The Curious Case of the Carton with the Carbon Label

Should products be labeled with their "carbon footprint?" That's the latest green debate in Britain, and it has implications for how to build support for changing our energy future here.

A British supermarket will be adding carbon footprint information to its milk containers, although critics say figuring this out accurately and compressing it down to the size of a label can get pretty tricky. The company says it has research to show that Britons do get the idea of labels for carbon footprints. As far as Americans go, Public Agenda didn't specifically ask about carbon footprints in our Energy Learning Curve™ survey (although the low levels of public knowledge we found should give anyone pause).

But we can hazard a guess about the sorts of people with whom this kind of labeling will resonate. In the Energy Learning Curve™, we conducted a cluster analysis of the data to find out how people group together based on knowledge and beliefs. We came up with four groups of Americans: the Anxious (40 percent of the public), the Greens (24 percent), the Disengaged (19 percent) and the Climate Change Doubters (17 percent).

The Greens, as you might imagine, would probably embrace these labels, while the Doubters and Disengaged may just shrug. The Anxious are another story. This is a group that knows enough to be worried, and they worry mostly about prices: nine in 10 worry "a lot" about the price of fuel, and three-quarters believe oil prices will rise because of scarcity. But they also believe global warming is real and caused by human activity (69 percent). And they may be the key group in the overall debate.

None of these four groups is a majority. Anyone who's actually going to make progress on changing our energy future is going to have to build coalitions. As the largest single block, the Anxious are an essential part of any coalition that emerges. The good news is there's actually a lot of common ground across various groups. For example, both the Anxious and the Greens favor alternative energy, but for entirely different reasons: the Greens are worried about global warming, while the Anxious see alternatives more as a way of stretching supplies.

For building coalitions, you need public engagement, not just marketing. When it comes to the big decisions, people have to weigh the options and consider what they're willing to do and not do. If the snags can be worked out, product labeling could be a powerful tool. More information can raise awareness, and it can give people who care about global warming new ways to put that caring into practice. The small decisions we make every day matter. But eventually we have to tackle the big decisions: Do we keep using coal? Do we "price carbon" with cap-and-trade or an energy tax? What new technology should we back?

In the end, the key thing is helping the public make the big decisions. Because when it comes to energy and climate change, the choices are not merely big, they're bearing down on us.