The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms
“Fossil-fuel propaganda is spun out of six key terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, ‘India and China’, innovation, and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this: ‘Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And, anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost […]
Language Wars Could Decide the Climate Fight
“Moving forward, journalists—and citizens as well—should recognize that oil and gas producers increasingly sound like climate advocates, using the same words and phrases that call for the end of the fossil fuel era. This is their new greenwashing strategy. It is all the more important never to take anyone’s words at face value, but to […]
The New UN Climate Report Airs the Dirty Truth About Fossil Fuels
“The IPCC’s statement signals the time for playing pretend is over. No country or leader can excuse more new coal, oil or gas development with fossil fuel producers’ false promises of magically effective technologies to reduce or recapture fossil energy emissions. The world must halt new fossil fuel development and dismantle current fossil energy infrastructure […]
The Epic of Survival
“The genre that offers us [a] pattern of extended political struggle is, of course, the epic. Its sweeping, episodic, iterative form attempts to narrate the labor of overthrowing an old or illegitimate order and building a new world. It tells stories about fighting to shape history. (If the idea of shaping history seems impossibly naive […]
Carbon Removal Isn’t the Solution to Climate Change
“The models saying ‘we need CDR’ are not establishing scientific facts. They are positing political futures…The whole idea of carbon removal was developed to keep the fossil-fuel system going.”
We Need to Talk About the Carbon Footprints of the Rich (Winner, Best Commentary Award, 65th SoCal Journalism Awards, 2022)
“‘Driving’ signifies something very different for the American worker at a big-box store who is forced to commute in her car to the mall versus the private equity manager speeding a gleaming Lamborghini around the cliffs of the Italian Riviera. One act is the expression of entanglement in an exploitative economic system that makes it […]
The Practice of Anger in a Warming World
“I will admit that nihilism and despair are very attractive—sexy, even, considering also they’re the affects that all too easily signify ‘intellectual sophistication’ in the Anthropocene. Embracing cynicism and hopelessness allows you both to look tough, as if you have the backbone to face devastating truths about global warming, and to take yourself off the […]
Fossil Fuel Branded Content Is a Form of Climate Denial and Propaganda
“Newspapers and television news programs should not only inform news consumers about the climate crisis, but also acknowledge the climate crisis in their business practices. Making ads for fossil fuel companies is a betrayal of the public and a dereliction of duty. It’s flat-out a form of climate denial.”
Imagination, Emotion, Action: Communicating the Climate Emergency
“As rhetoricians have known for thousands of years, communicators must appeal to the imagination, using vivid images that conjure visceral emotions, to move people to act. In the case of the climate crisis, communicators should help voters feel a complex of three specific emotions: fear of climate breakdown, outrage that powerful actors are blocking the […]
Americans Want Climate Change News. Media Should Give it to Them
“More than 7 in 10 Americans (72 percent) say that if there is a connection between an extreme weather event and climate change, they want to hear about it in the news, including 85 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans.”