City Lights in conjunction with SF Bay Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Oxford University Press present
Genevieve Guenther
discussing her new book
The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It
By Genevieve Guenther
Published by Oxford University Press
The Language of Climate Politics dismantles fossil-fuel propaganda and offers new strategies for climate communication. It argues that partisans on the right and the left often repeat the same fossil-fuel talking points and that this repetition produces a centrist consensus upholding the status quo. The book uncovers the falsehoods of this centrist consensus using rhetorical and ideological analyses of the terms that dominate current climate-change discourse: we, alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation, and resilience. It discusses climate change, climate science, and climate denial, as well as the recent history of American climate politics, climate economics, international climate negotiations, climate policy in China, carbon capture and storage, carbon dioxide removal, climate disinformation campaigns, fossil-fuel subsidies, climate psychology, anti-racism, and climate justice. Finally it provides a new vocabulary for climate activism and offers guidance on initiating conversations about the climate crisis that can move people to take climate action.
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School, where she sits on the board of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. While writing the End Climate Silence newsletter, Dr. Guenther advises NGOs, corporations, and policymakers on fossil-fuel disinformation and climate communication, and she serves as Expert Reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Her research has appeared in both scholarly journals and media outlets such as Scientific American, The New Republic, and MSNBC, and she has been invited to speak about climate and language to audiences at Duke, Columbia, and Harvard, among other universities. She lives in New York City with her family.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation