The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It is a well-written public-facing book concerned with the influence of fossil-fuel companies on climate discourse. The book’s author is Genevieve Guenther—the Founding Director of the New York City-based organization End Climate Silence. Guenther’s timely book is fixated on what she describes as the manipulative propaganda strategies of powerful fossil-fuel companies and the impact of this propaganda on climate politics. She begins her engaging book with a warning against the “fictional construct” (p. ix) of a nonspecific “we” in climate messaging, which, she bemoans, often lets fossil-fuel companies off the hook by blaming all of humanity for climate change. By contrast, Guenther expresses her aspiration for The Language of Climate Politics to inspire “a new collective ‘we’” that will “fight climate propaganda” (p. xi) as opposed to falling prey to it.

Each substantive chapter homes in on a specific propagandized word that Guenther claims is both central to “the language of climate politics” and especially problematic, including: “alarmist, cost, growth, ‘India and China,’ innovation, and resilience” (p. 2). For instance, in the chapter on “cost”—which Guenther emphasizes is “one of the most powerful propaganda terms in climate politics” (p. 48)—she laments how efforts to combat climate change are often obstructed because they are associated with negative terms like “sacrifice” and financial “burden” (p. 49). Through a fascinating historical accounting, she contends that the economist William Nordhaus and his climate change cost–benefit analysis paved the way for “fossil-fuel interests and centrist economists” to “say that the costs of climate change are small and the costs of climate action are large” (p. 50). Guenther then concludes this chapter—and the others—with proposals for practical change. To “fight climate propaganda” (p. xi) and “neutralize” (p. 75) the influence of “fossil-fuel interests and centrist economists” (p. 50), Guenther instructs her climate-concerned readers to stay cool, calm, and collected (p. 45) when speaking to the unconcerned. When specifically faced with the problematic word “cost,” Guenther tells readers to “emphasize instead the costs of climate damages” (emphasis in original, p. 75). Throughout the book, she also stresses that her 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). She also proposes a set of alternative words for people to use that are, according to Guenther, “more resistan[t] to appropriation” (p. 179), including: “climate justice” (p. 107) and “transformation” (p. 179).

Central to the book is a strong call to action. Guenther urges her fellow compatriots in the US to join her in the “fight” against powerful and polluting fossil-fuel companies. Guenther draws upon thinkers like the US climate scientist Michael Mann, who penned the book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (2021), to rally around the idea that the US must “lead the world out of the fossil-fuel era” (p. 141). In the final chapter before her afterword (which she cleverly titles, “After Words”), Guenther emphasizes how the US government’s “unprecedented mobilization of the productive forces of the economy” during World War II is just the “kind of mobilization that the world needs, in as many governments as possible,[…] to force the transformation of global systems despite authoritarian fossil-fuel resistance” (p. 183).

Guenther cites an array of climate science and quantitative economic analyses in her manuscript with the admirable goal of debunking inaccurate claims made by fossil-fuel companies, their allies, and the “misled.” There is less engagement with social, political, and/or cultural theory from the fields of communication, political science, and the interdisciplinary social sciences. The book’s analytical approach and conceptual framework are also unclear. Presumably, this is because Guenther wrote The Language of Climate Politics for a more “general” public—especially 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 does, however, open the book’s fundamental premise to critique, since no word is neutral, and even the language and terms that Guenther relies upon have less-than-sparkling histories. For example, her strong embrace of US patriotism and weighty calls to essentially beat China through a new US-led “climate Marshall Plan” (p. 142) are particularly striking. As the historian Adam Tooze noted in the September 18, 2024 edition of his Chartbook newsletter, “If there is predictable rhetorical flourish to accompany visions of American power, more often than not it is a reference to the Marshall Plan.” To this end, and via Cold War-style allusions and fearmongering about China’s robust climate policies as threatening to “the cultural supremacy of American democracy” (p. 113), Guenther echoes the zero-sum-game rationale used to justify US economic and military interference in other nations’ affairs since World War II, including the US’s extraction of fossil fuels and minerals in the so-called “underdeveloped world” as scholars such as Arturo Escobar, Thea Riofrancos, Rob Nixon, Julie Sze, and Timothy Mitchell, among others, have shown.

