Climate Reality Project / Reality Drop
Posted November 20, 2012 / Climate Reality Project / Reality Drop
When former Vice President Al Gore asks you to help him save the world, you say, “yes.” So that’s exactly what we did when he, and his advisor Alex Bogusky came to us with this opportunity to work on the Climate Reality Project.
Problem: In 2007, after Mr. Gore won accolades for An Inconvenient Truth, public attention to and understanding of climate change was at an all-time high. The overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrated clearly that global climate change is happening, and manmade carbon pollution is to blame.
Unfortunately, that truth was particularly inconvenient for the fossil fuel industry, and in the subsequent years Big Oil and Big Coal spent big money buying access to media, and fueling a campaign of doubt, denial and confusion in an effort to gain control of the climate conversation. And it was working. Public understanding of the issue was dropping, while the reality of global climate change continued to grow into the full-blown crisis it’s now become.
We needed a tool to help ordinary people cut through a very complicated and easily manipulated scientific issue to get the most current, relevant, and clear facts about climate change. We needed a tool to empower people to confidently and knowledgeably regain control of the conversation, so we can all get back to fixing the problem.
Our solution was Reality Drop.
We first introduced The Reality Drop concept at PSFK’s “Gaming for Good” conference. After submitting a brief asking more than a million creative professionals to incorporate game theory to address the issue of climate change, Reality Drop was one of two Arnold entries judged among the top ten.
On February 28th, Mr. Gore officially introduced Reality Drop during the prestigious 2013 TED conference in Long Beach, California. In no time, the news was picked up by Pete Cashmore and Mashable, Huffington Post, Fast Company, Digiday, and more.
Just 3 business days into the launch at the time of this writing, it’s difficult to tell if we’ve actually succeeded in saving the world. But among the many things our small team learned while building this tool, we can say this for certain: Trying something means everything.
