You can now read an excerpt of my book, *The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda & How to Fight It* in @tnr.bsky.social!
Here's the gist.👇
And my book offers powerful new ways to talk about the #ClimateCrisis that will help create transformative change.
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Yes!
Here's the text of what's in the photo:
This propaganda is spun out of six key terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience.
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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 us too much.
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Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience.
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This narrative is designed to encourage the dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels —
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either because climate change won’t be that destructive or, in some versions of the story, because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.
It would be bad enough if this narrative were being repeated only on the right.
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But what gives fossil fuel propaganda its power over climate politics is that it’s repeated, in echoes and fragments and sometimes in its entirety, by people on both sides of the supposedly partisan climate change divide —
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— not just by fossil energy interests but also by scientists, economists, journalists, politicians, and sometimes even activists, all of whom sincerely intend to advance climate solutions. That’s because these terms and the ideas they convey are appropriated...
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... from language produced over the decades by these groups themselves. Fossil energy interests have mined the language of climate science, economics, and technology for material they can use to spread denial ...
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... extracting, twisting, and deploying words to entrap advocates into unwittingly normalizing fossil fuel disinformation. This dynamic turns fossil fuel propaganda into a bipartisan consensus, portraying it as common sense.
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