Rebecca: Hello and welcome to Authors on Climate Words. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Gunther. 

Genevieve: Thank you for having me, Rebecca. And please call me Genevieve, good Lord! 

Rebecca: Okay, Genevieve, well, I'd like to just start by asking you to introduce yourself in your own words, if there's anything I missed. And also share how you came to be doing this work and what draws you to language and communications.

Genevieve: Yeah, well, my background is actually in Renaissance literature. I'm a Shakespeare scholar by training. And my first book was actually on the Renaissance theory; that beautiful elevated language, like the kind we find in poetry or on the stage in plays has this kind of moral effect on the people who consume it — sort of that the pleasure of language can be enough, as they thought, to make you a better person. (This is a theory that goes, in fact, all the way back to Plato.) And I've been very interested in this idea because I think it has something to do with the way that political ideologies are produced by culture. 

I had no interest in climate change for many years, though.

I saw An Inconvenient Truth when that came out in the early aughts, and I was really struck by it. But of course, at that point in my life, I was more concerned with establishing my career, my friendships, whatever. So I kind of put climate on the shelf. 

But then in 2010, I had my son. And I had a really long maternity leave. I didn't teach for an entire semester. And so I had all this time at home to sit with him while I was nursing and really read the news. And I read the news all the way down into the science section. And I started to sort of think about climate change more than I ever had before, because of what I had been reading in the newspaper. And it struck me that this little person that I had brought into the world, if he was lucky, he was going to live out his life over the course of the 21st century, when we would either phase out fossil fuels and resolve the climate crisis, or global heating would really accelerate and civilization could potentially start to unravel. And so I started to be concerned about what was going to happen after I died in a way that I had never been before.

So I started to pay more attention to the way that climate change was represented by policymakers, journalists, even scientists. And with my training, I started to feel like the way these groups were talking about climate change was sometimes not helpful and other times even counterproductive. So I started reading the literature on climate communication — which is largely social science literature, not literary criticism or rhetorical studies. I realized I needed to know more about climate science. So I took college-level climate-science courses through this online platform named edX, which is an excellent resource if you want to become basically proficient in any particular topic. I also did the Climate Reality training that Vice President Gore offers to people who want to learn how to give presentations about the climate crisis, write Op-Eds and letters to the editor, et cetera. I was also thinking about going back to graduate school. I even hired a math tutor so I could get my math up to speed in case I needed to take the GREs again!

But then in 2017, the New York Times hired a columnist named Bret Stephens away from the Wall Street Journal. And at the time, Stevens was a really inveterate climate denier. He was someone who argued that climate change wasn't real. And I was so outraged that the New York Times thought that climate denial was legitimate political commentary as late as 2017, that I actually started a petition with change.org trying to get them to rescind their job offer to Stevens. And of course this didn't work at all. The Times never responds to activist pressure. And so Stephens began his job at the paper, and, because he was aware of the campaign (which got a lot of press), he wrote his first column for the Times about climate change. This column was called “Climate of Complete Certainty.” And it basically marshaled the standard climate denial that had been circulating in right-wing commentary since at least the early aughts, which is that climate science was too uncertain to justify the kinds of massive policy changes, the kinds of capital expenditures, the kids of systematic actions we would need to make to decarbonize our economies. And because I had very recently taken a course in climate science — and because I was trained to hear how words are ambiguous and how they might mean one thing to one group of people and another thing to another group of people — I realized that the way Stevens and his right-wing brethren were using this word “uncertainty” was actually misleading and it misrepresented what scientists were saying.

When climate scientists talk about uncertainty, sometimes they use it in a colloquial sense, but mostly they use it in a specific disciplinary way. In this way, it means a “range of possible outcomes”. Scientific models of future global heating will always present what's called an uncertainty interval that goes from the best case to the worst case scenarios. And that interval includes everything that can be predicted with confidence. So “uncertainty” and “confidence” are actually synonyms in climate science. You can use the term “uncertainty interval" or you can say “confidence interval.” But Stevens and the right-wing propagandists were using the word “uncertainty” in this very colloquial way because most of us understand the word to mean, “I'm not really sure” or “I don't really know enough to say,” that kind of thing. So they were creating doubt by suggesting that scientists didn't know enough to say whether climate change was real or not. 

But what was really pernicious about this strategy was the fact that once they put that meaning of uncertainty into the discourse, once it started circulating through the news media and through public commentary, then every time scientists use the word “uncertainty” in their climate communications — mostly when they were trying to be very scrupulous and very accurate and to describe what they knew about climate change with confidence — they would repeat this word and make it seem like they were also saying they weren't really sure whether climate change was real or not. The right wing — by appropriating this word, twisting its meaning and putting it into climate discourse — they entrapped the climate scientists into confirming that there was some sort of doubt over whether climate change was real. And once I saw this dynamic, I started to see it everywhere.

