💥Americans want to hear about the #ClimateCrisis in the broadcast news!💥
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💥A MAJORITY OF VOTERS FOLLOW CLIMATE CHANGE CLOSELY IN THE NEWS💥
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💥A MAJORITY OF VOTERS THINK IT IS IMPORTANT FOR THE NEWS MEDIA TO CONNECT CLIMATE CHANGE AND EXTRME WEATHER EVENTS💥
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💥AN OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF VOTERS WANT TO HEAR IF CLIMATE CHANGE IS WORSENING AN EXTREME WEATHER EVENT💥
79% OF DEMOCRATS
68% OF INDEPENDENTS
66% OF REPUBLICANS
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💥A MAJORITY OF VOTERS ARE MORE LIKELY TO USE NEWS SOURCES THAT CONNECT CLIMATE CHANGE TO EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS💥
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💥A MAJORITY OF VOTERS ARE MORE LIKELY TO USE NEWS SOURCES THAT PROVIDE MORE STORIES ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE💥
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To give voters the information they need to make decisions in an increasingly chaotic world, the media must cover the #ClimateCrisis with the accuracy and urgency it deserves. They can feel confident that it is not only the right thing to do, but also what voters want.
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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This week’s recomendation is to avoid the phrase “reduce emissions” and to start using the phrase “phase out fossil fuels” in its place.
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This advice has a great deal of research behind it, but its importance was highlighted for me this week, when I read a report released by Potential Energy with @YaleClimateComm.
This report really signals a contradiction at the heart of our current climate politics.
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One of the most powerful English professors of the past 40 years stole an argument I made in a seminar presentation, turning it into the core of his next book.
The week after my presentation, he came into the classroom and...
...and he read a conference paper he was going to deliver at the Shakespeare Association that month, re-articulating exactly what I had said about the same material the week before. The 15 or so grad students around the seminar table were dumbfounded. Jaws on the floor.
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It was the classic Trumpy move: do something illegal, but be so blatant about it, trusting that your power gives you immunity, that somehow committing the criminal act manages to normalize it simultaneously.
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Today @WilliamJRipple et al released the 2023 report on the terrifying state of our #climate.
It should be read by every policymaker, decisionmaker, and journalist on the planet.
Here is a thread of some key takeaways.
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"Unfortunately, time is up."
"The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected."