Dr. Genevieve Guenther, the founding director of End Climate Silence, thinks a lot about one of the most important questions of our time: How can we combat climate change denial and actually bring about the transformations to our energy systems that will halt runaway climate catastrophe? She has written a book,The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It,that looks at how climate change is discussed in the media and how we can talk about it more effectively in ways that show people what the problem is and give them actionable solutions to fight for. She stresses the importance of avoiding doomerism and maintaining hope through action. We discuss the present state of the climate movement and what we should be doing right now.

nathan j. robinson

We're in a rather bleak moment. President Donald Trump was inaugurated yesterday for a second term in office. One of his immediate vows upon taking office was to undo every possible piece of climate action that he could in order to, in his words—or the words of the Republican Party—“drill, baby, drill.” Donald Trump is an outright climate denier. JD Vance calls climate science “weird science.” Basically there is a consensus on the Republican right that it's either not a problem or, if it is a problem, we don't have to do anything about it.

Unfortunately, it seems as if, in some ways, we've taken a step backwards in the last few years in the way that we talk and think about climate change, which is one of the reasons your book is so important. Could you discuss the distressing direction that the discourse and action on climate has taken in recent years?

Genevieve Guenther

As I was researching this book, I realized that we think of climate politics as being polarized. So you've got the outright climate deniers on the right, and then you've got the climate advocates in the Democratic Party, supposedly, who are opposed to the energy policies of the Republicans and are doing everything that they can to help the United States meet its Paris Agreement targets and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. And what I discovered researching this book is that, in fact, the reason we don't have more action on climate change, the reason emissions aren't actually dropping, is that our climate politics are not as much polarized as they are unified around this idea that the United States should continue to expand its fossil fuel production and consumption. 

On the right, you see this unequivocally. This is explicitly their energy policy. In the Democratic Party, you don't see this kind of full-bore embrace of fossil energy. You see ambivalence, and you see a self-contradictory political position which is shared by elected officials and the electorate. Over 90 percent of Democrats support the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, but only 48 percent of Democrats, a minority, support the phaseout of fossil fuels. At the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that we already have too much fossil fuel infrastructure to halt global heating at two degrees Celsius. So there's this self-contradiction in the climate viewpoints of the Democratic Party, where you have someone like Tim Walz in his debate with JD Vance saying, hey guys, we can do both. And you have Kamala Harris celebrating fossil fuel production and the United States becoming the biggest fossil fuel producer in the world during the Biden administration's tenure even as he passed the biggest climate policy in American history.

What my book tries to do is lay bare the fossil fuel propaganda that justifies that self-contradictory viewpoint, and it's not necessarily propaganda that's produced by the oil and gas industry. It's produced by economists and sometimes even by scientists and certainly by technologists and advocates for technologies like carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering. But I try to lay it bare, and then I try to offer other talking points that everyone can use that are designed to help shift people's political beliefs. 

The polling that I did after I completed the manuscript and sent it to my editor—thank god this turned out the way that it did—shows that the messages that I develop in the book actually raise the support for phasing out fossil fuels among concerned and alarmed Democrats and Republicans by up to 10 points.

robinson

I think you and I probably share a view that discourse matters, that media matters, that propaganda matters, that the way we talk about things matters. Your book is called The Language of Climate Politics, and [you argue] that in many ways, the industry's propaganda has been very sophisticated and has grown more sophisticated over time. It was one thing when the debate we were having was over whether climate change was real. You can respond to that with, well, yes, it is, here's pretty good evidence. And then people start seeing catastrophes unfold before their eyes. But now we're dealing with a situation where we're not really having that debate. 

I did an article a couple of years ago on the way the Wall Street Journal op-ed page had shifted how they talk about climate change from denial to downplaying. They’ve gone from saying that this isn't real to saying, well, it doesn't matter if it's real because it'll be solved by X, Y, or Z. What you're arguing is that sometimes the idea that we don't have to do anything about it, or the idea that it'll be solved by means other than phasing out fossil fuels, is actually reinforced by some of the people who claim that they really, sincerely care about climate change. I'm going to quote you here. You say, “Staunch opponents and ambivalent advocates of climate action reinforce each other's messages and reaffirm fossil fuel ideologies.” That seems a little self-contradictory. What do you mean by that?

