Words Versus Words, Fire with Fire

Chris Featherman considers the crafting of global warming and environmental crisis narratives in his review of “The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It” by Genevieve Guenther.

By Chris FeathermanJuly 30, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Politics

• Environment

ON A TRAFFIC SIGNAL pole at an intersection I often cross, a sticker reads “F*CK FOSSIL FUELS.” In place of the troublesome U is a skull emoji that evokes, I don’t know, either the gravedigger scene in Hamlet or an OK boomer meme. That both readings might be possible is suggested by the sticker’s placement, just south of a rain-cockled Rave Finder flyer with a QR code and askew at approximately the angle of the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock. If neither interpretation flies, then maybe we can, at a minimum, agree to hear, implied by both the slogan’s alliteration and the whoosh of a box truck ripping through the red light and warm morning air, the word futility.

Communicating about the climate crisis has become much easier and much harder. Think back to the North American winter of 2014–15, when climate change deniers still had decent rhetorical leverage. Amid the swirling discourse of polar vortexes and cyclones in the Bering Sea there was talk of hard freezes in Mobile, Alabama, and an ice storm that brought a day of sledding to Pensacola, Florida. Emcees at the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California, donned scarves and overcoats like they were waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square. That February, so much snow piled up in the nation’s capital that Senator James Inhofe could bring a snowball onto the Senate floor and offer it up as a bald refutation of global warming. Whether sophomoric stunt or political theater, Inhofe’s antics indexed the visibility-invisibility debate knotted into so many climate change conversations: if we can’t see global warming, is it really happening?

Fast-forward to the summer of 2023, when heat dome penetrated the national lexicon and melted any residual memories of Inhofe’s snowball. Texans pitting their air conditioners against triple-digit temperatures drove statewide power demands to record highs, while smoke from wildfires in Quebec trapped Washington, DC, in a mustardy, Prufrockian haze. Like a car accident or an illness, the weather had become severe—6,637 times, the National Weather Service reported, in July alone.

Deniers’ cries of alarmism and scientific uncertainty, though hardly silenced, began to lose amplitude. By the fall of 2023, 70 percent of US adults believed not only that global warming was happening but also that it would harm future generations.

Even Florida senator Marco Rubio, erstwhile climate change denier and fleeting Trump 2024 VP hopeful, shifted his messaging. Back in 2014, as he weighed his own White House run, Rubio rejected claims that humans contributed to climate change, a denier playbook staple, whereas now he says climate change is real and deserves “real solutions.” These include the “proactive adaptation” of restoring the resilience of the coral reefs in his home state, not simply because the reefs are “a natural wonder and critical breakwater against wave energy and storm surge” but also because they “play a critical role in our economy.”

Wedding environmental and economic language for political purposes has, of course, become a tactic for both sides of the aisle. Touting the economic benefits of clean energy is a pillar of persuasion in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the United States’ single largest investment in climate action. It’s also a play the fossil-fuel industry has nakedly co-opted. In Chevron’s 2023 Climate Change Resilience Report, for instance, the oil-and-gas behemoth listed “lower carbon” as a primary objective.

Such appropriations of sustainability language, like Chevron’s stated support for the Paris Agreement, reek of greenwashing. But greenwashing accusations on their own miss the sly and sophisticated ways that companies have adapted their sustainability communication strategies to counter the risks that greenwashing charges pose to their reputations and bottom lines. Instead, they have been advised to build their sustainability messaging around the idea of trust—namely, by showing that their interests align with what their customers believe is good for society. This might explain why Chevron’s resilience report sandwiches “lower carbon” between “higher returns” and “superior stockholder value” in the same sentence.

¤

More than mere word rustling, climate communications strategies like Chevron’s bear the fuller ideological power of what planning scholar Lizzie Yarina has called “imaginaries of resilience.” Through her research on environmental risks and spatial planning in Southeast Asia—one of the global regions most vulnerable to climate change—Yarina has shown how resilience planning can become part of pro-development narratives, some of the very ideologies that helped create the climate crisis in the first place. “The rhetoric of ‘climate-proofing,’” she argues, “implies that climate change, flooding, and other environmental risks are merely technical problems, with definite solutions. One imagines a physical remedy, like weatherproofing a home.”

But much like the belief that we can “‘proof’ a city against climate change”—a conviction Yarina dismisses as “transparently false”—the co-opting of sustainability language for neoliberal purposes is essentially a smoke screen. For fossil-fuel players like Chevron, it’s a diversionary tactic designed to shut down discussions of decarbonization, the process many agree is needed to save the planet from the worst of climate change. As it happens, it’s also the process that would put Chevron and its ilk out of business.

