The mythological figure Icarus flew with wings of feathers and wax crafted by his father Daedalus, but when he got too close to the sun his wings melted and he plunged to his death in the sea.
The ancient Greeks had a myth for everything.
2/n
Breugel's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is also relevant. Note the man plowing in the foreground, totally oblivious to the fallen man in the lower righthand corner, whose legs are still visible above the waves. This is an allegory for business as usual.
2.5/n
More business as usual: the trade ship with its sails billowing out towards sea, totally ignoring and speeding away from the drowning man who they could easily save if they suspended their goal of profit-making and colonial exploration even just for a moment.
2.75/n
See also the man in the lower right-hand corner, doing his futile best to save Icarus by holding out a stick for the tragic man to grab.
Unbeknownst to him, he is shadowed by a vulture—a symbol for death, to be sure.
2.9/n
Bruegel wants us to ignore this man, the activist trying to save the man of hubris who thought he could fly. He wants us to ignore Icarus too.
The central figure, the allegory for the economy, is dressed in a vivid red, which grabs all the viewers attention.
2.99/n
We must fight every day to keep our & other people's attention on the #ClimateEmergency, vultures circling or not.
And one way to do that is to talk about the reasons you've given up flying as much as possible.
In all the drama over Biden, & all the mockery of Trump's unhinged (yet super-boring) convention speech, I haven't seen much attention to the language of climate politics during the Republican Convention.
But the GOP did unveil new climate propaganda, so let's take a look!
🧵
First of all, both Vance and Trump introduced a new term, replacing "hoax," that suggests climate change isn't real.
That term is "Green New Scam."
2/n
The word "scam" will of course be familiar to anyone who follows climate news on X and is thereby exposed to the MAGA tolls using the "ClimateScam" hashtag.
3/n
Of course Vance went on to blame Democrats and immigrants for working-class Americans' suffering, which is of course absurd (but not *totally* absurd, given that even Dems were embracing neoliberal economic theory, if tempered by some Great Society policies like Obamacare).
2/n
Yes, this is just the rhetoric of populism, which exemplifies Adorno's dictum about ideology ("an imaginary relationship to one's real conditions of existence"), because obviously Trump and the GOP are on the economic side of the rich and the rich only.
3/n
Next month, @OUPAcademic will publish my big climate book, THE LANGUAGE OF CLIMATE POLITICS.
The book dismantles the core propaganda of the fossil-fuel era, and it offers readers powerful new ways to talk about the #ClimateCrisis that will help create transformative change.
🧵
Focus-group polling has found that the messages I develop in the book increase support for phasing out fossil fuels among Democrats AND Republicans alarmed and concerned about the climate crisis by up to 10 points.
That’s a big shift.
2/n
(Here’s the whole report on the polling if you’re curious.)
So I was supposed to deliver the keynote at a @columbia symposium on climate and language this Friday, but I have informed the organizers that, with true sorrow, I am pulling out because I will not be associated with this university at this political moment.
This was not an easy decision. One of the challenges for climate communication is that #ClimateChange tends to get kicked off the agenda any time anything else happens — part of my mission is to try keep the climate emergency at the foreground of everyone's attention.
2/n
And this event is not a Climate School event: it is a meeting of an ivy-league consortium of foreign-language scholars, who just happen to be convening at Columbia this year — and not even on campus, but at Riverside Church off site.
3/n
I want to say a more about this @SenWhitehouse @RepRaskin @SenateBudget finding, because it is so important to understand the underlying political dynamic.
This kind of collaboration—this normalization of fossil-fuel propaganda through supposedly objective institutions...
This normalization of fossil-fuel propaganda through supposedly objective institutions stands as one of the greatest barriers to phasing out fossil fuels.
2/n
Fossil-fuel ideologies get laundered as ivy-league research (selected and elevated by the ff companies themselves), then get filtered through lobbyists to Congress and through the news media to voters, with the result that...
3/n