End Climate Silence: Genevieve Guenther
September 26th, 2024
”Get coal, oil, and methane gas out of our systems.”
We discuss deepening our understanding of the climate crisis, the urgent need for decarbonization, and our role in speaking truth about phasing out fossil fuels.
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School. Her most recent book is The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It.
Genevieve’s civic action toolkit recommendations are:
Call your elected representatives and demand policies to phase out fossil fuels.
If extreme weather comes up in conversation, connect the dots to climate change and say: “We really need to phase out fossil fuels so we can halt global heating.”
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Read The Language of Climate Politics:
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Genevieve Guenther
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Genevieve Guenther Transcription
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm Mila Atmos, and I'm a global citizen in New York who's deeply curious about how to build a brighter future.
On this show, we take big ideas about civic life and democracy and turn them into action items for you and me. It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport, so we're here to bring you conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic issues and share clear, actionable ways for us to make impact. After all, tomorrow starts today.
When we think and talk about climate, I feel like we're afflicted by a kind of paralysis that goes something like this. We're all responsible for the warming planet, and it's going to kill us all. But many of us don't really know what to do. We've heard that we have to decarbonize, and we're hazy on what that means. So we think the solution is to drive electric cars, to stop using plastic straws, or become vegan. None of these things will actually lead to systems change, let alone decarbonization. Our guest is Doctor Genevieve Guenther. She's the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School. Her most recent book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It is out now.
Welcome, Genevieve. Thank you for joining us.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:02:03] Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.Mila Atmos: [00:02:07] So first of all, your book is super good, super accessible. I really enjoyed it. Not only does it debunk a lot of common misconceptions, but it is a clear how-to guide on ending climate silence. So before we get into the how-to, let's start with
the basics. If you could start fresh and explain the climate crisis to someone who is new to the conversation, what would you say? How would you frame this?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:02:31] Yeah, so we have built a world society, a global economy, which is powered by coal, oil, and gas, which together are called fossil fuels. And burning these fossil fuels is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that carbon dioxide is essentially creating a blanket around our planet, preventing heat from escaping back into space. It's trapping too much energy into the climate system. So the temperature of the planet is going up. Quite rapidly. More rapidly, we think, than any other time in geological history. And this heat and the increased energy in our planetary system is increasing extreme weather. It's changing the way the planet functions. Rain is dropping on places where it didn't used to rain. So there was a huge rainstorm in the Sahara desert just a couple of weeks before we recorded this podcast, and it's drying up other places. It's making it harder to grow food. So this trapping of heat in our planetary climate system is creating a climate crisis, and the planet is going to continue to heat up, and our climate is going to continue to break down until we phase out fossil fuels and create what's called a net zero emissions economy, which means that any carbon dioxide that our activities emit into the atmosphere are going to be removed again through human technology and what plants do naturally, which is basically eat carbon dioxide out of the air. And at that point, we won't be adding any more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And within a few years, still, for the next couple of decades, at least, global heating will halt. And this is what we have to do in order to preserve the stability of our civilizations and our ability to grow food and drink water.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:40] So, like I mentioned, we know we have to decarbonize. And I mentioned, of course, that many people don't know exactly what that means, right. So tell us what decarbonization would entail. How do we get to net zero?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:04:52] Yeah. So the climate conversation to date has mostly been focused on what are known as emissions, sort of what is released by the burning of fossil fuels and other economic activities like making steel or growing food, etc.. People have said that decarbonization involves, "reducing emissions," sort of putting less pollution into the atmosphere when we do the things that we do to create economic growth. But this way of understanding the problem is slightly misleading because, strictly speaking, yes, we need to bring our emissions down. Indeed, we need to bring
