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.

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✨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.

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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.

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

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.

2/n

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."

2/n

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.

2/n

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.

2/n

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.

2/n

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.

2/n

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? 🤯