Genevieve Guenther is a former Renaissance scholar who used her training in rhetoric and cultural politics to analyze how we talk about the climate crisis in a new book, “The Language of Climate Politics.” Working under the belief that our language is largely inaccurate and misleading, she suggests that we need to recognize how our speech itself reproduces fossil-fuel ideologies. Guenther draws on sociology, psychology, philosophy and literary theory to critique current forms of climate communication and craft messages to use moving forward. “The Language of Climate Politics” came out July 10, and Guenther speaks at the Harvard Book Store on Tuesday. We interviewed her the previous Tuesday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you become interested in studying the climate crisis?
I started getting really concerned about the climate crisis after I became a mom, because I started to think more about what the world might be like after I was gone. As I was reading the news and listening to the way scientists and elected officials and journalists were talking about the climate crisis, I started to feel that they weren’t talking about the crisis in ways that I had been trained to recognize as rhetorically effective. My background is in Renaissance literature, but really that means rhetoric, because to read Renaissance literature, you have to understand the principles of rhetoric.
As I kept observing people speaking about the climate crisis in a way that was not very rhetorically effective, I realized I wanted to study this. I did college-level courses in climate science, I read scholarship on climate communication, I completed Al Gore’s climate reality training. Ultimately, I started to recognize this dynamic between the right and the left where right-wing people weaponized the way scientists used the word “uncertainty” to describe climate change. In climate science, “uncertainty” is used to describe the range of possible outcomes you can predict with confidence – but the average person uses “uncertainty” to talk about something they don’t really know or aren’t sure about. Every time a scientist would talk about the uncertainty of their research while being interviewed, people on the right would see that as confirming the idea that climate change isn’t real. That’s how this misconception got so entrenched: It isn’t just that there’s disinformation coming from the right and from fossil fuel interests, it’s also getting unwittingly confirmed by our side, so to speak. After I first noticed this dynamic, I started seeing it everywhere in the public discourse about the climate crisis, and that was when I realized I had enough expertise to write a book about the language of climate politics.
How does your background in Renaissance literature contribute?
A large part of it is the training in classical forensic rhetoric. The way I have been taught to read things definitely carries over to this new topic of study. I also think there’s a connection between what was happening during the Renaissance and what’s happening now, which I think helps me understand the climate crisis and the way we have to talk about it in a unique way. The Renaissance was a couple centuries of incredible cultural and economic change, where the previous era was left behind to move into modernity. All of these new ideas were being introduced, and there was a lot of conflict because people had different views. I think we’re currently in a similar process of having to create systems, but we’re using the language of the 20th century, and even sometimes the 19th century, to do this. When people look at the future, they’re still working with those old assumptions – we’re trying to use old myths to create a new world, but those old myths don’t support the new world. That’s where the intentionality of the language we use is important.
How did you figure out what to focus on?
For a few years, I did a great deal of general information gathering, collecting papers and studies in a big folder. During that time I also spent a lot of time learning about economics, because I write a lot about climate economics in the book, but I don’t have an economics background. Ultimately, I narrowed everything down to six words that became the six chapters of my book: alarmist, cost, growth, “India and China,” innovation and resilience. Those were the words that I saw the most in the news media and in science papers and economics papers and that I heard the most in the language of policymakers and elected officials. Together, they’re making a narrative that goes something like this: “Yes, climate change is real, but to say that it’s dangerous is just alarmist. And anyway, it’s going to cost too much to phase out fossil fuels. Human flourishing relies on economic growth, so we should just write policies that support growth and try to solve the climate crisis with innovation and resilience. Especially because the U.S. shouldn’t really do anything about the climate crisis while emissions are still rising in India and China.” Once that narrative became clear, I worked through each chapter, and at the end, once I had a bird’s-eye view, I wrote the introduction.
Aside from how politicians and the media talk about climate change, does the way we speak about it matter?
We have to think about who we’re speaking with. If you’re talking to someone who’s already worried about the climate crisis, the most important thing to do is to turn the conversation to the need to phase out fossil fuels by no longer using coal, oil and gas. It’s also important to put people’s focus on the powerful people in government and in the news media who are trying to prevent the phaseout of fossil fuels from the economy, because those are the people who are making global heating worse. We’re not going to get to where we need to go until those people are taken out of power or are persuaded to change their ways. If you want a more positive message to share, once we have gotten fossil fuels out of the economy and decarbonized our systems, the vast majority of Americans will be better off. They will have more income, because they will paying much, much less for heating, electricity, transportation and health care, and they’ll be able to feel a lot more safe and secure about their children’s futures.
If you’re talking to someone who you feel is not thinking about the climate crisis very much, or doesn’t believe in it, I think a good first step is to make the connection between heat or other forms of extreme weather and fossil fuels. If someone says, “Wow, it’s really hot today,” you can say, “Yeah, climate change is pretty scary and we really need to stop using fossil fuels.” Planting the seed is great. And I think the best thing is positive reinforcement. If you’re in a conversation with someone who doesn’t seem to even be thinking about it, you can mention you use an induction cookstove, or you’re interested in getting an electric vehicle or you put solar panels on your roof and now you’re saving money on your electric bills. Those little things can go a long way.
Do you feel hopeful about the future?
I actually try not to think about hope at all, because I feel like hope relies on too much that I can’t control – I just don’t know what’s going to happen. If you had told me a few weeks ago that Joe Biden would drop out of the race and Kamala Harris would announce her candidacy for the nomination, I would not have believed you. So I think there’s no way to know what’s going to happen, and therefore instead of getting hung up on hope, I try to think about my duty. As a person with relative privilege, I consider my duty to be raising awareness about the climate crisis and contributing what I can to resolving it. I feel like I have a responsibility, and I want to do it out of love for my son and all of his friends and children everywhere. So my answer is to not worry about being hopeful, because none of us have a crystal ball. Just do the things that are going to make you feel like, at the end of the day, you have done what you could do.
Genevieve Guenther reads at 7 p.m. Tuesday from “The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It” in conversation with Martin Puchner at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free. Information is here.
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