them down essentially to zero. But it only talks about the sort of back end. Whereas the truth is, what we really need to do is get coal, oil, and methane gas out of our systems. We have to substitute in clean energy for this dirty fossil energy, and we have to start innovating industrial processes so we can produce heat, make steel, build our buildings without actually using coal, oil, and gas to power that kind of economic activity, substituting them in for clean sources of energy that actually will make our lives better right now by helping us save money. Because of course, sunlight is essentially free. Once you install our solar panel, you basically stop paying for your electricity. They will make our lives better right now by helping us save money on energy, and also improving our health. So 8 million people globally a year die from the effects of climate pollution. And that's more than the number of people who died from Covid, like it's a yearly emergency that we've just normalized. So really the key thing is that's the only way we're going to halt global heating and stop our planet from spiraling out of control and making it impossible for us to have safe communities and essentially an ongoing human civilization. So I'm trying in this book to show how not just sort of, you know, climate deniers on the right, but very often sort of people on the center left, policymakers, economists, sometimes scientists, and even climate advocates themselves fail to frame the task ahead of us in that way. And so it creates this kind of false belief that actually we can keep using fossil fuels and still halt global heating anyway. And this is not true. So I hope I show in the book why this is not true, how these false beliefs get created. But then I also give the reader new language to talk about the science, the economics, the geopolitics, and just sort of the psychology of climate change that will keep phasing out fossil fuels at the center of the conversation from here on in.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:08] Well, thank you for explaining it so clearly. I was actually at a dinner over the summer, and we were talking about climate change. This is before I read your book. And she was talking about, you know, this, this misconception that we can continue to have coal-firing plants that give us electricity. And we were talking about the planet, and the planet is dying, quote unquote. And I said, "actually, no, the planet is not dying. You know, the planet will continue to live. It's humans who will start dying and already are. It's about human life, not about the planet." And she was so surprised to hear this that I think it just blew her mind that I said, "no, people are just talking about it in a way that obscures the fact that this planetary crisis is dangerous to humans, not to the planet in and of itself." But so we are clearly a long ways off from actually achieving
decarbonization. In fact, we don't even want to talk about the climate, right? I mentioned this in the intro that many of us are plagued by a kind of paralysis on the subject, and I think that's because we feel like we're not equipped, we're not experts. But you argue that ending climate silence is essential. It's really important. And you suggest that willing participants deliver a three-part message. And the first part is to stress that climate change will be catastrophic. And most of us have a really vague understanding about this. I dare say that Americans, by and large, think that they're insulated from the worst. What exactly does catastrophic mean?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:09:42] Well, I mean, it means a lot of different things. That's what's so frightening, is that it doesn't just mean one thing. So, for example, there is this planetary process called the AMOC current, and it's this grand current that sort of cycles billions of tons of ocean water up the east coast of the United States into the Arctic Ocean. And that brings the heat from the tropics up into the northern regions of the planet. And then for complicated biophysical reasons, this current sinks below lighter and warmer waters. And as it does that, it releases its heat into the atmosphere. And this is what makes Europe temperate, because Europe is actually at the same latitude as northern Canada. And if it weren't for this AMOC current, It would be very cold and very stormy and almost uninhabitable in Europe. This current also controls where the monsoon rains hit on our planet, and then finally it brings heat out of the tropics. And if this current stops doing that, then essentially the equatorial band of our planet will again become uninhabitable, where billions of people currently live. So even as recently as I would say five years ago, scientists thought that there was no chance of this current being at all destabilized by the global heating that they were expecting us to see in the 21st century. But increasingly, there have been new signs that this current actually might be slowing down, and that there is a statistical chance that it could stop entirely in the 21st century. And I'm a mom. My son was born in 2010, and if he's lucky, his life is going to play out over the 21st century when either this current will stop or it will continue. So this is not just some sort of speculative danger for future generations. This is something that could potentially threaten the stability of the world for the children we have in our homes today. Another thing is that many of the breadbaskets, the places where humanity grows food, are starting to see instability in their agricultural production. So some years are fine. This year has been a good year actually, but for the two years before this year, agricultural production was very much curtailed by not only heat, but also drought, and indeed floods. Floods are also something that threatens our fields and