And this marked the conception of my book. I realized that for most of the words that dominate the language of climate politics, there is this echo effect between the fossil fuel interests and the legitimate climate advocates, scientists, economists, policymakers, and sometimes even activists whose language has been appropriated and weaponized. This echo effect is creating a kind of new climate denial, which says we can keep using fossil fuels and still cope with climate change anyway. And this is exactly false. What we need to do now above all is phase out fossil fuels at the greatest possible speed. So that was the sort of origin of my career as a climate thinker and the beginning of this book. 

Rebecca: Thank you. That's such an interesting story. And I can just imagine that light bulb moment. I think we see it all the time. I've noticed it particularly in discourse from the streets, when it comes into policy, it really gets appropriated. And so there's all of these changes that happen. Your book was really helpful for me to consider: how do we reclaim those words, or what other words do we use? 

You frame the book around six words: alarmist, cost, growth, India and China, innovation, and resilience.  I’m curious — I almost imagine you with a whiteboard in your office with a bunch of different words — how did this become the framing of the book or how did these words kind of come to the forefront in your thinking? 

Genevieve: So, I'm kind of a media junkie. I read the news, I read research, I read all sorts of things. And I spend a lot of time on Twitter, now known as X. And these were the words that kept coming up over and over and over. They were being used by fossil-fuel interests and by climate advocates all the time. So I started to see that, implicitly, together they were creating this narrative — which justifies keeping fossil fuels in our economy. And the narrative goes something like this:

So people say that climate change is going to be dangerous, but those people are just alarmists. And the cost of decarbonization is just way too high. It's much better if we just focus on economic growth because being wealthy will protect us from climate devastation. And so what we can do instead is work to boost growth and invest in innovation and resilience. And anyway, it's pointless to do any of this unilaterally because India and China are both increasing their emissions. 

I argue in the book that this narrative is the latest form of climate denial. And I'm not talking about the crazy MAGA climate denial that still claims that climate change is a hoax. I'm talking about the kind of denial spread by Republicans and swing states, centrist right publications like the Wall Street Journal, and oil and gas executives themselves. All these people have acknowledged that climate change is real, but they are still circulating this propaganda that justifies keeping fossil fuels in the economy. 

So these words are used by them, but they're also used by so-called climate people.

For example, take alarmist. Fossil fuel interests will accuse climate activists of being alarmists, and climate scientists are also very concerned with statements that might seem a little alarmist! Scientists have to do so much work to preserve their authority in a culture which is becoming anti-science and anti-rationalist and anti-empiricist. So they don't want to be associated with anybody who exaggerates, without justification, the possible effects of climate change! And they are also very worried about the small subset of people who feel like there's no hope whatsoever. But as I argue in the book, those people very often don't feel like there's no hope because they misunderstand the science, they're feeling despair because our politics aren't rising to the occasion. And that occasion, if you look at the science of what could happen in the next decades, if we don’t phase out coal, oil, and gas, is actually quite scary.

Anyway, that's just one example of how these right-wing commentators who accuse climate activists of being alarmists are very often almost reinforced or legitimized by the climate scientists who in another situation would be exactly the people that those fossil fuel interests were attacking. So that complicated dynamic just plays out over and over and over in our climate discourse. And actually I think this muddle in the middle is almost more destructive than outright climate denial, which is so obviously partisan that you know how to fight against that. What gets confusing is when propaganda gets reinforced and then masquerades as the truth. 

Rebecca: Yeah, I agree. And I even hear from some of my friends who are not necessarily right-wing or even conservatives, but they believe in technology and they trust that the economy is gonna solve this problem for us.

Genevieve: Totally, and you know, it's because the ideology of our economy is fossil fuel ideology. We are living in the fossil fuel economy. So the way that we are taught from a very young age to understand the world and how it works is in fact a representation of reality that justifies fossil fuel use.

So, for example, in growth, I talk about this one economist, Robert Solow, who created a model of economic growth that showed we can just keep our economy growing exponentially, no matter what happens to nature. Of course, his model was presented as a theory — he was very clear that it was just a theory — it wasn't supposed to be a description of reality. But somehow it morphed into that as the twentieth century went on. I won't get into that here. I talk about it in the book. The point is that this theory was not something that he advanced in order to celebrate fossil fuels or keep fossil fuels in the mix, but still this theory about the relationship between nature and technology makes fossil fuels seem relatively safe or like something that can be coped with or dealt with through the mechanisms that already exist in the economy, instead of substances that need to be taken out of the economy, like a cancer needs to be taken out of a body, after which you remake things for an economy that isn't based on fossil fuels. 

