I’ve structured my brief reply to Guenther’s review around two of her misreadings of my book: (1) that I deny the physical existence of climate change via a focus on “identity” and (2) that I define my book’s central theory of apocalyptic authoritarianism as a “structure of feeling” that is “produced” by journalism. I conclude with an interpretation of what these misrepresentations of my book’s analysis and argument reveal about the differences in our projects’ conceptualization of power and meaningful political change.

First, I will address Guenther’s assertion that my book’s historical and critical approach denies the physical existence of climate change. I want to be very clear: this is an inaccurate claim. My book’s main thesis emphasizes how the structural/political-economic causes and the on-the-ground/material impacts of climate change are discursively obscured and erased in US climate journalism via four recurrent tropes (tropes which also appear in Guenther’s book), including: “(1) appeals to nationalism and discursive processes of Othering, (2) the celebration of planetary-scale ‘solutions,’ (3) the admiration of visionary sage figures, and (4) necropolitical claims of the ‘inevitable’ climate deaths of racialized Others” (p. 5). Nowhere do I state or imply that climate change is a “video projection in front of which struggles over identity and belonging play out” or a “moral panic” (in Guenther’s words). While I do critique positivist climate social science research and exclusionary reporting practices, I do not claim that climate change is immaterial. My critique of positivism in some social science studies of climate change lies in their elision of political and historical contexts—which many critical scholars within and beyond the field of cultural studies agree must be contended with to fundamentally grapple with the root causes and various impacts of climate change. My call for more attention to social complexity and different ways of knowing beyond mathematical equations, IPCC reports, and planetary-scale models does not make me (or Jan Selby) a “climate contrarian.” Maligning critical scholars who critique positivism and who question oversimplified and all-encompassing proclamations like “climate change causes civil wars” by mislabeling them as “climate contrarians” sets a dangerous precedent. As I show in my book, this line of reasoning undergirds reactionary forms of politics where traditionally privileged figures denigrate the so-called “woke” left as dangerously obsessed with “identity” and a grave threat to “western civilization.” Acts of physical policing and the detainment of primarily young people of color and leftists who are deemed “violent” and “militant” often accompany these discursive denigrations—as Stuart Hall, for instance, showed decades ago in Policing the Crisis and as my book shows today.

Second, I do not define apocalyptic authoritarianism as “a structure of feeling” or as “produced” or caused by climate journalism because I do not conceptualize power as linear or top-down, as Guenther does. Journalism cannot cause authoritarianism, but it can work to legitimize and normalize authoritarianism. My book shows how Donald J. Trump’s presidential election in 2016 ignited a palpable sense of unease and anxiety about the present and future for many Americans. These national anxieties, in turn, influenced and limited how traditional journalists came to interpret and report on climate change. As I detail at length in my book, apocalyptic authoritarianism is a backward-looking and reactionary mode of politics that took root within these specific post-2016 contexts and was/is discursively legitimized and entrenched by national news media; it is not a “structure of feeling” or the result of a singular “bad” actor.

Overall, Guenther’s sweeping dismissal of critical and cultural scholarship as misguided “identity” politics demonstrates our very different understandings of power and what constitutes “transformative” responses to climate change. Guenther’s book presents power in decontextualized and black-and-white terms, with fossil-fuel companies as the singular source of all evil. These bad guys, according to Guenther, must be similarly overthrown by virtuous American saviors as the United States supposedly “defeat[ed] Nazism” during World War II as opposed to through radical movement-building and structural change. Critical and cultural scholars view power in more complex terms than this. My book, accordingly, uses a historically contextualized and critical analysis of news media to grapple with how the authority and impunity of fossil-fuel companies and other antidemocratic actors are culturally legitimized in the United States. I do this by attending to wider constellations of power and deeper discursive and material structures of capital—structures that were greatly expanded during World War II and the postwar periods, which Guenther celebrates in her book and again in her review. My book, in turn, calls for a collective reckoning with these structures and the national myths that normalize them. The ongoing violence of settler-colonialism, extractive capitalism, militarized nationalism, and the policing of racialized “Others” must be contended with to meaningfully address the root causes and material ramifications of climate change in robustly democratic ways. Contrary to a US-centric and elite-designed “fix,” what my book calls for are pluriversal forms of climate politics (and journalism) that center the lived experiences and knowledges of many different people from many different places for truly transformative responses to climate change.