our farms. And so you might have noticed that the price of olive oil has gone up, the price of coffee has gone up, the price of some of our staples have gone up. And the consultancy McKinsey & Co have estimated that there is a chance that we are going to see multiple breadbasket failure within the next 10 to 15 years if global warming continues down the trajectory it's on now. And that leaves out the kind of economic and health effects of extreme weather disasters like heat waves or storms or wildfires, which will also be going on simultaneously. So when you think of climate change and the potential that it could be catastrophic, you have to imagine all of these things happening in decades all at once. And you have to understand that once this breakdown occurs, you can't recover from it again. There's no way to sort of like go back and do it over. We don't get a do over. So the best way to think about it is that climate change is kind of like a cancer. So you notice it's happening. There are some early symptoms, but you have to catch it and you have to cure it before it metastasizes out of control. The real tumor, of course, is not climate change. Those are the symptoms. The real cancer are fossil fuels. We have to get our fossil fuels out of our planetary body, as it were, so that we can halt this disease and our children can have a livable future.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:20] Right. So let's talk about who the people are, who are responsible for this, because talking about climate change we already established is uncomfortable, in part because we also have a feeling that we're all deeply complicit in the state of the world. Right. And of course, we're told that it's our responsibility to stop using plastic or to stop eating beef. But actually, that's not true. We are actually beholden to powerful fossil fuel interests, and climate silence provides cover for them. So who are the main actors behind the efforts to protect the status quo?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:14:53] So the way I think about it is that there's a kind of continuum of responsibility. On one side, there are the billions of people on our planet who live on less than $6 a day. Like literally half the population of our planet live on less than $6 a day and emit almost no carbon at all. There are the people, even in the sort of wealthy world, who are doing everything they can to use fossil fuels as little as possible. I mean, that is part of the task, but really, to sort of take political action to make this systemic change that none of us can do alone. Those are the people sort of on one side of the continuum. Our children are there, too. Our children are innocent. On the other side of the continuum are, as you said, these powerful fossil fuel interests. People in industry, people in business, energy executives, their allies in governments across the
world, these people who are doing everything they can to keep fossil fuels in the mix and to block the transition to a safe future for our children. Those are the people that we all need to be focusing on getting those people exposed, as I would say, the evil doers that they are, because there's no excuse. Nobody can pretend that they didn't know. They've known since the 70s. Keeping our focus on those people and devoting ourselves to trying to get those people out of power and putting people in power, whether that's ourselves or our representatives who will lead the world through this transition into a better future, where we will be able to understand and integrate how our economic activity partners with the biosphere. How everyone will be healthier, happier, much better off at the end. And of course, we will have preserved this miracle that we've been given, which is an inhabitable planet and a livable future.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:16] We will continue our conversation with Genevieve in a moment, and when we come back, we'll discuss the complicity of the US government, the climate benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act and this week's Civic Spark, a small action that can help ignite big change.
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Mila Atmos: [00:20:07] And now let's return to my conversation with Genevieve Guenther.
Well, it's pretty obvious to pinpoint the people who work, for example, for ExxonMobil, right. Or any other big oil company. But it's a little bit less obvious to know that the US government has, in fact, been deeply complicit in all this. And we should be clear here about the role of the U.S. government, not only at the state level or the federal level, but also on the international stage. You know, the U.S. government, especially under Democratic presidents, likes to claim it's for climate action, but actually it isn't. And in fact, the United States has repeatedly thrown a wrench in international cooperations. Tell us a little bit more about that. How has the United States prevented climate action?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:20:56] Yeah, so this was a really shocking thing that I learned when I was researching this book. So, you know, what the book does is it takes on kind of the fossil fuel propaganda talking points that are lobbed by fossil fuel interests, but also sometimes used by, as I said, people on our side, so to speak. And one of those talking points is that it kind of doesn't matter what the United States does or what Europe does or what the developing world does, because quote unquote, India and China are all in on fossil fuels and their emissions are going up. So, you know, all the lack of progress is the fault of, "India and China." And what I discovered is, as you said over the history of international climate negotiations, the United States has been at the forefront of preventing any legally binding treaty that would require, legally obligate, nations to phase out fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas, or even just have legally binding emissions targets. They have consistently put a wrench into those negotiations, even
