I'm finally digging into the cross tabs underlying the @SearchlightInst memo telling Dems not to talk about #ClimateChange.

LOTS of surprises there!

The first one: swing voters like environmental groups & the clean-energy industry.

More don't like oil and gas than do.

🧵 Most swing voters think the top issue for Dems is not climate change, but LGBTQ rights, followed by healthcare and prices.

For these voters climate change seems as important to the party as abortion and jobs.

So not a referendum issue, by any means.

2/n

I'm excited to announce that I've restarted the @EndClimtSilence newsletter with a post on the main climate-communications opportunity I see in this difficult political moment: associating Trump's deep unpopularity with his support for coal, oil, and gas development.

🧵 When we have focused on fossil fuels—in the Beyond Coal campaign, via divestment, in pipeline fights, or under #KeepItInTheGround—coal, oil, & gas have been called polluting, toxic, the greatest source of emissions, and profoundly unjust.

And they are all of those things!

2/n

IT. IS. HAPPENING.

China's State Counsel has announced that provinces will be graded on their efforts to peak emissions before 2030.

"Authorities ranked as making unsatisfactory progress ... could be subject to disciplinary processes if issues aren’t rectified." 💥

🧵 In The Language of Climate Politics, I wrote about how this accountability was enacted in the 2021 "1+N Documents," China's whole-of government, whole-of-society policy to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060.

👇

This is the implementation of this provision in real time.

2/n

Devastating review of "Abundance" (the book) in @nybooks.

I mean, whew!

1/2 This is a perfect description of Abundance punditry.

2/2

I wrote about Chinese climate policy. And I said that Trump's gutting of US climate science and governance is a gift to China.

Why?

Because China has already enacted the most comprehensive climate policy in the world.

Yes, really.

🧵 Here is the article — thanks to @NoemaMag for giving me so much space to make my argument.



2/nnoemamag.com/trumps-climate…

This is really important.

🚨Do NOT talk about solar geoengineering as a climate "solution."🚨

1/n As people start to panic—and as others advance the next phase of the fossil-fuel agenda—we're now seeing a lot of talk about the need to research solar geoengineering (SG).

Fine. I actually agree that SG should be researched systematically.

2/n

I'm currently on vacation, but I must pop in to say: the DOE letter calling increased LNG exports “neither sustainable nor advisable" is a VERY, VERY BIG DEAL.

This is the first time a Dem administration has come out against expanding a fossil fuel.

🧵

nytimes.com/2024/12/16/cli… "The letter is expected to accompany a study of the economic, national security and climate effects of approving new natural gas export terminals to be issued within days by the DOE."

According to the letter, the study finds three things...

2/n

I am baffled by this opening claim in @TimothyDSnyder's New Yorker piece on Trump's fascism.

Trump's entire campaign was fueled by empathy for white men. It explicitly advanced the promise to improve their lives through his power as Leader ("I will fix it.")

1/n The US *has* been destroyed — economic inequality, lack of eduction or culture outside churches, crumbling infrastructure, the slow poison of social media in the body politic — has made town after town a decaying shadow of its former self.

2/n

I am very proud that Ted Nordhaus, @mattyglesias, and right-wingers like Judy Curry are attacking my book. It means they feel threatened by my analysis of their rhetoric in favor of expanding fossil fuels. This is good!

I must say, however, that their attacks are spurious.

🧵

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1836525286436786198

@mattyglesias This week The Breakthrough Institute published a blog post written by some guy I blocked on Twitter for misogyny years ago, who claims that errors he found in my text prove my research is faulty.



2/nbreakthroughjournal.org/p/fact-checkin…

Last month I spoke to @350NYC about William Nordhaus and economics of decarbonization, using material from *The Language of Climate Politics*.

TL/DR: all too much discourse about the “cost” of climate policy is bullshit.

🧵

1/n


A prime piece of fossil-fuel propaganda is that resolving the climate crisis will “cost” Americans too much.

But the truth is rather the opposite: NOT halting global heating will, within decades, cost Americans way more than creating a net zero economy.

2/n

Is #ClimateChange a winning electoral issue for @TheDemocrats?

Here's what @pewresearch data says.

69% of Americans favor the US working to become carbon neutral by 2050.

1/n 67% of Republicans under 30 want the US to prioritize clean energy development.

2/n

OK Twitter, here's the theory of change that underlies the new climate messages I offer in *The Language of Climate Politics*

Let me begin by saying: focus-groups show my messages increase support for phasing out fossil fuels by up to 10 pts among Dems AND REPUBLICANS who...

1/ ...who are concerned and alarmed about the #ClimateCrisis.

(The rubric of the "concerned" and the "alarmed" comes from @YaleClimateComm's and @Mason4C's "Global Warming's Six Americas.")

2/n

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

Coming back to this to say, now that I've read his speech: Vance delivered a powerful message, whose strength comes from its (ersatz) COMPASSION.

It acknowledged all the ways that America does suck for most people living here.

1/n

https://twitter.com/DoctorVive/status/1813776662716400049

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

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

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.

1/n

https://twitter.com/DoctorVive/status/1780950718821650541

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

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...

1/n

https://twitter.com/DoctorVive/status/1785307680845832511

This normalization of fossil-fuel propaganda through supposedly objective institutions stands as one of the greatest barriers to phasing out fossil fuels.

2/n

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

Relevant to you? Click👇, scroll down, & subscribe!

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.

2/n

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.

2/n

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