Guenther

Sometimes it happens inadvertently. Let me give you an example: the word uncertainty. This was the main talking point that produced this doubt over whether climate change was real or not. Fossil fuel interests took this word from climate science, appropriated it, weaponized it, and put into public discourse the idea that there was some sort of uncertainty about climate change, which meant that we weren't sure whether it was real or not. We certainly couldn't [advocate] large policies such as spending on clean energy research because there was some uncertainty. 

But this is not what uncertainty means in climate science. In climate science, uncertainty means a range of possible outcomes. So you can talk about the uncertainty interval of a model or you can talk about the confidence interval of a model. Uncertainty is actually synonymous with confidence. It has this very specific disciplinary meaning that acknowledges that projections have to have a range, like from best- to worst-case outcomes. But because fossil fuel interests had already put into the public discourse this more colloquial understanding of the word uncertainty and connected it to climate science, every time a climate scientist would acknowledge the uncertainty—the so-called “uncertainty” of his or her research—they would seem to confirm the propaganda that climate change isn't real or that scientists have some sort of doubt about the phenomenon they're studying. 

So this dynamic where the other side appropriates language out of our side and weaponizes it and manipulates ambivalent actors into spreading fossil fuel propaganda is seen across all domains of climate discourse: science, economics, geopolitics, etc. And now, as you put it, the propaganda has shifted from denying that climate change is real to an attempt to delay the phaseout of fossil fuels. They've come up with a new narrative, and this is the narrative: yes, climate change is real, but to say that it's going to be dangerous or catastrophic is just alarmist. It'll cost too much to phase out fossil fuels, and human flourishing actually relies on economic growth, so we should use fossil fuels to encourage growth in the so-called developing world and deal with climate change by increasing our innovation and our resilience.

Robinson

Embedded within that narrative are so many different assumptions, like with the words innovation, growth, and cost and the way that we talk about the developing world. So we need to break this down a little bit. On this question of uncertainty and risk, a lack of knowledge of exactly how the future is going to go is used to suggest that we don't need to fear the worst-case scenario. You quote Martin Weitzman's analysis, which famously shows that, actually, our lack of certain knowledge should motivate climate action because we can’t be confident that it will go the right way. In fact, it means that we have the possibility of a limitless downside, essentially. It could be as bad as massive global disruption or borderline or total human extinction. And you can say that even if these things are unlikely, the potential downsides are so great that the uncertainty should lead us more in the alarmist direction.

Guenther

That is correct. Martin Weitzman was an economist at Harvard who noticed that mainstream economic modeling of climate change essentially did not account for this unlimited downside exposure—the risk of the worst-case scenario coming to pass. And his insight—his philosophical insight, even—was that, in fact, there's no way for us to rule that out until emissions actually start to come down and [warming] starts to slow. Until that happens, there's no way to rule out the worst-case scenario, including the infinite cost of extinction. Of course, warming doesn't stop until we get emissions to net zero, and there is absolutely no evidence that humanity will survive unlimited warming. So just from an economic modeling perspective, you can't make the claim that, as he puts it, you can parameterize the costs because there's no way to know in advance what the downside exposure will be. 

So you have to model a precautionary principle in your mitigation scenarios, understanding that, in fact, what economics recommends—that we start spending a little and then keep using fossil fuels and then spend a little more once economic growth has made us all a little richer—is completely backwards. In fact, what we need to do is spend a lot upfront, and then when the risk of these downsides lessens, then actually we can start easing off a little bit more. And even without that absolute worst-case scenario coming into the model—he points out that this is a “fat tail scenario”—there will be shocks to the economy that cannot be modeled by a linear progression of climate damages, and we don't know where they’ll happen.