Rebecca: There's a quote that I really like where you say, “in so far as words shape ideas and ideas influence actions, we need to transform the language of our climate politics just as we need to transform the more material ways our policies support the fossil fuel economy.” So in the same vein as we need this structural adjustment, we need to really harness the power of words to kind of flip that switch as well. 

Genevieve: 100 percent. 

Rebecca: So before we dig into each of those words, because I would love to give you some time to kind of walk us through the propaganda and then your proposals. The first word that really stood out to me, and I think it starts in alarmist, but I've even heard you use it as we've been chatting, is climate heating, because we all say climate or global warming. And obviously that's been such a common term. We say the climate crisis, but even just global heating rather than warming really stood out to me.

Genevieve: That was very intentional. You know, some people make the argument that climate change was a term created by Frank Lunz in the 90s or in the early aughts to downplay the seriousness of the crisis, and it isn't. It's an actual scientific term. It was in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) charter when the IPCC was created. But right-wing PR people do love this term, because climate change seems not only vaguely benign, but also almost seems like a positive, especially for Americans who love to change things up all the time (their wardrobes, their cities, their hairstyles, their favorite restaurants, whatever.) So I usually say the climate crisis, although there are so many crises that this phrase is also losing its power. The climate emergency had some currency for a while, climate catastrophe, climate breakdown. In any case, it’s good to have a lot of words so that you don't keep saying the same thing over and over. 

But in terms of using global heating in the book, I decided to do that myself. Just because, global warming, again, it sounds so benign. Like, we love to be warm. 

Rebecca: It’s cozy. 

Genevieve: 100 percent, the connotations are positive, right? Whereas heating is not always positive. I mean, it is in the winter if you're heating your house, but even that feels defensive. Like the connotations of heating are more accurate, right?

What we're facing with these heat waves, which are literally deadly, is a dangerous heat. It's not a cozy warming. 

And so this is another insight, if I may, that underlies this book: language doesn't do its political work on the level of its literal meaning; it does its political work on the level of its implicature. That's just a jargon from the philosophy of language, of course, but it conveys that meaning comes from these silent implications, these connotations which create pictures in your imagination and kind of teach you what the situation that the word refers to is going to look like.

Just as you said, warming has the connotation of being cozy. Heating has the connotation of being either defensive or outright dangerous. You know, it invokes a fever for me. So I very consciously used it. I don't do it on the first page of the introduction because I want to get people comfortable with me — I don't want them to be like, “what does this mean?” right away. But I think by like page six or seven, I start using it. 

I want people to always remember that climate change is going to be really bad for all of us, not just the poor, not just the people in the global South. It is going to be horrific for everybody if we do not phase out fossil fuels. So that's ground zero — like, it’s the baseline. There would be no point in changing everything, no point in phasing out fossil fuels, if that weren't the case, but unfortunately, tragically, that is the case.

Rebecca: Yeah, and it's a good reminder to be mindful about the language that we're using and just using these words that we've heard so often, or pulling from media that we're hearing, but really think about and be conscious of the words that we're using to describe things. I know people have even gone so far as calling it a global boiling. Because no one wants to boil. 

Genevieve: Right, exactly. I wrote about that phrase in the book! Some scientists were very disturbed that Antonio Gutierrez, the United Nations Secretary General used that term global boiling because they didn't think it was accurate. They didn't want climate science to be associated with terms that weren't accurate or that might leave scientists open up to ridicule or something like that, you know? But I mean, what I think is ridiculous is to pretend that climate change is something that we can just survive if we keep using fossil fuels. That's what I think is worthy of mocking laughter.

So anyway, yes, your point is excellent. We do inherit our language for thinking through these things from the institutions that already exist, particularly the news media. Our research at End Climate Silence shows that most people in America actually learn everything they know about climate change from the news media. So it's really important to, as they say in the academy, interrogate those terms and make sure that you're not simply unwittingly spreading propaganda — that you actually use a considered language that will give people images in their imagination that will be accurate, that will move them into action, and that will create a better world. 

Rebecca: Thank you, I think that's a great kind of introduction into the nitty gritty of some of these words that you give us. The first two I'd love to delve into are cost and growth, because I do think they are related. We hear this all the time, that it's so costly to respond to climate change. I'm wondering if you could give us a little primer on why that rhetoric is wrong or misleading and what we should be saying instead. 

Genevieve: Yeah, the conventional wisdom is that resolving climate change will be incredibly costly, I mean, there are a lot of reasons for that, but the primary reason is that climate economics was essentially created by this one economist, William Nordhaus, who developed the first cost-benefit integrated assessment model, which tried to game out the relative costs and benefits of mitigation relative to the costs of climate damages, i.e. the economic costs of the impacts of climate change over the course of the 21st century. And what Nordhaus argued — and he's been arguing this since literally the 80s, all the way through up to 2018 and beyond —

Rebecca: And he won a Nobel Prize for it.

Genevieve: Correct, he won a Nobel Prize for essentially creating the field of climate economics. Ironically, he won the prize right when new economic research was really starting to emerge showing that the content of his model was unscientific and very misleading. So there was this weird sort of overlap between this new emerging discourse on the value of Nordhaus's work and a kind of residual understanding that he was kind of the groundbreaker in this field. And he's been understood as a climate advocate from the beginning, because for decades he was one of the only economists who was doing work on climate change at all. And so he's an example of one of these so-called climate people who actually produce work or echo claims that keep fossil fuels in the mix. 

Because, indeed, what he argued was that it was economically optimal to keep using fossil fuels in order to encourage economic growth, in order to free up investment or free up capital to invest in innovation — or whatever would have a higher rate of return than any climate investment. He argued that it was optimal to keep using fossil fuels and invest in everything else except decarbonization for decades, until the cost of climate change would outweigh the cost of keeping fossil fuels in the mix. But this moment comes so late for him that he argues that the target heating that policy makers should be planning for is 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.

So let me just say right here that the physical science says that if we allow the planet to heat up 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, Southern California, the Southwest, parts of the South and Florida are going to be so hot for six months of the year — and this is not a heat wave, this is just their sort of background temperature — they're going to be so hot for six months of the year that going outside will put you at risk of death. Other places on the planet, including the East Coast all the way up to Maine, will be this hot three months out of the year. So a 3 degrees Celsius warmed planet is a deadly and dangerous planet, even for Americans. 

The way that Nordhaus got this result was not by looking at climate damages and doing a kind of historical survey. He essentially asked his friends and climate scientists he knew, but mostly economists, what they thought about climate change and how bad it was going to be decades ahead. And he used those roughly estimated numbers in his model. In his model, he also omitted climate damages to infrastructure, to non-coastal real-estate, to rates of economic productivity, to health, to all sorts of things that we now know are actually some of the biggest costs of the climate crisis.

You know, even just in 2017, the cost of Hurricane Harvey in Texas was larger than what Nordhaus had assumed would be the cost of climate change to the entire GDP of the United States for one year. 

So we've been put in this position where the kind of mainstream, most authoritative account of climate economics sees climate change as something that's going to damage the economy only at the margins and can be outweighed by robust economic growth moving forward. But this is just not true. There have been multiple studies  on this — some that have been released since I turned in my manuscript nine months ago. 

So for example, one study came out last month that said even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, the climate change that's already coming down the pike, is going to cost the global economy $38 trillion a year by 2050. That is double the GDP of the entire European Union. We're already facing that, and that's if we stop fossil fuels tomorrow. So that's the background of this. But of course, fossil fuel interests are constantly talking about the costs of climate change. 

And it's hard because the upfront costs of decarbonization are real, right? You have to build a lot of new transmission lines. You have to buy solar panels. You have to buy an EV. You have to rip out your gas stove and put in induction. Like all of those costs are real. But they could easily be socialized! For example, the estimates of how much it's going to cost to decarbonize the American economy come in less than the cost of the bailout from the 2007, 2008 financial crisis. And can any of us really say how much money came out of our own pockets in the government bailout of the banks? I don't think so. I mean, it was really not something that we felt in our wallets in that way. Of course, if you lost your home, you felt it, but that was because of bank malfeasance. That wasn't because we were paying to fix the crisis. 

Moreover, and this is the real point, once we've decarbonized, decarbonization is going to not be a cost. It's going to be a windfall for 90% of the people alive on the planet today as well as the majority of Americans. Because you know what's going to happen? Our electricity costs are going to plummet, our transportation costs are going to plummet, our heating and cooling costs are going to plummet, because solar and wind, once it's installed and up and running, it’s essentially free.

