Genevieve Guenther

This is such a great concept for a book: collect all the keywords used by the fossil fuel industry to spread their disinformation, show how they use them, and discuss how to counteract them. This full frontal attack has been missing from the battlefield, but Genevieve Guenther, who lives this language daily, makes it dramatic and effective in The Language of Climate Politics. The execution is powerful and even delightful.

The fossil fuel industry would like everyone to believe they are the show more solution to pollution. They are uniquely qualified and positioned to be at the center of efforts to meet zero carbon goals. Sure they’re making a fortune warming the atmosphere, but hey, they can make an even bigger fortune cleaning it up again, because if they’re in charge, we will continue to burn our way to the ultimate solution. Or in Guenther’s words they are “imagining absurdly that they are going to be the garbage collectors for their own pollution.” She shows again and again that their claims are baseless, their proficiencies near nil, that they are continuing to expand their polluting ways rather than lead the way back, and that their co-opting of the language is succeeding in the absence of anyone calling their bluff. They are the Big Tobacco of the 21st century.

Right off the top, Guenther lists a string of words that the fossil fuelers have taken as their own, assigning meaning to them in defiance of fact or reality, and taking them away from rational discourse. This is how disinformation is created. She says the words have been diverted such that “climate change is something ‘we’ are doing rather than something we are being prevented from undoing.” Total gaslighting. They are blameless and just want to help us get out of the mess we made, not them. That is the essence of her analysis, and she proves it with every keyword she analyses. They become entire chapters of this book: Alarmist, Cost, Growth, India-and-China, Innovation and Resilience. They’ve all become Orwellian nightmares in The Language of Climate Politics.

The easiest one is probably alarmist, a great one to begin with. Absolutely anyone who recognizes climate change is an alarmist, according to the fossil fuel industry, Fox News, and Republican Congressmen. On Twitter/X, its use went up 900% between 2016 and 2020, and hasn’t looked back. It’s a way of simply dismissing people and anything they might have to say – in advance. But Guenther says wear it proudly. Thinking people have every right to be alarmed at the unprecedented spread of forest fires, the unprecedented flooding and landslides, the melting of the ice caps and the cratering of agriculture from false springs in midwinter and drought all summer. It is actually sensible to be alarmed, she says.

Along the way, Guenther distributes some interesting sidelights in the collapse of the anthropocene climate regime. I did not know that it is so hot in Phoenix that people who are foolish enough to walk the sidewalks can stumble and fall in the oppressive heat, resulting in third degree burns to their hands, legs and faces. Dozens have been admitted to Intensive Care Units for this reason. The sidewalks are famously hot enough to fry eggs, after all. That’s the new normal.

Meanwhile South America has been scoring all time high temperatures of 95° to 100°F – in winter. And while everyone predicted Canada would be a huge beneficiary of global warming, taking the severity out of its winters, it seems almost to have gone straight past that to drought and forest fires that turn the sky orange over half the continent. Thousands of fires, still smoldering nine months later, as I write this. And the Caribbean is beginning to record ocean temperatures over 100°F, hotter than bathwater. Nobody seems to be “benefitting” from any of this. Shouldn’t everyone be alarmed?

Next up, the word cost is powerful, it turns out. It makes focus group participants feel poorer, all by itself. Fossil fuelers leverage this every way they can, claiming it will cost too much to correct the carbon situation, frightening the populace with this word.

In order to take that away from their talking points, Guenther points out that correcting the carbon level will not incur cost, but benefits. Not only will there be half a million new jobs a year (solar installer is the fastest growing new job already, at nearly half a million in the USA alone, and thousands of positions going begging), but healthcare will cost less as fewer people get sick and die from bad air, overheating, and involuntarily touching the scalding sidewalks of Phoenix. That is retained income people must spend these days for cancers, asthma and other respiratory nightmares from air pollution.

The real cost is in doing nothing. Global heating has been shown repeatedly to severely damage jobs, productivity, and GDP overall. Doing nothing is a total losing position. A downward spiral in trade and global economies will be far harder to correct. But that’s what our governments have chosen for us. Thanks in large measure to fossil fueler lobbying and donations to politicians.

There is an odd position taken by the fossil fuelers that posits we need to build up the economy before we spend money trying to correct the carbon problem. They have scientific backing from totally inadequate, outdated and discredited models that show we can let the global temperature rise by 3°C before we start attacking the problem. This is absurd on its face. Zero dollars are being set aside for that day. The technology we have today does not scale globally. And trying to outrun global warming is just plain nuts. It can’t be done. Nature will always be several steps ahead, unless we stop burning carbon now.

Halting burning is now and has always been the only solution that works. The state of the art models, that most economists agree on, show that cleaning up the carbon will cost 30 times LESS today than if we wait until the planet heats up by 3°C. If we can’t afford it today, by 3°C it will be silly to even think about. Yet fossil fuel companies are very busy pretending they have the solutions at hand, and yes, we can continue burning carbon as long as we want, because they can clean it all up as soon as we’re ready. This is horrifying BS that got us all into this mess in the first place. Because continual leaks of documents from fossil fuelers show they were totally aware and feared the rise of carbon as an existential threat to their business decades ago. And now they want the whole world to believe they lead the way in remediation, even as they accelerate production.

Sadly, the USA is not concerned with any of this. Instead, “US investors collectively account for around 58% of institutional investments in the global coal industry, with equity and bond holdings of around $602 billion.” Wall St and the fossil fuelers are working hand in hand to derail civilization. And they walk the talk: Americans burn three times as much coal per capita as Indians. Is it any wonder things are not getting better despite all the bogus accords, heavily influenced by fossil fuel lobbyists?

Carbon sequestration and direct removal from the air come in for a vicious beating at Guenther’s hands. Despite fossil fuelers’ claims there are proven technologies available now, they fail again and again. They cost far more than they are worth. Guenther says “Current estimates for capturing one ton of carbon dioxide range up to $1,000, not including the costs of CO2 compression, transportation, injection, and sequestration.” And we add billions of tons to the atmosphere every year. There’s no way to clean that up unless we stop the burning of fossil fuels.

There is no clear path to scaling them up globally. And what plants there are in service typically remove carbon in a year equal to about 15 minutes of the carbon spewed into the atmosphere. At huge expense. As for sequestration, 90% of the CO2 obtained this way simply goes into fracking. It is trucked to well sites, and pumped into drill holes to break up rock and release the methane gas they hold. This is a win-win for the fossil fuelers. Plus the technologies of removal and sequestration are largely agricultural, not oil and gas extraction technology. So when the deniers and the fossil fuelers talk about innovation and expertise, there are large gaps to be pointed to.

Finally, the notion of resilience takes its turn on the chopping block. Deniers and fossil fuelers depend on society bouncing back between natural disasters. But Guenther points out that if we do not cease emissions immediately “climate change will cease to be a series of discrete disasters from which communities can just ‘bounce back.’” She says resilience is not the right word. Transformation is closer to the truth, as everyone everywhere will have to change the way they live in order to survive.

The book is straightforward, direct and authoritative. Guenther knows all the key players, and they know her. She is an Expert Reviewer for the UN’s IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is always at the center of the storm, and enormously careful about what it says in its reports. She advises NGOs, corporations and policymakers and is the Founding Director of End Climate Silence. You couldn’t pick a better source to pull this book together.

David Wineberg show less