Get Savvy to Fossil-Fuel Propaganda: A Review of The Language of Climate Politics

I was having a fine chat the other day with a fellow who was no climate denier—he was worried about climate change and keen to address it. “But what good will it do for the US to decarbonize,” he lamented, “when India and China are investing so much in coal!”

“Well, actually…” I began. It turns out I had just written about energy transition in China for my newsletter, so I did have some information in my head about this. I reassured him that China is in fact way ahead of the world—including the US—in clean energy manufacturing and implementation, their emissions are likely to peak very soon, and they’re moving fast on their ambitions to dominate a new clean-energy economy. If anything, the US needs to catch up to them (and in some ways we are trying).

It was a stumbly answer. Only days later, however, I discovered a whole chapter on how to engage the “India and China” objection to US climate action in Genevieve’s Guenther’s new book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It (Oxford University Press, 2024). On page 111, Guenther describes this objection almost in the exact words of my interlocutor.

For the next 35 pages (and 104 footnotes) Guenther unmasks the origins of the “but India and China!” line and explains why it has legs. Using India and China as an excuse to drag our feet is useful, she writes, in obscuring “the United States’ obstructionism in international climate negotiations and its ongoing commitment to fossil-fuel development.” Who would want to do such obscuring? That would be anyone heavily invested in slowing down energy transition—that is, the fossil fuel industry and its political servants. Interesting that the Wall Street Journal has pushed the India/China story extensively. And through such channels, ideas get stuck in people’s heads—including those of people who actually want climate action.

In her analysis, Guenther demonstrates how the India/China line has become a usefully misleading and even deceptive rhetorical strategy for fossil fuel interests. But that’s not where she ends. She then explains (citing a thicket of sources) what’s actually going on in China (impressive) and India (more problematic). Finally, she suggests a set of talking points for responding productively to people who repeat this objection.

That’s the basic structure of this book, for six dense and fascinating chapters. Her goal is to equip sympathetic readers with appropriate, fact-based rhetorical strategies in order to counter deceptive rhetoric, especially the subtle kind that sounds sensible but gets co-opted to sustain fossil fuel interests. She writes in the preface, “To undo climate change, a new collective ‘we’—me, you, everyone who reads this book, everyone with whom we share its ideas—will need to use the power of words to fight climate propaganda and transform the deep ideologies of the fossil-fuel economy. Contributing to that transformation is the goal of this book.”

Guenther’s genius is in the way she organizes the book, boiling the most common and subtle rhetorical obstructionisms down to six key words: alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience. Each chapter handles one of these in turn, exploring origins and perpetrators, taking a deep dive into facts, and suggesting talking points to counter the falsities.

I did not expect a page-turner here, but I have to admit, I gobbled this book right up. I most enjoyed the way Guenther follows her six words down to their origins. For instance, the objection “But transitioning our economy will cost too much!” has its origins in the theories of Yale economist William Nordhaus. Guenther analyzes the assumptions behind Nordhaus’s 1990s cost-benefit models (he grossly underestimated the costs of climate impacts, it turns out), then describes the objections and counter-models of his colleagues as well as Nordhaus’s own change of heart later in life, and more.

Not everyone would enjoy getting so deep into the weeds, I suppose. But the weeds are where the truth is. All of these notions have histories and a network of trajectories, and examining the timeline is revelatory and essential. In the “cost” chapter, as well as in the “growth” chapter, for instance, we trace how caveats and hedges inherent in an economist’s academic work get leeched off in the media, the theories over time get hardened into supposed laws of nature, and eventually we find ourselves stuck in economic mythologies that no longer fit the facts.

Nordhaus’s theories, which can be used to claim that climate action is “too expensive,” no longer reflects the cost-benefit facts on the ground, Guenther demonstrates. At the end of the “cost” chapter, she concludes: “the cost of climate damages has been significantly lowballed; economists are increasingly sure that they will be large and devastating… To repeat: a new generation of climate economists increasingly argue that relative to heating the planet over 2°C, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and creating a net-zero economy by 2050 provides substantial economic benefits.” And then she offers a whole raft of studies concluding that yes, we can “afford” to decarbonize.

