A Timely Guide to Preparing and Delivering ‘Do-Good’ Speeches 

Review of: Speaking on Climate: A Guide to Speechwriting for a Better Future by Rune Kier Nielsen (204 pages, published April 2025)

In his comprehensive collection of life advice addressed to his son Philip, Britain’s Lord Chesterfield urged the young man to closely study the art of delivering an effective speech; no one, the concerned father observed, “can make a fortune or a figure in this country, without speaking, and speaking well, in public.”

With a similarly urgent tone—but a far different goal compared to Chesterfield’s—Danish professional speechwriter and trained cultural anthropologist Rune Keir Nielsen has just published Speaking on Climate. The advice in this book is intended for young adults and others who want to publicly advocate for rapid societal and government action to address global warming, loss of biodiversity or general environmental matters, but who are unsure about what step to take first. Some may assume this means the subject matter has been “dumbed down”, but that would be a mistake as well as a disservice to Nielsen’s book.

Nielsen wrote Speaking on Climate to provide readers with a wide assortment of ideas and information that will help them deliver speeches with a specific outcome in mind: the mobilizing of audiences in favor of “climate action.” The nine concise, accessible chapters that make up Nielsen’s book all focus on how to plan, write and deliver such speeches. They cover everything from relevant parts of Aristotle’s writings on rhetoric to Simon Lancaster’s cutting-edge observations regarding neuroscientific aspects of communication—to how to amplify a speech’s impact across time and space, to what would-be climate speakers can learn from Greta Thunberg, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and Malala Yousafzai.

Nielsen has also distilled key take-aways from his professional speechwriting experiences, which he shares alongside useful case studies and lessons from history, mythology and literature. 

Nielsen begins with a confession. He shares his personal disappointment regarding a climate-themed speech he researched and wrote in 2013 for Denmark’s minister for climate policy. 

Nielsen won a prestigious Cicero award for his work on these remarks, delivered to a major policy conference that year.  The speech did not, however, achieve the goal Nielsen had personally set for it—which was to, in his words, help “change the world.” How? By fostering a lasting commitment to climate action on the part of the audience, that would endure in demonstrable fashion over time. 

This 2013 speech, Nielsen observes, was by conventional measures a “good” effort, which he worked hard to construct according to the best rhetorical techniques, research and insights he could muster. Where it fell short, he believes in retrospect, is that it was not written as a “do-good” speech (emphasis added).

Planning a “do-good” speech begins with a speaker putting a clear, unambiguous message at the center of their remarks (per Nielsen’s handy “one ring” speech organizing/writing schematic, as outlined in the book). 

As well, such a speech needs to create a lasting feeling of “us” between speaker and audience, which Nielsen advises can be accomplished through careful application of a storytelling framework gleaned from the work of scholar Marshall Ganz. 

As they refine their remarks prior to delivery, speakers should recall Nielsen’s reminders to get comfortable with harnessing their feelings about climate change to make their words more powerful. The alternative, as he notes, is to appear “emotionless and overcautious” at the podium by playing it safe. 

Properly-executed, a do-good speech motivates listeners “to take real-life action,”  moves them away from individualized concerns towards cooperating for “collective impact,” fashions “a shared sense of community” and inspires listeners to “tell their own stories in a new way.” The surest mark of a bona-fide successful do-good speech might be that it comes to be regarded, over time, as a discernible “tipping point” for increased social engagement with or mobilization in support of a cause (as Nielsen hoped for his 2013 effort).

As noted earlier, Rune Keir Nielsen has written Speaking on Climate with a specific audience and a specific kind of speech in mind. That said, with its broad focus on the topic of maximizing the lasting influence of speakers and speeches, this book has much to say of relevance to all speechwriters. Speaking on Climate is thus certainly worth adding to one’s “professional development” reading list for 2025.

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Note: You can click this link for a recent video where Nielsen provides further context for why he decided  to write Speaking on Climate.