✨I've launched the @EndClimtSilence newsletter, where each week I'll raise a climate-comms issue & give researched advice on how to solve it.

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Want more details? Here's a 🧵about the first post.



1/nendclimatesilence.org 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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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...

1/n

https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1738219903520268687

...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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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.

1/n "Unfortunately, time is up."

Here is fossil fuel companies' new defense in lawsuits accusing them of deceiving the public about climate change:

They perpetrated no deception, they say, because the "alleged impact of fossil fuel use on the global climate has been ‘open and obvious’ for decades."

1/n They're calling us stupid, you know.

2/n

I'm lucky enough to be reading an advance copy of @MichaelEMann's new book. It is really fascinating!

Mann acts like the Virgil to the reader's Dante, taking us on a deep tour of past uninhabitable climates to reveal wild facts about science & our possible futures.

1/n Eg. did you know that during the Pliocene, CO2 concentrations were btwn 380 & 420 ppm, yet the planet was much warmer than climate models project for such concentrations today? Mann shows why this is the case, and why seas were much higher than models project too.

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Some climate scientists, including the new @IPCC_CH chair @JimSkeaIPCC, have recently been working overtime to disprove inaccurate claims by "doomers."

This comms strategy ignores the actual data about the electorate in top 15 emitting countries & is therefore misguided.

1/n As you can see from this 2022 @YaleClimateComm
survey, only minorities in most top-emitting countries are "alarmed," which is to say only minorities of the electorate understand that climate change is "happening, human-caused, and an urgent threat."

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So, I dug into @RogerPielkeJr's claim that the @IPCC_CH has "concluded" that a climate signal beyond natural variability will NOT emerge by 2100 for many big impacts, & guess what?

(You'll never guess!)

The self-appointed "honest broker" is misrepresenting the science.

THREAD

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1682031215107526656

Pielke centers his claim on AR6 WGI Table 12.12, which shows the "confidence" scientists have that a climate signal has emerged or will emerge in a particular region.

White signifies "low confidence" of an emerging signal.

There is a lot of white in this Table.

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Some people say that the wealthy world will normalize climate deaths the way we've normalized Covid deaths. But I don't agree. Here's why:

1) Covid deaths are not getting exponentially worse. And we expect them to eventually drop, no? But the number of climate deaths...

1/n ... The numbers of people dying from the direct and indirect effects of #ClimateChange will continue to rise until the world phases out fossil fuels and halts global heating. That's not like Covid.

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Unpopular opinion: we can't help people accept the value of a zero-emissions economy without acknowledging that a zero-emissions economy will indeed require less consumption by the top 10%.

This is parenting psychology.

1/n The best way to stave off temper tantrums and resistance from kids when you're asking them to do something hard that they might not want to do is to *acknowledge the reasons why they don't want to do what you're asking* and to help them process their painful feelings.

2/n

I am just appalled by the media coverage of @POTUS's decision to approve the Willow oil drills in Alaska.

WHY is the framing "Biden vs the activists," when even the @IEA says that meeting the 1.5C target of the #ParisAgreement requires no new fossil energy development?

THREAD

https://twitter.com/jendlouhyhc/status/1634322921651929088

First we have @jendlouhyhc @JenniferJJacobs, who broke the story, reporting that it's only "environmental activists" who "insist [Willow] will exacerbate climate change."

This is anti-science, verging on misinformation.

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I'm happy to say that I have new scholarship on #Climate storytelling out in TDR, The Drama Review.

TL/DR: climate narratives tend to reproduce the traditional theatrical genres of tragedy and comedy, but these genres actually demotivate people. To counter this problem...

1/n ...climate communicators can structure their stories on the epic, the genre that lays out a pattern of extended political struggle, collective action against great challenges and obstacles, to build a new world out of the ashes an old.

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A thread on @paulkrugman's @nytopinion OpEd that we don't need to give up the idea of "perpetual economic growth" in order to halt global heating.

TL/DR: Krugman is looking at tiny parts of our global system with a magnifying glass, which makes his argument deeply flawed.