though Democratic administrations have presented themselves as the global leaders in international climate change negotiations, and by and large, the American news media has accepted the framing, often advanced by Democratic administrations themselves with their allies in the UK, that it's India and China who blocked a stronger agreement or a legally binding treaty. And this is actually not true. So that was a big shock to me. But what paled in comparison to the biggest shock that I had researching and writing this book was that, yes, the Republicans are all in on what Donald Trump calls "drill, baby, drill." But the Democrats have this kind of ambivalence towards fossil fuels, and very often they make the argument that we can do both. We can increase what they call domestic energy production, which really just means extraction on American land, generally for export. And we can also meet our climate goals by supporting clean energy. But this is actually not true. The scientific body of the UN, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said recently in 2023 that existing fossil fuel infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for halting global heating at 2°C, that we may have a risk of setting off tipping points between 1.5 and 2°C, so we can't actually have any more fossil fuels, and I in some sense feel for Democratic administrations. It's very, very, very hard to try to manage or even encourage the wind down of an industry that has so much control over American politics through their ability to manipulate, supply, and then influence gasoline prices influence inflationary pressures for better or for worse, depending on how they manipulate supply. So it's not an easy challenge, but I don't even think they're taking up that challenge because I think that they genuinely believe that we can do both and still meet our climate goals. And I think they also believe, because they've been told this by economists, that even if climate change is going to be devastating to poor people, to the what's called the developing world, by and large the United States will remain, as you suggested, insulated from its worst effects by its infrastructure and its power. And that's one of the chapters in the book, too, like, why are these economists making that promise? And I try to show in the book that this promise is not based on any actual evidence. It's just based on a sort of faith in human ingenuity and the capacity of technology to kind of substitute for nature. So, yes, the Republicans are fossil fuel supporters, but the Democrats themselves have this ambivalent -- not all Democrats, but most centrist Democrats have this ambivalent -- view of what it's going to take to really halt global heating and resolve the climate crisis, because the truth is, we can't do it if we keep fossil fuels in our economies.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:56] Well, I would say my perception from the outside is that Democrats are, uh, are just being hypocrites. I mean, like to say that they genuinely believe that we can continue down this path, you know, to do both and have a livable planet. I just don't buy that. I mean, I don't buy that Obama believes that or that Biden believes that. I think they know better. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're like, I don't know, the low information voter who doesn't know what decarbonization means. And they think it's plastic straws, right? So... We can give them the benefit of the doubt. But you made a mention just now of 2o tipping points. Tell us a little bit more about that. Just so that everybody who's listening understands what a tipping point is, what it means to go to 2o. You know, what's the difference between 1.5o and 2o.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:26:45] Right. So these are degrees of Celsius 1o, 2o. It doesn't seem like a lot of heat. But let's just think about the analogy to having a fever. Most of us have a body temperature of 98.6°F, right? And if we got a fever that raised our body temperature to 101°F, that would feel pretty crummy. We would absolutely be sick. So you have to understand that each degree of Celsius of warming is kind of like the planet getting that kind of a fever, which is a symptom of a real illness. And so that heat has kind of systemic effects. So to go back to the current that I was talking about earlier, one of the things that makes this current able to sink in the Arctic Ocean and release its heat to make Europe temperate, is the fact that as it moves north alongside the coastline of the United States, it evaporates a little bit from the heat, and as it evaporates, it gets saltier. And so that's part of what makes it heavy enough to sink underneath the water in the Arctic Ocean. But what's happening is because the planet is heating up, ice is pouring into this current from the Arctic Circle and from Greenland, where ice is just melting at like astronomically big rates. You know, ice that has been in place for hundreds of thousands of years is now pouring into the sea. And so this freshwater is changing the composition of this current, which is one of the reasons that scientists are fearing that it's not going to be sinking as readily, because the sort of delicate balance that allows these processes to repeat year after year after year is being destabilized. So if this current stops, the planet will tip into a different kind of climatic system, and it will not go back for hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of years. So that current, the AMOC current, shutting down is considered this tipping point that once it happens, you can't reverse it. And scientists have warned that the risk of these tipping points being tipped, the risk of this sort of climate breakdown that cannot be put