Climate change activist Genevieve Guenther is wise to all of this. “People and institutions at the center of global power,” she argues in her new book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, “vaunt the idea of resilience in part because it elides the urgent need for systemic change.” To Guenther, the appropriation of resilience is merely the tell. It’s the elision that indexes the complexity and intent of what she calls “fossil-fuel propaganda.” She justifies this label through sharp, informed analyses of economic, political, and corporate discourses that document how fossil-fuel interests have “mined the language of climate advocates for material they can use for propaganda purposes, extracting, twisting, and deploying their words to entrap those advocates into unwittingly normalizing fossil-fuel disinformation.” Ultimately, Guenther reveals an ideological stratagem driven by economics and political interests, one that “turns fossil-fuel propaganda into a bipartisan consensus—the common-sense position.” In other words, a fundamental and harmful reversal, in which language is used to make the increasingly and often arrestingly visible effects of climate change seem normal, invisible.

Spotting the ruse, Guenther wants to turn the tables. Her book’s stated mission, like the aim of her broader work as a climate communication and disinformation consultant, is “to use the power of words to fight climate propaganda and transform the deep ideologies of the fossil-fuel economy.” Words versus words, fire with fire. She directs her energy into what’s tempting to call, given her previous career as a Renaissance scholar, a close reading of a fistful of terms that, together with resilience, she sees dominating the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, India and China, and innovation. It’s an approach that invokes public intellectual and New Left critic Raymond Williams’s landmark 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society—a nod, presumably, to Guenther’s politics.

Somewhat less explicit than its mission and stance are the book’s methods. Deconstructing fossil-fuel ideologies, Guenther talks about “assumptions,” “unexamined beliefs,” “implicature,” and “false narrative,” terms that suggest a grounding in ideological discourse analysis. Yet, elsewhere she employs more colloquial terms like “echoes,” “doublespeak,” and “osmosis,” and largely limits her theorizing to a passing mention of philosopher Jason Stanley’s 2015 book How Propaganda Works. Choices like these liberate her book from the trappings—and limited audience—of the academic monograph yet marginally dilute her analyses, which otherwise tend toward the forensic and are frequently surgical-grade.

In her chapter on growth, for instance, discussing the use of adaptation in economic and government discourses, she leverages systems-level thinking:

Climate change reveals the porousness of the boundaries between the “insides” of concrete factory buildings, where productivity drops when it is extremely hot outdoors, and the “outside” of the so-called “natural world,” exposing the limits of adaptive technologies like air conditioning that were thought to offer exquisite control over the built environment.

Or consider this fallacy-dismantling in her chapter on innovation, where she explains the dangers of advocating for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies:

To say “the tech exists” is to say nothing about its capacity for planetary-scale development. Human life in space also “exists,” in that astronauts live on the International Space Station for months at a time. No-one believes this means that everyone on earth could move to space permanently. And rather than restoring ecosystems, CDR at planetary scale, as we have seen, looks likely to further degrade them.

So much for Elon Musk and his multiplanetary delusions.

¤

A gifted explainer, Guenther backs her analyses with a persuasive grasp on the science and economics of climate politics. In her chapter on cost, she’s equally at ease discussing fat-tailed probability distribution and Nobel-laureate economist William Nordhaus’s cost-benefit climate models as she is detailing their impacts on climate policy and the effects of warming at two degrees Celsius versus 1.5 degrees Celsius. Guenther also has journalist chops. She can put readers in the room, for instance, where Xi Jinping and Mohammed bin Salman agree to swap “high-speed internet infrastructure through the [Chinese] state-run technology company Huawei […] in return for favorable deals on fossil fuels,” and she skillfully dramatizes the occasion when Barack Obama hornswoggled his homologues at COP15 to prevent the Copenhagen Accord from becoming a legally binding treaty. Guenther demonstrates a similar proclivity for bringing historical figures to life. The villainous Nordhaus is “slim, dapper,” for instance, and his fellow economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow “tall and laconic,” while the more morally heroic economist Martin Weitzman is “a stocky, handsome New Yorker, built like a boxer and born on the Lower East Side.” These characterizations, with their hints of bodily habitus and class, are presumably meant to remind us that driving the ravages of climate change are real individuals, making repercussive decisions.

Keeping that fact front and center no doubt sustains Guenther’s belief that individuals can be held accountable—or at least be persuaded to help transform the fossil-fuel economy she blames for our collective climate nightmare. Because for Guenther, “the sine qua non of saving the world is building a mass movement to elect and support candidates who will commit their power and the power of their offices to this mobilization.” And following her counterpunch strategy of appropriating the appropriated, how better to empower activists to build this movement than to provide them with a playbook?