And our healthcare costs are going to go down. Fossil fuels are so poisonous and so toxic, even to Americans who globally have relatively clean air, that the benefits of fewer emergency room visits, fewer lost days of work, and fewer deaths means that the cost of health insurance is going to plummet. And so everybody is going to be better off. They're going to have more money in their pocketbooks and they're going to be healthier, so their stress is also going to go down. It's going to be a huge benefit!

Now, it's not necessarily going to be a benefit for the 1% or the more affluent among us who have a very fossil fuel intensive lifestyle and who are very often heavily invested in equities, including fossil fuel holdings. The fossil fuel industry has investments that are going to be stranded, and it is the case that private investors holding those equities are going to lose some money. But when you go back to that $38 trillion a year by 2050, it seems like a small crater to get over in order to have an economy at all, let alone a livable future for our children. 

But that said, just to keep on the economy, literally the vast majority of people on this planet and in America are gonna be better off on the other side of this transition. Decarbonization is not a cost at all, it's a windfall.

Rebecca: Yeah, you write that the outlays are not costs, but investments, like investments in our future, investments in health, in energy…we're all going to be better off. Compared to the underestimated costs of the climate crisis, we're actually going to have so much more time and money and energy. So I found that really helpful to contextualize and compare when you're looking at like these two distant futures, one is incredibly costly.

I also think that this is very tied into this myth of growth or the idea that the growth of the economy will offset these costs or somehow be able to repair the damages. Or even this other myth that I myself have perpetuated sometimes, which is that billionaires will be able to somehow escape the costs of the climate crisis or like just hide themselves away or shoot themselves off into space. And you write that ruining the planet will also ruin the economy. I'm wondering if you could dive into this myth of growth a little bit and let us know why we cannot just continue this path of perpetual growth. 

Genevieve: Yeah. So, there are these influential thinkers that aren't necessarily that famous, but who have still done more to create our understanding of the world than you could possibly imagine. And one of these thinkers is this guy Robert Solow. Solow was an economist. (He just died recently.) He was an economist who was actually Nordhaus's PhD supervisor, pretty hilariously. He was an economist who worked on economic growth. And his first major success was a paper called “A Contribution Towards a Theory of Economic Growth,” where he kind of changed the overarching growth model that had dominated economic thinking in the 19th century.

So in the 19th century, economists felt that there are three, what they called, factors of production. There's labor, people who work; there's capital, the people who invest and hire, or buy, the labor of the people who work; and then there's land, the actual planet that produces the food and other resources that labor and capital both need to survive. Growth models from the 19th century very often ended up being limited because they modeled land as scarce. And with land as a factor of production, what they said was the more labor and capital interact to produce economic growth, the more kids people will have, and the more the population will rise — but land won't really be able to keep up with rising population. So there'll be this kind of natural lid on economic growth. At a certain point, you're going to end up at a ceiling and from then on have a kind of steady state economy. So Solow came in and said, well, no, actually, because there's this other thing that these models don't account for, which is technological innovation. He said that technological innovation will allow us to transcend the limits that land might place on production. And he actually did build a mathematical model in which land is not a factor of production at all. You replace land with technological innovation, and then you can build a mathematical model that shows that growth can be perpetual. It can be homologous to the nth degree. And because technological innovation is an unlimited resource, and you can keep applying it to economic growth, you can keep using it to sort of transcend the limits that the planet might place on the economy. 

Now, Solow was very clear that this was just a theory. And in a footnote, he makes the absolutely crucial point that this model, this theory that he was advancing, could only be true if you could keep extracting new arable land, more land to grow more food on, indefinitely at essentially constant cost. And he said — he was such a great writer and sort of self-deprecating and had this kind of, I don't know, sardonic voice, even in his scholarship — he said something like, well, this is only going be true as long as we can just “hack arable land out of the wilderness” at essentially constant cost. But nobody really read that footnote. 

So people started to think about technological innovation as a force with the same strength as nature. And this went on for maybe 15 or so, maybe 20 years. And then what happened was there was all of this Malthusian catastrophist discourse in the 1970s about resource scarcity. This cultural phase culminated with the publication of Limits to Growth, a catastrophist bestseller that essentially argued that, if the economy continued on as it was, civilization was going to collapse in the 21st century and billions of people were going to die. Economists just absolutely loathed this book for a variety of reasons. And there were intellectual weaknesses in the book: the models they used never had any kind of negative feedbacks, for example, the possibility that once people saw that pollution was getting too terrible, they would try to switch the energy source that they were using to something that wasn't so polluting et cetera.

(I would like to note here that emissions are still rising despite the fact that the climate crisis is accelerating. It's not like we've done major technological substitution to this date.)