Among the most pernicious and stubborn notions Guenther addresses: Don’t worry, economic growth and technological innovation will save us! (Or at least those of us with money.) The idea that growth and tech will save us, assumes, among other things, that whatever we destroy in “nature” can be replaced with tech. It ignores ecological limits, in other words. And it ignores inequities in access to tech and wealth, too. Turns out that growth-and-tech fundamentalism, as you might call it, goes back to Robert Solow, another economist, whose foundational paper was published in… 1956.

No one is against technology here: in fact, clean energy tech is exactly what we need. But as Guenther explains, this tech-as-savior notion is also used to justify “solutions” in the fossil fuel industry, such as carbon capture and removal. Guenther ruthlessly dismantles industry claims about these technologies in the chapter on “innovation.” Here she emphasizes the industry’s absolutely deceptive claims about how carbon capture and storage will allow us to continue merrily burning fossil fuels. It won’t. And the industry knows it, but is still willing to take billions of federal dollars to “develop” it.

Guenther emphasizes everyone’s responsibility to be wise about truth and distortions around these six key terms. But she particularly calls out media outlets who, by lack of due diligence, repeat misleading ideas and information. And she does not spare political actors, on the right or left. She’s clear that the Democratic party is by far the best bet right now for the kind of extensive and rapid “transformation” we need, but that doesn’t mean she holds back from critiquing their collusion with fossil fuel interests. The section on what went on behind the scenes leading up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, for example, left me pretty disappointed in President Obama. The point is not to dig up the villains, though. The point is to show well-meaning people how they can wind up inadvertently perpetrating the propaganda and help them replace naiveté with savvy.

Guenther is a climate activist, researcher, and founding director of End Climate Silence, an volunteer research organization whose goal is to pressure media to talk about climate change competently and accurately in their reporting. I found her own argumentation fair, extensively supported with research, and careful to consider objections and acknowledge limitations in what we know. Very occasionally, I wished for more precise language. In the quotation above from the Preface, for example, I wish she hadn’t used the phrase “undo climate change.” That is not possible, as Guenther knows very well based on the rest of the book. The best we can hope for is mitigating the warming as much as possible and adapting to what we can no longer prevent.

I did not know this as I read the book, but I was absolutely delighted to learn that Guenther began her career as an English professor. She has a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from Berkeley, and she taught English at the University of Rochester until 2010. What happened? She had a baby. And while home with the baby, she started reading about climate change. And that was it. She felt compelled to shift her life’s work.  

Skeptics might wonder whether Guenther’s training qualifies her to write about climate. Well, I can testify that a humanities Ph.D. teaches one, most fundamentally, how to research, think, and write, skills that one can transfer to new areas of expertise. Rhetoric and the way words shape thinking and action–that’s the focus of the book, and right in the wheelhouse of an English professor. In any case, Guenther clearly does her homework, with 57 pages of footnotes, much of it from the scientific literature, and vetting by a number of expert readers, as noted in her acknowledgements.

Despite the preponderance of facts and analysis throughout, Guenther’s tone sympathetically addresses a well-meaning, worried, non-expert reader. This is where her background offers a particular strength. She is exactly where we are: worried, confused, eager to help but feeling sometimes helpless. She is not blaming her readers or trying to make us feel guilty. Instead, she urges us to face the truth about climate change—that’s a sign not of alarmism but of courage, she writes—and then work on the most directly effective levers: removing from cultural and political power “the people who are doing everything they can to keep the fossil energy system in place.”

That project entails engaging in the rhetorical battle for our own imaginations and those of our neighbors. The need is urgent, not only for reasons of self-interest but also for love—for all that exists, for this earth, for each other (and, I would add, love for God). The very last words of Guenther’s acknowledgements section remind us of the heartbreaking stakes. She dedicates the book to her young son, writing, “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.”