back together again, increases massively in between 1.5°C of warming and 2o of warming.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:35] We're already there though, right?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:29:36] Well, no, we're actually at 1.2o of warming. And I know that seems kind of close to 1.5o, but you have to put an enormous amount of energy into an entire planet to raise the temperature these tenths of a degree. So we're close. I mean, the risk is that we're going to cross 1.5°C within possibly a decade and a half, if not two decades. But we still have the possibility. We still have the capacity to halt global heating and to prevent these things from happening. It's as if we're kind of driving towards a cliff. And right now our brakes are still functioning. But as we get closer to this cliff, our brakes are going to get weaker and weaker and weaker. And that at a certain point, we're not going to be able to slam on the brakes at all. And we're definitely going to go over the cliff. We're not there yet, but that's a future we can see ahead of us if we do not phase out fossil fuels starting today, essentially, and create a net zero economy that works for everybody.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:44] Right. So this is a good time to return to our talking points. So part three of your talking points of messaging on this is to show how decarbonizing, how transforming our systems will have immediate benefits. Right. I think this is the other thing that people lose, in a way. It's it's so abstract, right. Because we're baked into the system or the system is baked into us, however you want to think about it. So the main talking points we hear, of course, are the opposite, that it's all about the costs of transforming this world. The lost jobs, the lost economic growth, the lost capital. So what are the immediate benefits?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:31:19] So there is no we, right? It's not like we can say that decarbonizing is going to be good for everybody on this planet. Obviously it's not going to be good for fossil fuel executives. You know, it's not going to be good for billionaires who have carbon footprints in the tens of thousands because they have a private jet that they take like we take the train and, you know, a huge yacht or whatever. So there is a subset of people on this planet for whom climate action is not going to be great, but literally 90% of the people on this planet are going to be financially better off after we've gotten fossil fuels out of our system, and we are running our planet on clean energy, our
electricity bills are going to go down, our heating and cooling bills are going to go down our transportation bills are going to go down, and our health care costs are going to go down because as I said, millions of people are dying from air pollution and not just in sort of polluting global South countries. A Duke University economist named Drew Shindell has testified to Congress that the health care and labor savings from America decarbonizing -- even if no other country in the world does it -- are so large that it will pay for the cost, the upfront investments in clean energy, with billions of dollars left over. So yes, absolutely. You have to shell out money to put solar panels on your roof. You have to be able to buy an EV. You have to build out a public transportation system that actually connects people in the suburbs to their malls, where they shop or their kids to their schools, so that you don't have to get into a gas fired car every day. But they're not costs in that you've lost that money. They're investments that you will get the money back in abundance within a few years. That said, most people don't even have an extra $400 in their pockets, let alone like money to put solar panels on their roof. Many people don't even own property, which is totally legit. But this is why we need this kind of transformative policy vision that actually enables these investments to be made collectively so that people don't feel them coming out of their pockets. Let me give you this example. So the financial crisis of 2007-2008, that was an economic hit to almost everybody. But the US government stabilized the financial system by paying out 17 or 18, I think it was, billion dollars or, excuse me, trillion dollars. And I would defy anybody to say exactly how much of that money came out of their own pocket directly. The point is, is that these huge projects can be done by our governments with some combination of public and private money, but mostly public money that will actually not only enable our children to have a livable future, but will also immediately make all Americans financially better off and healthier. And also, I would argue, happier, because even if you don't really think about climate change, I think this sort of just widespread sense of unease, this widespread feeling that something is wrong, is very much bound up with our perception that that the weather is different. It's hotter than it used to be. Things are more expensive. Something is off and that thing is climate change.