In any event, this book was a phenomenon and economists hated it so much. It also seemed to have some sort of effect on Solow that made him lose his wry self-knowledge, because he started to talk about technological innovation, not just as an element of a theory anymore, but as this other thing called technological substitution, which was actually something in the real world. What he started to argue was you could actually use nature up as long as you could develop a technology that would substitute for the ecological system or the ecological entity that you've destroyed. So, for example, he said it didn't really matter if some species of fish went extinct because you could just eat another species of fish or you could start farming a third species of fish. Like there was this idea that human ingenuity could always overcome the limits that ecosystems place on our consumption. 

But you know, he never really had an account for something that is the foundation for a greater system. He never talked about coral reefs, for example. So if the coral reefs die out or the phytoplankton die out because the ocean gets too acidic and too hot, then the marine food chain collapses. And almost half the human population relies on marine proteins for their food. So I'm not sure what kind of technology can substitute for food. 

Now it also occurs to me that it's interesting that he was always talking about fish and fish species, because it's a way to talk about food without actually acknowledging land. Do you know what I mean? He never discussed agriculture. He just discussed marine stuff.

But he started positing that we would always have enough to eat because we would figure out technologies that would give us enough to eat. Now, obviously this is not true. The climate crisis, global heating, the combination of heat and drought, and sometimes flood is already contracting global food production. You see it in certain niche products like olive oil, coffee, chocolate. We haven't seen it in staples that much yet because we're still producing a surplus that gets wasted every year. So there is some buffer, some wiggle room there. But if the climate keeps heating up and breaking down, our ability to grow enough food to sustain ourselves is going to be curtailed.

And it's not like we can go north and just hack arable land out of the wilderness in Canada, because, in fact, trying to move agriculture to different locations means there are going to be species mismatches. It also means that new diseases will be emerging because there's no ecological resilience to them in the new places. It also means that we will be deforesting these old-growth forests in the northern latitudes of our planet that are actually helping us by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So if we try to so-called “adapt” and hack more arable land out of the wilderness, we're actually going to be creating a positive feedback loop that makes global heating worse.

So, essentially, Solow was largely wrong, but people didn't realize this because in the wake of the 1970s conflict between catastrophism and innovation there was all this economic growth that seemed to be created by innovation. So it seemed like Solow was actually describing the way the world worked. Of course, now in retrospect, commentators and economists are realizing that the economic growth of the past 40 years wasn't entirely driven by innovation. It was equally driven by government policy that favored capital over labor. It was driven by, as Thomas Piketty talked about, parking assets and equities, which inflated the value of capital.

To his credit, at the end of his life, Solow started talking about the climate crisis a lot. And he acknowledged that climate change could actually curtail economic growth, perhaps drastically. And he actually outlined — kind of as a joke, but in a really profound joke — a vision of the world where he imagined we all decided to cultivate gardens instead of endlessly extracting resources and polluting the atmosphere. In that vision — which is of course a vision of a bounded natural space that is cultivated in a cycle — the economy isn't expected to keep growing. And he said that in this cyclical economy, the amount we emitted into the world and the amount we extracted from the world would come down a lot. In having an economy like this, he suggested, we would make ourselves safe. (I got all teary when I was writing this phase because I find it so moving that someone who's devoted his entire life to arguing that we can have perpetual growth has the intellectual integrity and the emotional maturity to point towards a different system as perhaps better for the conditions that we're facing today.)

All of this faith in growth, I'm trying to argue, comes from Solow's work and the way it was adopted by neoliberal economists. And, you know, even today, there is very, very little work on how climate change is going to affect growth rates. I mean, almost no work whatsoever. So when someone progressive like Ezra Klein says that mainstream economics says that global heating isn't going to make our country worse than it was, say in the 1950s, he is correct. That is what “mainstream economics” says, but that's because A) there's almost no work on the question, and B) most economic work includes in its mathematical models this variable called “adaptation”, which allows economists to adjust their results based on how much they believe that human ingenuity or technological innovation is going to get us out of our ecological predicament. But there's nothing empirical about this variable “adaptation.” Like, there's no evidence that we've adapted yet and there's no evidence of how much we're going to adapt in the future. It's literally just a number representing the economist's belief in optimistic fantasies. And I don't mean “fantasies” as if they're definitely going to be untrue. I just mean “fantasies” as ideas that have no grounding in reality as we know it.

In some ways I feel like the “Growth” chapter is almost the most important chapter of the book, because I think that even people who are very concerned about the climate crisis and want policymakers to do what they can to stop it, still believe that even if our governments fail, even if we don't get it right, we in America, people in the global North, are largely going to be fine. And that this is a moral tragedy for the poor — for people in the developing world, for people in the global South — but it's not really something that's going to destroy our world. And that belief rests on nothing.

