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.”
What Climate Change Tells Us About Being Human
“Climate change requires us to keep two perspectives in mind at once: we must feel and accept the essential limits of the planetary system on which we entirely depend, and we must embrace our capacity to remake our collective fictions and thereby redistribute social and political power. In that double consciousness we may find an […]
Who Is the ‘We’ in ‘We Are Causing Climate Change’?
“To think of climate change as something that we are doing, instead of something we are being prevented from undoing, perpetuates the very ideology of the fossil-fuel economy we’re trying to transform.”
The Racism of Climate Denial
“Stories about the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities are not universally understood as evidence for the reality and the danger of climate change [because] the dynamic of racial othering still structures political identifications in America.”