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:10] Well, you mentioned just now that we need public infrastructure. We need public dollars, but we really also need public policy. And in this time and space, people are, like you already said, blaming India and China. But as it turns out, China has a very comprehensive public policy that anticipates and prepares for a future without fossil fuels. So how would you describe what's happening in China?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:35:37] I know this was another mind blowing thing I discovered. So China has passed not only a whole of government climate policy, but a whole of society climate program to achieve its goal of peaking emissions, its own emissions in 2030 and achieving a net zero emissions economy by 2060. So it has set out plans and steps for those plans to be implemented by the entire Communist Party bureaucracy, with a verification structure in place for every aspect of the Chinese economy energy, industry, finance, imports and exports, the built environment, agriculture, nature, just everything. It is also required now that Chinese schools teach about climate change and climate policy, that universities have competitions for climate innovation, that they institute departments of climate studies. It has started tying its interfacing with the developing world to its climate goals, and it actually has set out a policy architecture that is more elaborate, more comprehensive, but also more granular than any other countries in the world. And I know that Xi actually has been a long standing environmentalist. He came up with this concept of the ecological civilization decades ago, where he envisioned a whole planet, really, where the economy worked hand in hand with the biosphere, so that it sort of recognized which ecosystems needed to be preserved, which needed to be regenerated, which were being exploited too much. And he's presented this as part of his vision for 21st century, led by China. And they've been planning for this really since the Copenhagen climate summit of 2009. After the Copenhagen climate summit, they came home, and within a year China designated solar batteries, electric vehicles, conservation, all as strategic emerging industries. This was 2009 and not only
Mila Atmos: [00:38:09] 15 years ago.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:38:09] Yes, 15 years ago. Not only did they subsidize them with, you know, concerted public money, they also sort of just encouraged lots of innovation, lots of failure, lots of attempting to learn as you do. And now, essentially, not only have they absolutely cornered the global market on all clean energy technologies, they're actually deploying these technologies at home at a scale that just leaves every other nation in the world in the dust. So, yes, their fossil fuel emissions have been rising. Doesn't seem like they're going to rise in 2024. They seem to maybe be stable this year. I don't know if that means that they've reached their goal to peak emissions early, but it does seem like 2024 they're going to be stable. And they've actually thought
very carefully about how to time the phasing out of fossil fuels, because they're also very clear in their policy that you need to substitute clean energy for fossil fuels. And you haven't heard any American, or I would argue even European policymaker, say something as stark and pointed about the role of fossil fuels in a future ecological civilization. So I don't know. I think that it's very impressive. People delude themselves when they think that China is the bad actor here. I think that if America doesn't get off its proverbial butt, the 21st century is going to be the Chinese century.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:34] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I was really surprised when I read your book that they have halted new coal plants outside of China, and that they have also tied their road and belt infrastructure programs to being fossil fuel free, you know, going into the future. So, as you said, the U.S. has to get off its butt. And I'm a little bit surprised that the US government in all of its anti-China talk has allowed itself to be in this position and having this much, much weaker hand, you know, 15 years hence since 2009, and has not yet committed its vast resources to resolving the planetary crisis and be a leader, because, of course, a livable planet is in the public interest of the United States. So if the US wants to be a leader rivalling China, theoretically, what would it have to do?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:40:30] So in 2022, Congress passed a law called the Inflation Reduction Act, which was part of a bigger program that Biden proposed called Build Back Better. And initially, this law had not only sort of carrots in it, not only tax credits for clean energy or clean energy manufacturing. It also had sticks, like there were some pollution standards that it was trying to impose, and those all got taken out by the end. What it does is it offers consumers tax credits for buying zero carbon machines for their personal consumption. So heat pumps, induction stoves, electric vehicles, etc. but it also provides tax credits for people who want to establish clean energy manufacturing, whether that's solar or batteries or electric vehicles. On United States territory using materials sourced in the United States. And so President Biden essentially has gotten started with what China did in 2009, realizing that these are the industries of the future and trying to get them established domestically, you know, not just to de-risk the supply chain, but also because we need so many of them that they should be manufactured in the United States. And it will also help to repair some of the economic damage that was done by globalization and the offshoring of so much manufacturing and industry to countries in Asia and the global South. So that is a very