In the language of (United States) climate politics (both in Guenther’s book and writ large), there is a consistent and curious falling back onto the myth of American exceptionalism, in general, and a nostalgic longing for the return to an imagined World War II/early postwar US “golden age,” in particular. Guenther’s patriotic celebration of the promise of a “climate Marshall Plan” (p. 142) and her nationalistic call for the reclamation of a currently threatened global “American hegemony” (p. 141) via this Plan is troubling (and ironic) considering the fact that these US war-time and postwar liberal political-economic schemes supercharged the highly exploitative set of trading policies and (neo)imperial extractive industries that have propelled climate change, US militarism, multinational (US-based) corporate impunity, and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) right.

Guenther’s inconsistency in critiquing what she describes as “centrist economists” (p. 50) and a “centrist consensus” (p. 47) while also embracing overtly centrist (and nationalistic) political-economic visions like the Marshall Plan (p. 142) could in part stem from the way she conceptualizes “power” and “propaganda.” Although she does not explicitly define these terms, it appears that Guenther views power as a top-down mechanism of coercion and control with the bad guys—a.k.a. fossil-fuel executives—at the top pulling all of the strings. Likewise, from my reading of her book, Guenther understands propaganda as messages that are developed and deployed by these bad guys at the top, with everyone else on the bottom “unwittingly” (pp. 3 & 4) accepting and circulating these wrong ways of thinking and talking about climate politics. This sender-receiver theory of communication is commonly leveraged by technocrats (i.e., the self-declared good guys) to propose and advance their own “objective” and “evidence-based” communication “fixes” that conveniently leave highly exclusionary liberal political-economic structures—of which they unduly benefit from—solidly in place. Thus, while Guenther does nominally critique a “centrist consensus” (p. 47), she also proposes very similar types of “fixes” as centrists because of their shared understanding of power and how communication works. For instance, in addition to calling for a “climate Marshall Plan” (p. 142), the first main fix that Guenther proposes is the top-down inoculation of people from fossil-fuel propaganda by, in part, reading her book so that the currently unaware will become immune to the linguistic deception and coercion of fossil-fuel interests (pp. 7, 189). Another major fix that Guenther champions is the deployment of a set of supposedly appropriation-proof words that she claims are not as susceptible to fossil-fuel manipulation, such as the terms “climate justice” (p. 107) and “transformation” (p. 179), to “arm” (p. 189) an otherwise defenseless public.

But is this how communication really works? According to many critical communication scholars, including the renowned cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall, communication and power are much more complex than how Guenther conceptualizes them in her book. This complexity has been established and expanded upon by a wide array of researchers in the field of communication for decades. For instance, in his famous 1973 essay, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” and his 1997 edited volume, Representation, Hall describes power as non-linear, unpredictable, and involving the encoding and decoding, as well as the appropriation, reappropriation, negotiation, and contestation of meaning at all levels of society. Meaning-making and identity-formation have no clear direction or stable form, according to Hall, because people are dynamic, diverse, and always changing. Meaning and identity are fundamentally uncontrollable—whether by governments, fossil-fuel executives, technocrats, or climate communication consultants —because “the people” are not just dumb and passive pawns that are moved from one square to another in a game of chess played by a handful of elite figures at the top. Some scholars even argue that inoculation theories and linear sender–receiver models of communication are little more than fantasies of control borne from an anxious desire among elites to desperately “prove” that they are distinct from, above, and intellectually superior to “the people.” (See, for example, Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter’s arguments in their 2020 book, Reactionary Democracy.) These fantasies, in turn, serve to reaffirm the outsized political and material advantages of a historically privileged few.

In short, The Language of Climate Politics importantly underscores how language matters in climate politics through an intriguing set of examples and discussions. The book, however, tends to oversimplify the complexity of communication and shortchange the powerful potential of radical and truly bottom-up movement-building because it struggles to see beyond a liberal and US-centric status quo. This could very well be due to Guenther’s intended audience of “general” readers (based in the United States) as opposed to specialized scholars or radical political organizers. This book’s simultaneous embrace of questionable patriotic and positivistic appeals along with its compelling critique of the societal and environmental harms of fossil-fuel companies is emblematic of the tricky and vital challenge ahead of us—namely, how to collectively reckon with the national myths and elite-level fantasies that continue to legitimize and entrench exclusionary modes of governance and extractive capitalism.