We all knew that California was subject to wildfires, but I don't think that anyone projected that one of the most affluent neighborhoods of Los Angeles was going to be burned to the ground in 2025. That's just one example. It's really important to think about risk differently in order to cope with the climate crisis.

robinson

It's the very unpredictability and uncertainty of the actual risks that we face in the future that should really motivate us to take urgent action to phase out fossil fuels.

guenther

And it's uncertainty not in the sense that we don't know. It’s uncertainty in the sense that we can confidently say that there are outcomes that we will not be able to predict. And I know that's a nuance. 

robinson

Yes, it’s a difficult thing to wrap your mind around. “Known unknowns,” in the Rumsfeldian parlance.

guenther

Exactly. That is, unfortunately, a really immortal piece of philosophy from that administration.

robinson

He made one contribution before he departed this earth, and that was the concept of unknown knowns and known unknowns. I want to unpack some of those terms that we discussed, like growth, but I also wanted to mention that, for those who are very deeply concerned about the consequences of climate change, we need to be a little careful how we talk. You point out ways in which the language [is used] even by those who are climate journalists. You specifically single out David Wallace-Wells, who wrote the book The Uninhabitable Earth, which was a very stark warning about the potential downsides of climate change and how bad it could get, but who has since written in a way that has allowed people to take what he's saying and suggest that it means that actually everything's going to be fine and none of this was something to worry about. You might be able to describe this better, the dynamic where people who are climate journalists can write about this in [misleading] ways. I think there was a Harper'scover that was like, the apocalypse isn't happening.

guenther

That was hilarious—sad but hilarious. The research that we did with End Climate Silence shows that most Americans know everything they know about the climate crisis via the news media, which is really a terrifying thought. And just more broadly, I think that nobody has an experience of climate change or really anything else in this world without it being mediated through language and the thoughts that we have in our head. And that language that we hear in our thoughts is social. We don't make it up. It's something we all share together, which is why we can communicate with each other. And so it's being influenced by the most influential voices in our culture, and very often on climate change that's going to be climate change journalists since we don't have climate change education in this country. Scientists have been disabused of their authority due to right-wing propaganda.

I argue that David Wallace-Wells’s first book came along in a confluence of events, including the wake of the Paris Agreement, the publication of this special report on 1.5 degrees Celsius by the IPCC in 2018 which laid out the differences between a 1.5-degree temperature rise over pre-industrial temperatures or two-degree temperature rise. And it turns out there are many differences, and a lot more people are going to suffer and die just from that 1.5-degree difference of warming. And that was a shock. It was also a shock to hear that, in fact, the world had to zero out our emissions, essentially, by the middle of the century. I don't think policymakers had actually wrapped their head around that at all before this. 

So there was this rise of global alarm catalyzed at the time by Greta Thunberg, who joined with all these indigenous activists and water protectors who had been doing this work for years. [There was] a huge groundswell of attention by the news media and just a general sense that capitalism needed to pretend to be on board with the energy transition if they were going to continue to have a social license to operate. So this surge of alarm, this groundswell of worry about climate change and social movements insisting that policymakers needed to do something about it, entered into the 2020 election and led to lots of climate policy being passed in the Build Back Better Act, which then got watered down for various reasons and became the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. But simultaneously, as this was playing out, there was a backlash and counterforce. This included obviously the climate deniers and the Wall Street Journal editorialists and everyone on the political right. But it also included supposed environmental advocates on our side who are capitalists and believe, for that reason, that the best way to drive climate action is to create a sense of optimism and excitement about technologies that capital can invest in that will disseminate through the market and supposedly lower demand for fossil fuels or at least mitigate some of their externalities without putting the costs on consumers.

So there are these two different strands in the climate movement, the green capital strand and the social movement strand, that don't agree about the best way to deal with this problem. But then, additionally, there is a center-right strand that's supposedly in the climate movement and that is constantly trying to tamp down alarm and to delegitimize environmental advocacy and essentially argue that we can be environmentalists and still use fossil fuels indefinitely, anyway. 

And so out of this coalition came this argument that some of the climate science behind the global alarm was implausible, and that, in fact, what we thought was going to happen by 2100—which is to say, this level of warming that we thought we were going to have by 2100 that would have been utterly catastrophic—has now been mitigated by the policy moves and the market developments enough that now we've “avoided the worst-case scenario,” and we're on track to much lower levels of warming.