good first step. But it's not enough. Just let's take electric vehicles as an example. Even if you subsidize the manufacture and the purchase of electric vehicles, a lot of people have a lot of range anxiety. They worry that they won't be able to take a long trip and charge their car very easily. And so the Biden administration has been trying to build more charging infrastructure across America, using a kind of public private partnership model, where you try to get Elon Musk to build your charging infrastructure or other car manufacturers. And this is just not going to work. I mean, we didn't electrify the rural regions of this country with public / private partnerships. This is a public works project and in itself could create thousands of good paying jobs and help revitalize the middle of the country, especially states where people might feel resentment as if they've been left behind by the financialization of the American economy and the globalization of manufacturing. So we need a public works project that will build out our nation for clean energy. We need a national transmission system so that we can do solar in the sunny part of the country, and wind in the windy part of the country, and combine it all together in one grid. But none of that is going to happen while the Senate remains as it is, basically a reactionary slave-holding original institution. And we still have a filibuster. So what we need is filibuster reform. We might need reform of the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is now on the side of the fossil fuel interests and actively trying to block the passage of climate policy by essentially making up doctrines, saying that Congress never gave federal agencies the right to regulate power production in the United States or pollution from power plants. You know, now, the EPA can't do that. So we are basically fighting against powerful interests who are trying to block the transformation of the world to keep fossil fuels in our mix. I mean, I just, every time I say that out loud, it just seems so unbelievable to me. But that is the case. And so we need to have a kind of political transformation. And then once that transformation is achieved, we can use the incredible provisioning and logistical power of the United States governments to do this kind of public works, to make clean energy available, to make it easy, to make it affordable for everybody so that people can just switch. I think people just want to make sure they can get to work. They can feed their families, they can turn on the lights, they can have their vacations. Most Americans don't really care whether their that all comes from fossil fuels or the sun, as long as they can live their lives. And that is something that public policy can achieve. If we're serious about the threat, and we actually take this as a struggle over who has power in the government, and we need to give power to the people who are going to lead this transformation.
Mila Atmos: [00:45:26] Right. I want to talk about people power in a minute. But before we do that, I wanted to ask you about public policy that has clearly worked in this space, because I feel like we can't only talk about the bad things, we also have to point to the public policy that has been working and use it as an example to galvanize people to continue to speak up. So what is the public policy victory that you point to that has made a difference?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:45:49] No, I mean, I definitely think the Inflation Reduction Act is a triumph. Imperfect though imperfect, I think it's a triumph. I mean, there's already been massive manufacturing investments in, you know, mostly purple and red states, which I think is a really interesting thing. So it's going to take a little while for that to have political effects. But it does seem like there is a real resurgence of manufacturing in the United States due to this policy. And it's all clean energy manufacturing. So there is a way in which we are getting a really important sort of constituency in our politics on board with the clean energy transition by tying their livelihoods to this new form of energy. So, for example, Trump and his Project 2025 agenda promises to try to repeal everything in the Inflation Reduction Act. But 18 Republican members of the House wrote to the speaker and said, we don't want you to support these repeals because the investments spearheaded by the IRA, or IRA, are creating new opportunities in our communities and helping to create jobs, and we don't want that to go away. So there is actually this sort of new political coalition that's slowly being built out of this very canny strategy of putting climate investments in red and purple states. So I would take that as a win 100%.
Mila Atmos: [00:47:20] Yeah, that's interesting because of course, so many members of Congress are beholden to the influence of corporate lobbyists, you know, not just in Congress but also in local politics. But like you said, there have been a lot of investments in red and purple states, notably Texas. So much wind power, i think they are maybe number one in the country now, which is unexpected. So you're going to have a very strong wind lobby now in a way that might rival, of course, a fossil fuel lobby. But nonetheless, it's really an uphill battle for everyday Americans to be heard. And we are increasingly turning to ballot initiatives to make public policy decisions ranging from reproductive freedom to minimum wage, but also on climate. And in fact, there have been well over 100 ballot measures on climate going back to the 1970s.
