I did not recognize the book that Morris wrote about in her review. Morris claims The Language of Climate Politics “is fixated on … the manipulative propaganda strategies of powerful fossil-fuel companies,” but this is not the case. My argument is the following. Fossil-fuel interests—defined broadly as right-wing elected officials, titans of finance, tech entrepreneurs, some scientists, engineers, and economists at elite universities, right-wing media figures, and, to be sure, oil- and gas-company executives—knowingly appropriate the discourse of liberal climate scientists, economists, journalists, politicians, and activists in order to manufacture a consensus around a propagandistic narrative that says the world can continue to use coal, oil, and gas and still manage climate change anyway. The narrative goes something like this: “Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist (or ‘fearmongering’). Anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, America should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China.” Using a Foucauldian framework that traces the appropriation and circulation of language by power, my book reveals how this fossil-fuel propaganda masquerades as the “common-sense position,” in the Gramscian sense, thereby producing the hegemonic public discourse that normalizes policies, like Democratic “all of the above” energy policies, which lead to further fossil-fuel development even as global heating accelerates. At the end of each chapter, I offer readers language they can use to combat this propaganda and help raise public support for the phase out of coal, oil, and methane gas.

Yet Morris claims in her review: “Throughout the book, [I] also [stress that my] readers must clearly explain the climate science, economics, and evidence-based policy solutions when communicating about climate change, while underlining the fact that a few ‘colluding’ (p. 185) fossil-fuel companies are the true villains at fault (e.g., see: pp. 46–47, 65, 141–142, 167–170, 185).” This is a remarkable claim. Until the last, I do not mention fossil-fuel companies at all on any of these pages of my book. On pages 46–47, I give advice on how to communicate about extreme weather and tipping points, and I discuss the research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan to try to inspire the reader to engage in civil disobedience. But I do not mention fossil-fuel companies. On page 65, I describe the economic studies that show decarbonization is a global benefit that would raise the real incomes of the working class—and, indeed, the majority. Again, I never mention fossil-fuel companies. Without any reference to such companies, on pages 141–142 I give advice about how to talk about China’s green electrification and its massive climate policy, the 1+N framework, while offering thoughts on how to manage coal, oil, and gas phaseout across national borders under an International Hydrocarbon Agency. (Incidentally, page 142 is the only place in my book where I refer to the Marshall Plan, in this sentence: “Arguably India could be brought on board with a kind of climate Marshall Plan: a treaty-established fund for India’s investments in solar farms, flexible power grids, energy-storage facilities, and so on.” This is hardly a ringing endorsement for the American exceptionalism that Morris claims I promote.) On pages 167–170, I explain how misinformation about carbon removal is enabled by the neoclasssical economic assumptions informing the Integrated Assessment Models in IPCC reports. No fossil fuel companies are mentioned in this section either. Finally, on page 185, the last page of the book, I speak about my personal sense that taking up climate change, and resisting “the forces of destruction,” including “the fossil fuel industry and the governments that support it,” can give meaning to your life and help you construct your legacy as someone who cares for future generations. The disparity between what my book says, and what Morris claims it says, is notable.

One final point. Morris suggests I wrote The Language of Climate Politics for “Americans from the United States who are already concerned about climate change but may not have reflected on the words that they use to express their concern.” This is only partly correct. To decide on the target readership for my book, I used a schema called “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” developed by the researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (see, e.g., Megan Ayers et al.’s 2024 piece in Climatic Change, “Changes in Global Warming’s Six Americas: an analysis of repeat respondents”). From that schema, I segmented out the voters not just “concerned” but also “alarmed” about climate change. Together, these two groups form a cross-partisan majority. But as I lay out in my Introduction, this majority is conflicted about climate change: on the one hand, they want the United States to achieve its climate targets, but on the other hand, only minorities of even Democrats support ending fossil fuels. My book tries to address this political contradiction. And it actually does so, at least in the focus-group context. According to polling done by End Climate Silence and Lake Research Partners, the messages in the book raise support for the phase out of coal, oil, and gas among Democrats and Republicans concerned and alarmed about climate change by up to 10 points (see https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b71db17365f0230bbf7aa7c/t/6638da80ef77eb7199d005f2/1715001984874/1-Polling-LCP-Messages.pdf). Insofar as they might circulate through a captured, fractured, and polluted media environment, these messages are neither “fixes” nor “top-down communication,” but contingent interventions that can help shift the public conversation away from the techno-solutions of green capital and toward the systemic phase out of fossil fuels, thereby contributing to exactly the bottom-up, radical movement building that Morris and I both say in our books is necessary to any politics that will halt global heating.