1/n Krugman focuses on two correct, but inadequate points:

1) that value can grow even if production contracts

and 2) that technology can enable production to become less damaging to the climate.

But those two points do not prove that we can have "perpetual" growth.

2/n

It will never stop astonishing me that otherwise intelligent people in science, in policy, in the academy, at the center of international climate change negotiations, truly believe that fossil energy companies will willingly transform themselves into allies of decarbonization. Have these people never been lied to? Are they so bowled over by power? What do they make of the the *overwhelming* evidence that industry is fighting decarbonization tooth and nail? Have they never taken a class in literature or rhetoric? Do they believe what everyone says? 🤯

Bill Gates pays $9 million per year to offset his carbon footprint. $9 million.

https://twitter.com/jtemple/status/1582772011113119749

Apparently @Climeworks is doing personal CDR for Bill Gates.

Its largest plant captures about 3 seconds of annual emissions. What fraction of that is for Gates' personal emissions alone?

https://twitter.com/jtemple/status/1582770584546443275?s=20&t=D_X4osOVw1kRHGLA5rwo9g

Today @DouthatNYT advances the fallacy that phasing out fossil fuels will, uhm ... leave us without energy.

Does he not understand the principle of technological substitution? That energy is the capacity for doing work, not "fossil fuels"?

Let's investigate.

THREAD Beginning with a remarkably uncivil potshot at activists, Douthat claims that the climate movement is calling for two contradictory things: both expanding and contracting "energy supply."

Note the sleight of hand that conflates fossil fuels with "energy supply."

2/n

In what world does the passage of the IRA mean that the climate movement no longer needs to oppose new or expanded fossil-fuel projects?

In no real world—no real world outside cost-benefit models.

🧵 There is an emerging idea among climate centrists that making clean energy cheap & removing regulations on permitting will "change the economics" of the transition so much, lowering demand for fossil fuels to such a degree, that the market will naturally decarbonize.

2/n

Do you know the work of the Cambridge University economist Partha Dasgupta? You should.

Dasgupta is not a degrowther, but he's still trying to integrate the biosphere into economic analysis.

An excellent short account of his work is here. 👇

washingtonpost.com/business/how-m… His major report—The Economics of Biodiversity: the Dasgupta Review—is here. 👇

gov.uk/government/pub…

So I'm 6 days into Covid, my brain feels like cottage cheese, but I still want to try to say something about this permitting bill & the way that climate politics seems to be shaking out after the fade-away of the #GreenNewDeal.

It's supply-side climate policy and it's bad.

1/n The vision of the #GreenNewDeal was to connect climate policy to a large host of policies that would raise the majority's real income—quite aside from what people would save on clean compared to fossil energy—and thereby win a entrenched constituency for decarbonization.

2/n

I think it's under-appreciated how revolutionary and important this @MarshallBBurke, Solomon Hsiang, @tedmiguel paper really is.

Conventional economic wisdom says that rich countries will be largely ok even if the climate heats up past 2°C.

But this paper...

🧵 This paper shows that "both rich & poor countries exhibit similar non-linear responses to temperature," and that...

2/n

There is a politically significant difference between the inherent tension of a transition to a different energy and economic system (in which old processes and structures of feeling still linger even as new technologies and ways of being emerge) and...

1/n a hope and plan to keep fossil fuels significantly in the mix in the next iteration of our economy. It is this that is so dangerous, because, insofar as it succeeds, it ensures that the world won't halt global warming at a relatively safe level.

2/n

I've been thinking about climate messaging that emerged in the weeks leading up to Manchin's decision to support the IRA.

Once folks believed Manchin was lost forever, they started explicitly talking about climate destruction, and pinned that future destruction *on Manchin*.

🧵 The best example of this shift: @leahstokes brilliant NYT OpEd in which she eloquently described how climate change is already destroying so much of our world and noted that "Mr. Manchin’s grandchildren will grow up knowing that his legacy is climate destruction."

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