Rebecca: Yeah, and we've already seen that that's not the case, that there are these heat waves that will affect countless people in the United States, that there are wildfires that will affect entire stretches of the United States.

I think too, you were saying that this is kind of a dream of economists, that somehow innovation will solve our problems. And in the innovation chapter, you get into the fact that the two main innovations that we have right now, carbon capture storage (CCS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are both super expensive and are actually not going to save the day in any regard. And so they can't actually be relied on at all. So the dreams we have, even the realities we might want to use aren't really backed up.

Genevieve: Right. Or, at least on a super large scale. We will need carbon removal for the margins, right? Because agriculture emits carbon dioxide. It just does. I mean, the vast majority of our agricultural land goes to beef production, right? Of course, if you get people to eat much less beef, and you rewild that land, you will have much less need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

So how much carbon dioxide removal we'll need is a political question. It's not a scientific question. We will need some of it for the margins if we're gonna hit net zero, 100%. But what the CDR advocates and the oil and gas companies are selling are carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal as innovations that can keep the fossil fuel system going — that literally do what Solow said, help us overcome the limits that our pollution is placing on the survival of our economy.

But for all the reasons that I outline in that chapter, it will be really awesome and very challenging to even get enough carbon dioxide removal to remove the carbon at the margins, like 3 to 5 gigatons a year, you know? Let alone the amount that would be needed to balance the actual emissions of the fossil fuel economy — 30 to 40 gigatons of CO2 a year. That's just not going to happen.

Rebecca: To be mindful of time, I want to dig into the final word that you go into in the book, which to me was the most interesting analysis. The word resilience and the ways that resilience and adaptation are used together and the way that that word, which feels… like ecological resilience is amazing. It feels like such a positive word, but it can actually be easily co-opted and has been co-opted. So what other words we might use in its place?

Genevieve: Right. Well, look, resilience means the capacity to bounce back and maintain your systemic integrity after a shock. That's essentially what it means, right? You want ecosystems to be resilient. You want them to be tough. You don't want them to fall apart when you blow on them. You want them to be resilient, okay?

You don't necessarily want the system we've got right now to be resilient. So again, going back to what we talked about at the beginning, what resilience implies, the connotation of resilience is that the system, the political and economic system we've got right now is something that needs to be shored up so that it can respond to the climate crisis or other shocks without changing, right? This is absolutely counterproductive.

We need what I say in the book (and you know, it's not just me, it's the United Nations Environment Program, it's the IPCC): we need transformation. We need new systems of production and consumption. We need new ideologies. We need new ways of eating and getting around and working and doing all of the things so that we can have a livable future. The word “resilience” doesn't capture what we need to do to ensure a livable future. We need transformation. We don't need to retrofit our current system. 

Essentially resilience is a conservative idea in almost a literal sense: it conserves. It’s no surprise that right-wingers love it. And they love it also because it misrepresents the climate crisis. “Resilience” suggests that if we don't stop using fossil fuels we’re going to face just one discrete extreme weather event after another in between times when things are normal. But if we keep using fossil fuels, there is going to be no new normal. We're going to have overlapping disasters. We're going to have disasters that come before we've recovered from the last one. People are going to need to adapt, not by increasing their resilience, but by literally moving away from where they can no longer survive.

I mean, we already see what's happening in Europe and the United States due to people's refusal to let other people migrate north. This is one of the most terrifying aspects of the climate crisis — what it's doing to our politics and how it's enabling fascist ideas to seem more attractive because people are afraid of how many people are already, at 1.3 degrees Celsius, moving north because they can't survive where they're living. So the term “resilience” papers over all of those things and it needs to be jettisoned, I think, and replaced with “transformation,” which includes a truly global adaptation, which allows people to go where they need to go to survive and welcomes them there. 

We must acknowledge as Americans that everything we have around us, we have because we are destroying other parts of the world now. Eventually we'll destroy ourselves too, but other parts of the world are already being destroyed now. Not to welcome migrants in is to say that you're kind of okay with causing mass death just to preserve your own luxuries. And I find that utterly unbearable. I can't bear it. But we need to have those conversations on those terms. And we're not having those conversations on any terms because we're still thinking about resilience. So that's basically the resilience chapter.