And so David Wallace-Wells covered this research and this story and told it as a story that just in a few years, the future that he had envisioned in The Uninhabitable Earth was now off the table, and what we were looking at was a future in which there would be great suffering among the global poor and in the Global South, but, by and large, Americans would be protected from the worst of climate devastation. 

And then there's one more step that I should add: this got picked up by climate deniers. Wall Street Journal editorial board memberHolman W. Jenkins Jr.also took up this science and argued that, in fact, we have no need for further climate policy or even further climate investments because we've already avoided the worst-case scenario. But what he left out—and which David Wallace-Wells didn't leave out, I should add—was the fact that the emissions trajectory we're currently on, or at least were on before Trump's election, will lead to three degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, and that is a level of warming that these scientists said explicitly and clearly is actually catastrophic. And so the story that got told left that out.

Robinson

With the existing state of climate science, what does it say that we are on track for if we do not phase out fossil fuel use? How should people understand this? They hear conflicting messages of how it's not going to be as bad as we thought, that we don't need to tamp down fossil fuel use, and that we have wonderful technologies that will be able to do everything at once. If it's not The Uninhabitable Earth scenario or if it is, where are we actually headed? What should people understand?

guenther

The thing to understand is that the planet will keep warming until we phase out fossil fuels and bring our emissions down to net zero, until the point where we are no longer adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So that's number one. Number two, there are two different kinds of climate models. There are the climate models that model out carbon dioxide levels and then levels of warming for each of those carbon dioxide concentrations. There’s climate modeling that tries to model the impacts of different levels of warming, and that's the physical science of climate science. 

But then there's also the economic domain of climate science, which is the domain of these emissions trajectories. They are sort of like combined models of the science that we have about levels of carbon dioxide and their relation to levels of warming but also what's going to happen in the economy, in our energy systems, and politically moving forward. So when you hear we're on track for X amount of warming by a certain date, what you're hearing is an estimate about what's going to happen in our economy, in our energy system, in policymaking, and how all of those things are going to combine to produce a certain level of warming. So they're policy scenarios. They're stories that you're telling about the future. They're not like hard science, insofar as they're also projecting out historical events into the future, in addition to saying that those historical events will lead to a certain amount of carbon dioxide, and then we'll have X amount of warming. You have to have those models, but you just have to understand that they're like historical projections. They're economic models. They're not hard science. 

So right now, the U.N. Environment Programme has said that, at least before the election of Trump, we are on an emissions trajectory to lead to 2.9 or three degrees Celsius by 2100 and potentially more after that, if we haven't halted our emissions by then. The last time the planet was three degrees Celsius hotter, the East Coast ended 100 miles west of where it is now because the seas were so much higher, and there were pine forests in the Arctic, and camels lived there. It was just a completely different planet. So if we allow ourselves to get to three degrees Celsius by 2100, it is going to be beyond catastrophic for the entire planet, even affluent people in the United States.

robinson

You point out that that can mean that for three months of the year, across most of the United States, you can't be outside without a serious risk of death.

Guenther

You can go outside, but you certainly wouldn't want to spend time there, go jogging, or work there.

robinson

We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the summers have been getting hotter, and it is already the case that the differences are noticeable. It used to be the case that summer was hot when you went outside. It was very unpleasant. Now, I go outside in the summertime, and it's frightening. It's really like I need to get out of this as quickly as I possibly can because the clock is ticking on my ability to sustain life. You can feel that. You can feel that even the small differences make a difference. And then I think to myself, well, this is going to get worse. This will get worse over the course of decades. It really is terrifying. I want to go through a couple of these things. 

What your book helps us to do is think, okay, so we know that the risk is very frightening. We've already seen the wildfires in January and the kinds of things that we can expect to see more of as this unfolds. Now we've got to think, well, how do we talk about this properly? How do we think about this properly? And you point out that there are a number of words that can mislead us. One of those words is “cost”—what are the costs? 

