Changing the Narrative around Electric Vehicles

October 17, 2024

Authored by:

Ruth Steinhardt

In the oil and gas country where Artealia Gilliard grew up, there was no question that industrial pollution, climate change and socioeconomic injustice were real and life changing. Extreme weather events displaced whole communities. An unreliable boom-and-bust economy kept financial stability out of reach for many. Family members died young or were afflicted for life by illnesses like asthma, cancer or heart failure, conditions caused by environmental poisoning and exacerbated by a lack of access to health care.

Gilliard fought for the education that gave her the tools and language to put these facts in context, earning multiple degrees that led to government roles in the Department of Defense, Department of the Interior and the Department of Transportation under President Barack Obama. "As an adult, I started to understand the bigger forces at play, and that these things that affected my family were part of a bigger economic piece," she said.

Now, as the first-ever head of sustainability communications and advocacy at Ford, Gilliard helps shape the company's narrative and advocacy strategy around electric vehicles (EVs), giving her an insider's view of that bigger economic picture and insight into what change will require. And she is sharing that perspective and insight as the inaugural Sustainable Future Fellow at the George Washington University Alliance for a Sustainable Future.

Alliance Executive Director Frank Sesno said Gilliard's experience in both the government and private sectors, her inclusive approach to technology, her unique story and her "credible and creative communication style" make her a perfect fit for the the Sustainable Future Fellowship, which connects full-time sustainability professionals with the GW community through a series of guest lectures, brown bag lunches and evening salons.

"Artealia Gilliard's work puts her at the intersection of technology, engineering, business, communication and the 'just transition,' a phrase she consistently uses to highlight the challenges in underserved communities and elsewhere to ensure that all can participate in this emerging technology," Sesno said. "Having her on campus and in the GW community will be incredibly valuable."

EVs occupy an increasing share of the global vehicle market, and many view them as key to any sustainable energy transition. President Joe Biden's administration has invested heavily in the United States' EV future, including millions of dollars in grants to support EV charger installation and almost $2 billion to convert shuttered or at-risk auto manufacturing and assembly facilities for EV production.

Access to EV chargers varies by community. (Adobe Stock)

While these investments are likely to pay off in the next few years and EV sales in the U.S. are rising steadily, at 7.6% of all new car sales in 2023, the country still lags behind China (24%) and heavy adopters like Norway, where EVs now outnumber gas-powered vehicles, hitting a record 94.3% of new vehicle registrations in August. Obstacles to their widespread adoption in the U.S. range from the practical (EVs require a functioning infrastructure of easy-to-access chargers anywhere drivers plan to travel) to the ideological (attitudes toward the technology are politically polarized in the U.S., with Republicans tending toward opposition to EVs on principle). GW researchers have also found that the current generation of EV owners tend to drive less than gas vehicle owners do, so they may not be fully realizing their potential benefits.

For Gilliard, the temporary failure of corporate marketing to sell EVs more effectively to the American public is partly a question of telling the wrong stories and using the wrong language, she told a gathering of students, faculty, staff and allies from the GW and D.C. sustainability community at Sesno's home Monday evening. "Narrative," she said, "is a key thing."

From the "many, many hours" of focus group polling she's observed, Gilliard has learned that people on the right wing of the political spectrum may object to the term "climate change," interpreting it either as an ideological framework they don't believe in or as an attack on their way of life. (Gilliard's own stepfather is quick to remind her where she comes from and what she owes to a community powered by fossil fuel industries, she said.) But if the questions are reframed to focus on clean air and clean water, on conservation, on environmental stewardship and leaving a better world for the next generation, voters on both sides agree: These are shared high-level values.

And once the ideological baggage is cut away, people are more clearly able to see the benefits of EVs, Gilliard said-not just lower emissions but reduced overall costs thanks to more efficient fuel consumption and reduced maintenance.

"The math is mathing," Gilliard said.

Particularly at Ford, which banks on its reputation as a quintessentially American company, the narrative of patriotic leadership is also effective. "We can get behind the jobs that are being created by this industry and the patriotism of investing in American companies and American jobs while we still have an opportunity to be leaders in this technology," Gilliard said. "All of those are things that can bring us together…and when we do that, we are so much more effective."

Effective storytelling is a cornerstone of the Alliance, created by Sesno and Provost Christopher A. Bracey in 2023 to connect and elevate sustainability initiatives across GW. At the time, Bracey recalled, he'd gathered GW's deans to discuss possibilities for impactful university-wide action in the gaps between strategic planning processes. Everyone he spoke to listed sustainability as a top priority. As Bracey dug into the topic, he found that many across the university-siloed by their different schools, offices or disciplines-were actually "already doing the work."

"If we could just tell the story of how GW is trying to push the frontiers of knowledge and train the next generation of future leaders to be champions of sustainability and to save the planet, we'd be doing a good thing," Bracey said Monday evening.He approached Sesno, an award-winning journalist and founder of Planet Forward at the School of Media and Public Affairs, as the obvious choice to lead.

Sesno took up the challenge. As a "recovering journalist," he is deeply interested in the power of narrative to spark empathy and effect change. Since creating his first documentary on energy for CNN, "We Were Warned: Tomorrow's Oil Crisis," Sesno also has been fascinated with the interdependence of environmental challenges-the way a crisis in one arena could affect a supply chain in another, altering the day-to-day lives of people who may never have thought the root issues relevant to them.

"You cannot talk about any one of our challenges, whether it's food or transportation, mobility or energy or biodiversity, without talking deeply across disciplines, [and] if our students come away from GW with anything, it's an appreciation of that," Sesno said Monday before an audience of guests whose makeup reflected that interplay of diverse bodies of knowledge: graduate and undergraduate students, faculty from multiple schools, EV experts and environmental advocates.

Gilliard first came to GW as a guest lecturer in Sesno's class after the two connected through a mutual acquaintance from the Obama administration. She returned as featured speaker at 2023's Planet Forward Summit, where the students she connected with made a powerful impact.

Gilliard and Sesno onstage at Planet Forward in 2023. (William Atkins/GW Today)

She'll return to GW multiple times over the course of her fellowship to visit classes and participate in campus conversations. GW students also will have a chance to see her work from the inside: in the spring, the Alliance plans to take a group to the Ford F-150 Lightning plant in Dearborn, Mich., where the electric version of America's bestselling truck is built. There they'll see the new industry in action, hear about the challenges and opportunities ahead and meet with engineers and others building the future of mobility.

"I'm fascinated by young journalists," Gilliard said Monday. "Their journalism is very personal, and a lot of it is independent. It's their voice unfiltered, direct to social, direct to their local community. That type of storytelling is so powerful. And with GW's global footprint, the diversity and wide range of students that come here, that is so powerful-especially for an international company like Ford, where the challenge is not just in the U.S."

The impact was mutual, said guest Sophie Holtzman, a senior in the Elliott School of International Affairs who is also a research assistant in the Alliance's Sustainability Research Institute. In Sesno's crowded living room Monday evening, she and her peers mingled with older adults with institutional clout, adults who were not abdicating responsibility to a younger generation but, instead, working out how to use and share power alongside them.

"Being in this room is really reassuring, because we already know the youth do care about climate change-our generation is out here doing the work," Holtzman said. "But sometimes in the general population it can go unseen. So to be here and to see that there are adults doing this work-not putting it fully on the youth, but having an intergenerational dialogue that also goes between different disciplines-feels important."