Concluding each chapter on appropriated terms is a section that teaches climate change communicators “how to talk about” that term. Talking points (“So that is the first part of the message: the cost of climate damages has been significantly lowballed”) are complemented with coaching (“When you talk about carbon removal, the most important thing is to guard against the false narrative that CDR is a miracle that can decarbonize fossil fuels and restore the climate, if only the world would deploy it wisely”) and countermoves (“regain control of the conversation by citing China’s enormous rate of clean-energy deployment and by describing the scope and ambition of its climate policies”). The result is a kind of decision-tree manifesto and de facto minicourse in critical thinking, an often uncanny hybrid that nevertheless equips and empowers climate communicators to expose fallacies and disinformation in fossil-fuel interests’ rhetoric.

Yet, if the aim is a mass movement, tacking a playbook onto a primer isn’t quite a call to the barricades. If not in the streets, where does Guenther imagine these conversations taking place—in town halls or boardrooms, at symposia or on factory floors? In its current form, social media doesn’t afford much space for the rational discussion and debate at the core of her strategy, which itself presupposes that a deliberative public sphere still exists. Similarly, though her playbook certainly falls far short of ventriloquism, it is unmistakably written in Dominant American English, which, as climate change communication researcher Julia Coombs Fine reminds us, could limit its value for linguistically marginalized activists, the ones who, as it happens, also tend to suffer greater climate injustice. So exactly which climate activists, then, is she advising?

¤

If language is power, then the language we choose reveals the power we believe we have. Some of us sticker-bomb and throw snowballs, others flip-flop for votes and write books. Others still give advice. Several years ago, a doctor discussing my treatment options for cancer—some more aggressive than others—suggested I think of my son, a toddler at the time. At first, I found his counsel patronizing—an insult. As if confronted by disease, I’d become so disoriented, so lost, that I needed his expertise to remind me of my priorities, his moral compass to return me to my senses. Later, I came to understand that he was appealing to my imagination. Beneath his surface-level condescension was an urging to look deeply, to see past not simply the fear summoned by my diagnosis but also the vortex of facts in which I’d suddenly become immersed: the pathological staging and five-year survival rates, the Breslow measurements and degrees of ulceration. Imagine living to see your son grow up, he seemed to say, not despite the facts, but because of them.

“Imagination,” political scientist Manjana Milkoreit reminds us, “lies at the heart of social change.” Facing climate crises, it’s through imagination, or what Milkoreit calls “socio-climatic imaginaries,” that we perhaps can best collectively “describe attainable futures.” Flexing our “ideational power,” she says, “facilitates the emergence of shared or collective beliefs” and can “motivate behaviors and decisions.”

It’s a sensibility not far from Lizzie Yarina’s calls, at climate change’s front lines, for “counterplans” and “competing imaginaries of resilience,” ones “that give voice to the vulnerable, elevate local knowledge, and reveal alternative models” of climate change adaptation. For Guenther, the facts of climate change warrant a fight; her call to arms, like my doctor’s advice, is understandable. And she’s unequivocal in reminding us that it’s a fight with clear sides. “Instead of thinking of climate change as something ‘we’ are doing,” she argues in her preface, “always remember that there are millions, possibly billions, of people on this planet who would rather preserve civilization than destroy it with climate breakdown, who would rather have the fossil-fuel economy end than continue.”

Language reveals as it conceals. Ideologies sort and isolate us, yet they also unify. Elsewhere in her book, Guenther quotes George Eliot’s observation in Middlemarch (1872) that “we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle.” With climate change, the statisticians tell us we’ve moved beyond incredulity—and the scientists, beyond miracle.

Ultimately, then, amid the simultaneous challenges and exigencies of communicating about the climate crisis, the true feat of Guenther’s book may be exposé. By pinpointing what the fossil-fuel industry fights and schemes to defend, she reveals their greatest fears: that resilience and growth, technological innovation and Nobel-laureate brilliance won’t keep the seas from rising, the wells from running dry, and their own actions from putting themselves out of business. Because in the end, we all want to stay in business of some kind—at a minimum, in the business of living. Perhaps this desire, shared among us, equally and vernacularly, like language, could be—if not common political ground—then a collective counter-imaginary for a burning world.

¤

Featured image: Still from “Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) Snowball in the Senate (C-SPAN),” 2015. YouTube. Accessed July 26, 2024.