can get more people to rally behind climate solutions and action. So we need both.
And it's not only about the stock prices, we also have a lot of analytical firms that are actually analysing companies. And they say that we recommend you to sell this company or we recommend you to buy those stocks long term. And that's also needed for time and sustainability.
We are living in a crazy world right now. I mean the geopolitics, everything are insane. But what I see much more clearly out there today than I did eight years ago when I started We Don’t Have Time is something very hopeful. And that is I see a lot closer correlation between profit and doing good. Because the companies that are doing good, they are the ones winning market and that means that if you do good you will also make more profit. And we at We Don’t Have Time, we actually have done some research. We were contacted by a fund company that wanted to use the data we have on our platform because we have a lot of data on what people think about companies, if they do good or bad. So, we gave them this data and we also gave them data about the companies this fund could invest in.
Because you know, now with the US and UK politics etcetera, everyone are kind of looking beyond ESG investment because it's an investment model where you invest in companies that are reporting in a good way, but that is data that are lagging behind and just because you're good at reporting doesn't mean that you're good for climate. I mean, one example is like oil companies that are scoring 5 stars because they are reporting in a very good way. But are they doing the good action? Not necessarily. So we gave them this data to build a MSI World Fund, a fund that kind of replicates the whole world. And we gave them that they should only invest in companies that have set science based targets. And they should not invest in companies that have got a lot of criticism on the We Don’t Have Time platform. So, even if you have set the target but have got a lot of criticism, like Tesla for example, we didn't invest in that company. And we backtracked this, five years back in time, and every single year, this imagined fund was outperforming MSI World with 8%. It was performing 8% better. That's very interesting.
So, I think what we're going to see from now on is more and more if you do good is good for business, it’s good for investors, you're winning. And that's also where I see why we have got this anti-climate, anti-science movement in the world, because there’s going to be a lot of losers out there. And those losers, they are powerful today. So they make everything to resist, but they reason they do that is because they're starting to lose. If they were not losing, they will not be afraid of people acting in the climate space, but they are. And that's because they are losing. And it's not sustainable to try to silence and and stop development. It has never worked before.
It's so many people out there that are starting to feel very depressed, feeling that doesn't matter what we do, the world is going crazy and the future looks very bleak. And sometimes I also have those feelings too, but what we should remember is that just because it blows some bad winds doesn't mean that it can’t change instantly.
Now we're living in a time where we're not going to see so many climate victories, in short term, but just staying alive until things have settled, until the wind will change, means that you do impact.
And it will really change. It will change very fast and the reason I know it is that I'm unfortunately very convinced that the climate crisis will soon be a financial crisis. And the society we have today, all the countries they are not governed by science, they are governed by finance. If the stock market goes down, they react. If the inflation goes up, they react. If people are getting unemployed, they react very fast. So, when the climate crisis is now starting to lead to a financial crisis. The hopeful thing with that is that governments will start acting on it, and if you're a government that try to resist this. You will be out of government quite soon.
Dickon: What's the single most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communication endeavours?
Ingmar: I'm very glad you asked that question and many times I got the question, “What's the most important thing you can do for climate?” And I start to talk about it's important how you communicate. So how can they communicate in the best way?
I will say that the best way we can communicate is to use the platform we have. And it's not necessarily creating another LinkedIn post. It can be if you're a LinkedIn influencer, a little bit like me. But if you're not that, I mean, focus on the real life, focus on your workplace. When people are eating lunch, raise your voice, talk about difficult things, do it with your relatives. With friends, with people you have near and don't judge them. Instead ask more questions around what they feel about climate future and how we can fix this. And if they say something stupid, you don't need necessarily to go against them. You can only say that, “I don't think so. I do this.” You don't need to go in conflict. That, I think, if many are doing that, that creates a lot of change.
If you talk to ten people. You will create an enormous effect if you only get one of those ten people to change their mind a little, because that's how you create a wave. When someone changes a little, that person changes the next person a little and suddenly it all adds up. What started with a small wave or at the other end of the sea a big wave.
So we can all play part of this wave creating effect and if you see social media, you see that people don't agree with each other, but if you talk with people that you normally don't talk about those things with, you see that they agree with a lot more things than you think. So start there.
Dickon: What's the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
Ingmar: Staying silent. That's 100% the problem. We need people to speak up what they say is not the most important thing that they say something is most important thing. I mean, it's an old saying out there, “Evil is not done by the people doing it. Evil is done by the people that's staying silent.”
Dickon: It was brilliant talking to Ingmar for this episode, but what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply to your own work?
For me, Ingmar’s insights about trust stood out the most. In the end, the truth always surfaces in the numbers, being untruthful risks eroding trust, damaging value, losing social licence and, for businesses, even investment potential.
Marketers will recognise the link here to greenwashing and the need for honest, transparent, verifiable climate and sustainability claims. But it reminded me of a core principle of great climate communication, and that's always starting from a science backed position. I often take that for granted, that it's something we all know and understand, but it's worth repeating. While complex science can often create barriers for audiences, it remains the essential foundation for any story or campaign. Without it, we risk spreading misinformation and undermining the trust our movement.
We're at a turning point. Scientists are being silenced. Research is under threat. Disinformation is outpacing truth, just when we need science most to face up to the climate crisis and a slew of other global challenges. That's why We Don't Have Time has just launched Make Science Great Again, a campaign to defend truth, empower scientists and fight denial with evidence based solutions. To find out how you can get involved, I've put a link in the show notes.
So that's what I'll be taking. With. Me, but how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Ingmar Rentzong for sharing his time and insight with the show, it was great. You can find links to some relevant resources in the show notes.
Thanks also to you for listening to communicating climate change. If you enjoyed this episode, why not leave it a rating or a review? Your feedback not only helps to shine a light on the guests and themes that resonate with you the most but also boosts visibility, meaning the series reaches more people, expanding the community and driving the conversation forward. After all, that's what it's all about.
You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts or by subscribing so you never miss out. You can find Communicating Climate Change on LinkedIn too, and if you think this series would be of interest to friends or colleagues, why not point them in the right direction?
Remember, each and every episode attempts to add to our toolkits to help us develop the communities and the infrastructures that we'll need for this global task, so be sure to stay tuned for more. For anything else just head over to communicatingclimatechange.com.
Until next time. Take care.