Rebecca: Yeah, and you introduced a term that I hadn’t heard of, too, anti-resilience, which you say is “resisting systemic violence enacted upon communities of color and the poor in the name of energy.” [Anti-resilience is] motivated by a politics of anti-racism and anti-oppression that really exposes what you're talking about, that inequality is inherent to our global emissions, generally, and really moves us towards that path to transformation. 

Genevieve: Right. And what I say also in the book is that there's a political reason to talk this way. It's not just a moral issue. (I talk about this in “Alarmist" a little bit.) We just had this global efflorescence of climate action — we had a global climate movement, and we had governments really pledging to enact policies that would lower emissions. And one of the reasons, at least in the United States, that this happened was that a policy called the Green New Deal emerged. And the Green New Deal was developed in part by Rihana Gunn-Wright, who works for the Roosevelt Institute now. And she talks about how she really developed this policy to help Black people. 

There's all this debate in the climate movement about how you get climate policy. Do you take a very sort of technocratic approach and just try to invest in technology substitution, solar panels for fossil fuels, or do you really try to enact a kind of climate justice? And many people are like, “no, we need market solutions” — or “we need industrial policy,” if you're a little bit more on the left. But you know the consensus is that confusing the climate issue with racial justice is bad because we're going to lose people who are maybe a little bit racist, and won’t be on our side if we include Black people. But here's the thing: African-Americans are the core democratic constituency. When African-Americans turn out at the polls, Democrats win, period. Look what happened in Georgia in the last election. Resolving the climate crisis needs a very big tent, including climate entrepreneurs, suburban mothers worried about their kids, youth activists, degrowth socialists, maybe. But there is no climate movement without African Americans. So it's not just a matter of our moral obligation or being okay with your own soul. Anti-oppression is how Democrats get elected and how they get forced to pass the kind of climate policy that will actually be effective.

So to me, I feel like the program is anti-resilience all the way down. Like morally, politically, technologically, ecologically, we need to create an ecologically integrated economy that is built on the principle that nobody is disposable. Because if you keep thinking that some people or some places are disposable, you're still going to have the kind of economy that spews things out thinking their costs are going to stay “over there.” But nothing is going to stay “over there.” This is a blue marble shooting through space. It's our only home and we're all in this together.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I'm glad you ended using that because in the very beginning of your book, you talk about the term we and how it's often said like, “oh, we're causing the climate crisis.” But instead, no, we collectively are not all causing the climate crisis. It's actually the select few at the very top, but we will be the answer. And so that pronoun is so powerful when used in the right context.

Genevieve: It’s weird. It's like that picture that you look at in one way and it looks like a duck, and then you look at it in another way, and it looks like a rabbit. On one hand, there is no we, because as you just said, there are some people that are causing the climate crisis and some people who are fighting them, right? On the other hand, we are all in this together. And you need a collective we to fight the people who are happy to destroy our only home, and the only life we know in the universe, just so they can keep making some more money now. So you need all sorts of different we’s.

Rebecca:Yeah, you write in the book that “we need a new collective we, me, you, everyone who reads this book, everyone who shares its ideas, need to use the power of words to fight climate propaganda and transform the deep ideologies of the fossil fuel economy,” which I think is exactly what your book is doing. And I am so grateful to have read it. It’s what we at Climate Words are trying to do too, really get the nuance out of these words and clarify what they mean and try to remove  propaganda or any co-opting. So thank you so much for spending the time with me and sharing all about these words and kind of word nerding out. 

Genevieve: I love talking to you. It was really super fun.

Rebecca: I'd love just to close, we love to ask, is there any word that you've been thinking about lately, climate or non-climate related, that you think is important right now? 

Genevieve: Yeah, I think the most important word related to climate change right now is actually freedom. I'm only starting to think about this. I think this is going to be my second climate book. But it's really clear to me that the right wing is tamping down on our rights while simultaneously claiming that decarbonizing is what’s going to curtail our freedoms. But there's also something about the way that people on ‘our side’, so called, buy into the idea that fossil fuels enable our human freedoms that makes fighting the rising right wing authoritarianism harder than it could be. So I think that people need to start thinking about how the right is supporting fossil fuels with increasingly authoritarian tactics and responding to the changes in our societies and on our planet due to global heating with increasingly authoritarian tactics. 

But we also have to think about our assumptions about freedom and ask: do we have beliefs that actually kind of mirror or recapitulate those that so easily slide into authoritarianism? I don't really have something more articulate to say about it yet because I'm just starting to think about it for the first time. But I really think that that's the next thing. Climate change and freedom. 

Rebecca: Thank you for sharing that. It's been really wonderful to talk to you.

Genevieve: It's been great to talk to you too, Rebecca. Thank you so much.