If we do open the columns of Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in the Wall Street Journal—and he has ruined many a morning coffee for me with his half-baked opinions—you will read basically variations on, okay, yes, there are costs to climate change, but it costs so much more and is economically ruinous to try and deal with climate change. They often say, Europe tried it, and Europe is bankrupt now because they tried to deal with climate change, and now they don't have any money, and they can't heat their houses. Look what happens. You help us think a little more clearly about this notion of what costs are and what it actually costs to deal with this problem.

guenther

Europe is struggling due to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. There are many reasons that Europe is struggling or not struggling, but their green policies are certainly very low down on that list, if they're there at all. Well-designed climate policy should actually create jobs and put money into people's pockets almost immediately. There is absolutely no reason for it to be associated with economic contraction. And the reason it is associated with economic contraction is that in climate economics, originally, climate policy was figured in these models as a carbon tax, and a carbon tax was figured as recessionary. So what you tried to do was impose as little climate policy as possible—because a tax would contract the economy—and try to play chicken with the climate so that the cost of fixing climate change would sort of balance out with the cost of climate change. And this happened so late in these economic models because most of these economists lowballed the cost of climate change by not only failing to price risk appropriately, as we were talking about earlier, but also by leaving out impacts that we know are coming down the pipe, like the impacts to the insurance industry, for example, which is already struggling to stay upright in the face of the climate disasters we've already seen in the United States. 

Here's the truth: all economic modeling since about 2018 that more accurately and scientifically prices the cost of climate devastation has found that decarbonizing the global economy will be an economic benefit. It's even an economic benefit to halt warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. As much effort as that would take, as much money that would need to be spent up front, even that is an investment that would end up being an economic benefit, as opposed to letting warming even heat up to two degrees Celsius. So the macroeconomic modeling shows that Jenkins is lying.

What’s more, when we come out on the other side and we have a global economy that no longer runs on fossil fuels, 90 percent of the people on this planet will be better off than they are now because once we're done, our electricity costs, our transportation costs, our heating costs, and even our healthcare costs are going to decline. The costs of burning fossil fuels, which kill eight million people from the harms of climate change, will be taken out of the economy, and you'll just simply have more money in your wallet to invest in your kids, to use for leisure, to do whatever you want to do with. The only people who are going to see an economic contraction are people who are invested in the fossil fuel assets that will have to be stranded in order to halt global heating. And I'm not saying that's not going to be a huge economic transition, and I'm not saying it's not going to have some sort of leveling effect on the economy, but on a macro level, halting global heating is a benefit. 

And in terms of human flourishing and human health, it is a benefit for 90 percent of the people on this planet and the majority of Americans. And that is just leaving totally to the side the point that if we don't do this, we're going to destroy the only planet to have life in the whole universe, as far as we know. 

robinson

It can be very dispiriting. For someone who cares about and writes about the climate crisis, you feel like the scientists in the film Don't Look Up. It’s like, but the asteroid is coming! But even though it feels dispiriting, I think one thing that people need to understand is that we are facing a scenario that can be dealt with. You can imagine a hypothetical major global crisis that couldn't be dealt with without massive sacrifice—you can imagine if we didn't have alternative sources of energy, then it would be the case that your choice is between either not using energy or using fossil fuel energy and destroying the planet. But we are incredibly fortunate because, as you say, we can benefit from the transition. We don't face a choice between destroying our economic growth and civilization itself and the worst climate catastrophe. We are actually in a situation where solar and wind are affordable. They're good, they're cheap, and they’re getting cheaper.

guenther

Totally. And we may indeed have to have fewer plastics, so we may have less stuff to buy, and we probably won't be able to have private jets or those 400-foot yachts that billionaires love. I guess they just use them for one week over Christmas, whatever they do. So, yes, there will be some sacrifices, but sacrifices of shit that we don't even want and luxuries that the vast majority of us never enjoy. So, as far as I'm concerned, this is just absolutely a no-brainer, and everybody should get behind it.

