First, the good news: Millions, perhaps billions of people want to halt climate change. They “would rather preserve civilization than destroy it with climate breakdown,” and “would rather have the fossil fuel economy end than continue,” upcoming Terra.do keynote speaker Dr. Genevieve Guenther writes in her new book, The Language of Climate Politics. “Those people are not all mobilized, by any means, but they are there.”
Now, the bad news: Millions of others, “some of them running the world… seem willing to destroy civilization and allow untold numbers of people to die in the decades ahead so that the fossil-fuel system can continue now.”
At the heart of Guenther’s book is how that last group too often shapes our conversations about climate action, particularly with the pernicious notion that we can avoid the worst impacts of climate change while still relying on coal, oil, and gas. The science says otherwise—phasing out fossil fuels is crucial to a liveable future.
Guenther didn’t know this when she first started writing the book. Working on it involved “repeated episodes of shock and grief,” the author says. You get a sense of why just from the introduction:
Since at least the 1970s, coal, oil, and gas companies have known that their products would cause the planet to heat up, undermining the climate that enabled civilization to flourish over the past 10,000 years; to cover up what they knew, these companies worked with political strategists, advocacy organizations, think tanks, trade associations, and advertising firms to hone and spin the message that climate change wasn’t real.
The problem, the book continues, isn’t just the kind of outright denial you might hear from a well-heeled U.S. presidential candidate. Guenther points to “a new, more subtle form of propaganda, which acknowledges that climate change is real but still seeks to justify continuing the fossil-fuel economy.” It does this in a few ways:
- Calling people who speak out on climate “alarmists”
- Claims that a fossil phaseout would cost too much and inhibit growth
- Claims that we can deal with the problem through innovation and resilience
- “Something something China and India,” more or less.
Concerningly, it’s not just the usual suspects who echo these themes, Guenther writes, but “scientists, economists, journalists, politicians, and sometimes even activists, all of whom sincerely intend to advance climate solutions.” And fossil fuel interests are crafty and relentless in “extracting, twisting, and deploying their words to entrap those advocates into unwittingly normalizing fossil-fuel disinformation,” like that pesky misconception that we can stop the planet from getting hotter without ditching fossil energy.
So how do we unravel this problem as we work to avert the worst impacts of our warming world? Guenther will elaborate in her upcoming keynote to Terra.do fellows and the public on Wednesday, October 16th. RSVP for free here to catch it live over Zoom.
From Renaissance expert to climate author
The Language of Climate Politics is not Guenther’s first book. That would be Magical Imaginations: Instrumental Aesthetics in the English Renaissance (2012).
Indeed, Guenther is a former Renaissance scholar who taught a class at The New School in New York called “Tragedy in Literature and Philosophy” and published papers on the works of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. But after her son Teddy was born in 2010, she became increasingly concerned about the climate crisis.
(An aside—her new book is dedicated to Teddy: “With all my heart, I hope this book helps create the future that he, and every child in the world, deserves, but no matter what happens I want him to know that his mother tried.”)
Over a few years, Guenther started reading up. She took college-level courses on climate science and thought hard about going back for a master’s degree in climate and society. But her path forward wasn’t clear until she ran across a misleading newspaper opinion column that used the word “uncertainty” colloquially to downplay the need for climate action. By this point, Guenther knew scientists talk about uncertainty to mean something quite different.
“I had this vision of these competing discourses and how they were combining to make a kind of mainstream viewpoint which was misleading. And I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is exactly the kind of linguistic dynamics that I would trace out in my work in Renaissance literature, and here I’m seeing it in climate! Maybe I don’t need to go back to school and get a completely different degree. Maybe I’m actually in a position where I can use the skills I already have,” she says.
From this emerged the idea for The Language of Climate Politics, as well as Guenther’s work founding End Climate Silence, an organization to enhance media coverage of the climate crisis. Now that the book is out, she expects to ramp up its efforts.
(Another aside: Asked if, during her years-long journey to better understand climate change and how her skills could apply to it, a program like Terra.do’s fellowship might’ve been handy, she answered, “100 percent. If I had had some sort of institutional support coming into the climate space, I think it would not have taken me 12 years to get to this point.”)
Political reality
Though The Language of Climate Politics often centers U.S. figures and political parties, some of its lessons are global.
“The thing to understand about climate communication is there’s no one message that’s going to work for everybody,” she says. Not everyone is primed for action. Per the book:
If you are speaking to someone who dismisses climate change as a hoax, do not bother to debate them unless there are people observing your exchange who might learn something from your debunking false statements. If you encounter someone who’s relatively uninformed about the climate crisis, or indifferent but open to discussing the problem, it will be enough if you connect the extreme weather you will both surely be experiencing to the global heating caused by fossil fuels. But don’t belabor the point. Immediately pivot to touting clean energy… In these conversations, you’re just planting seeds.
One person Guenther (pronounced “Gunther”) hopes gets the message on phasing out fossil fuels entirely is U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. Though imperfect on climate, Harris is currently the only leading presidential candidate who has not claimed that wind turbines cause cancer or waved off the significance of sea level rise, and Guenther considers Harris reachable.
Conveying to policymakers the importance of phasing out fossil fuels is vital, Guenther says. “I’m not going to say that this is going to be an easy task ahead of us, but focus your work on that task, whatever that means to you.” Here, she notes the problem isn’t just about energy, but also justice, culture, technology, and many other areas.
“We need everybody’s talents, everybody’s strengths, everybody’s unique approaches to come together on this problem,” Guenther says. That includes a Renaissance scholar, mom, and author. It also includes you.
Key details
- Dr. Genevieve Guenther’s Terra.do keynote is Wednesday, October 16, at 8 a.m. Pacific. RSVP here to catch it online for free. The next cohort of Terra.do’s 12-week Learning for Action course will also be attending. (The upcoming cohort’s nickname is the Nautiluses. It follows on the heels of one called the Manatees.)
- Guenther’s latest book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, came out in July. The venerable climate writer, activist, and past Terra.do keynote speaker Bill McKibben calls it “a genuine gift to the world.”
- Guenther is also the founder of End Climate Silence, which aims to improve media coverage of the climate crisis.