It's so hard to think about the future in America right now, and that's in part because the future will be a future with climate change in it. And either the future is going to involve resolving the climate crisis and creating a new system and a new form of human flourishing or it will be death by a thousand cuts. When you start thinking about this stuff, if you start to have feelings of grief or terror or depression or hopelessness, just know that that comes with the territory. It's normal. You're not the only one. But it doesn't mean that it's hopeless. You're taking on these feelings because you have courage. It's a sign of your bravery. But don't think about the stuff you can't control. Don't think about the scientific impacts that feel overwhelming or somehow too scary and depressing to deal with. Take your attention and focus it on the people who are preventing us from halting the climate crisis.

robinson

Yes. One of the cautions that you make in the book is that we can't surrender to what is known as doomerism, which is those who acknowledge the potential catastrophic effects of the crisis but essentially countenance resignation. To be a doomer, to be someone who considers the worst a foregone conclusion, is ultimately to be the ally of the very people who don't want us to attempt to do anything about the crisis. So, your book counsels determination instead. What we really don't want to do is have the people who are most concerned about the problem feel totally disempowered and useless and not want to take any action.

guenther

Correct. You have to take action because it is the right thing to do. It gives your life meaning, and it opens a space for hope. If you allow yourself to fall into doomerism, then they win, and that is, as you say, unconscionable.

robinson

Now, I recommend people pick up your book. You go through, for example, the other common right-wing talking point, which is, the United States doesn't need to do anything because, ultimately, it won't make a difference. India and China are much larger, and everything that matters happens there. Nothing we can do makes a difference. So we might as well burn fossil fuels to our hearts’ content. So people need to read the book. They need to understand how climate change is talked about and how it can be talked about better. 

You've thought a lot about how we can talk more persuasively about these issues. Obviously, it's very important right now, at a time when the president of the United States wants climate change totally off the agenda. And as I say,earlier this year on New Year's Day, The Wall Street Journal ran an article that basically said, let 2025 be the year that we stopped talking about climate change altogether—it's over, we've had that discussion, we're not talking about it anymore. So for those of us who see this moment, we want to talk effectively. We want to build a movement, and we want to take people who get everything they read about it through, as you say, the news media and make them feel determined. What are some of the strategies that you've come up with for how we can talk effectively about this?

guenther

The messages in my book are designed for people who are concerned about climate change. So you can use these talking points to talk to them about climate change because very often, even as they're concerned or even alarmed about the problem, their thinking has been warped by fossil fuel propaganda. So you can use the messages that I developed in my book with people in your families, workplaces, churches or synagogues or mosques, your gym, or whoever you encounter that expresses concern about the climate crisis, and you can draw them out and use the talking points that I offer in the book. When you are talking to someone who seems disengaged from the problem, you can just make connections between things, between extreme weather and the climate crisis, and then from the climate crisis to coal, oil, and gas. And you can talk about the benefits of clean energy just lightly—just plant seeds and let them blossom. 

The most important things you can do, however, are three things. Try to connect to a climate change organization, either by volunteering with them or by donating to them or by signing their petitions. Getting connected to these organizations is a really good way to plug in and to do things when the opportunity arises. The second thing to do is, please, reach out to your media venues, your media platforms, the newspapers you read, the television stations you watch, even the social media platforms that you use, and say that you want them to talk about climate change. You want them to promote content about climate change on their platforms, in their algorithms, etc., and you need to do this regularly. It makes a difference. There are people lobbying on the other side, and [the media] needs to hear from us, too. And then, of course, the people who are really getting lobbied from the other side are policymakers. So you need to call your elected officials on the left and on the right every month, or even biweekly, and say, hi, I'm your constituent, I want you to prioritize the phasing out of fossil fuels. I want you to oppose Donald Trump's “drill, baby, drill” agenda. I am concerned about climate change, and if you don't do that, I'm going to organize people to vote you out of office. And those things, I promise, will start to move the needle even in the Trump administration era.

robinson

For more on the strategies that people can use and how to talk effectively, people need to pick up your book. It is exactly the kind of book we like here at Current Affairs because it doesn't sugarcoat, downplay, or deny the scale of the problems we face. At the same time, it doesn't leave you feeling pessimistic and useless and wanting just to cower under your sheets.

Transcript edited byPatrick Farnsworth.