What do you think, though, it's going to take to build a mass movement for climate action?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:48:17] I have three answers to that question, hopefully. Mila Atmos: [00:48:21] Go for it.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:48:22] First of all, let me say that I did not write my book for the people who are disengaged with the climate crisis or the people who are skeptical about whether climate change is real or not. I wrote this book for people who feel like they understand that the climate crisis is real. They're concerned about it, but they don't necessarily prioritize it, and they certainly don't know that solving it involves phasing out fossil fuels. So that's the sort of slice of the American electorate that I wrote this book for. Right. So this kind of messaging where you tell them that if we don't halt global heating, climate change is going to be catastrophic, and here are the people who are blocking us. Let's get them out of power so we can build a better world. That's the people for whom that messaging is effective. So we did some focus group polling on the messages I develop in my book, and they increased the support for phasing out fossil fuels among concerned and alarmed Democrats and Republicans by up to ten points. So we have to mobilize the people who are concerned about climate crisis, the climate crisis, but who aren't actually sort of mobilized or who don't prioritize it yet.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:49:42] So that's job number one. Number two is we have to get the sort of, you know, skeptical or disengaged people on board, but not by messaging about climate change to these people, because the issue has been so successfully polarized, and now it's become a kind of badge of right wing identity to be a climate denier, and you're not going to be able to intervene into that. The social norm of that is much too strong. But if you make clean energy part of people's livelihoods, right, if you make it part of their bottom line, then they can support that. They can support economic growth, they can support having more money in their pockets without feeling like they're giving an inch on climate change. So that's what you have to do with that constituency. But then, of course, the third thing to do is to really communicate to policy makers who I think don't really always know.
Mila Atmos: [00:50:44] Okay. I believe you.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:50:46] Like, I didn't know.... No, no, no, I didn't even know. Like, when I started working on climate change, I didn't even know. I was still thinking about it in terms of emissions reductions and just the way you sort of hear about it in the news media. I don't think people actually know. So the next job is for everybody listening to this podcast to call their elected officials, their congressional representative, their two senators and the white House, maybe once a month, maybe every two weeks, and just say, "I want you to pass policies to phase out fossil fuels." Not just "I want you to prioritize climate change, or I want you to care about the environment." No, specifically say, "I want you to support phasing out fossil fuels." And I really believe that if they start hearing that from their constituents regularly, that will actually start to shift the needle. You would be surprised by how seriously they take communications from their constituents, and they are subject to so much lobbying from industry, from right wing think tanks, from centrists who are telling them that people don't care about climate change and they need to hear from us. They need to hear that counter voice. And once they do, they're going to have a much fuller picture of what the challenge is and what they really need to get on board to do. And I truly believe that that is what's going to help shift the needle.
Mila Atmos: [00:52:19] Yeah. Well said. So on Future Hindsight, we're always looking to be the best kind of citizen we can be and to build our civic action toolkit. So we always ask each guest for a civic spark, a small action that can help ignite big change. And you just gave us one. So I'm going to ask you for another one.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:52:35] Sure.
Mila Atmos: [00:52:35] We should call our electeds. So what's another clear, simplestep we can each take to end at least climate silence.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:52:44] Okay, so in addition to calling your electeds twice a month, really doesn't take more than ten minutes. It's so easy, but so impactful. The other thing I would recommend is that if someone mentions extreme weather to you, "oh, it's so hot today!" Or "wow, it hasn't stopped raining for a whole week." Or "I wanted to go skiing, but then there wasn't any snow." Something like that. Just say, "yes. Climate change is really real. I'm seeing it around me too. We really need to phase out
fossil fuels so we can halt global heating." That's it. Just put that idea into people's minds as often as you can, and you don't need to persuade them of anything. You don't need to have a whole debate. You don't need to make them feel bad. Just: "I see it too. It's going to be really bad if we don't phase out fossil fuels." Boom. Because again, information is not enough to change people's minds. We're all social creatures. We take our cues from our peers and the people around us, the people we admire. Our choices are limited by the systems that we live in, but there is a deep core of knowledge that we all need to be able to be influenced in the right way by our peers, and also to influence others. And I am just deeply, deeply committed to the belief that people still don't know. There is still an awareness that needs to be raised. And maybe this is, you know, naive, but I actually believe that people are fundamentally good and that they love the world and that they love young people, whether or not they have children and that no one really wants the world to fry. There's just this core of knowledge that you can be empowered to transmit just by saying something really simple connecting whether to climate, climate to fossil fuels at every opportunity. And I really think doing that, plus calling your electeds twice a month, it's just going to be a climate champion. You're going to be able to like, look back at what you've done in your life and think, okay, I did a good thing, and that's not nothing.
Mila Atmos: [00:55:06] I totally agree, that's good advice. So last question. Genevieve Guenther: [00:55:09] Yeah.
Mila Atmos: [00:55:10] Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful? Genevieve Guenther: [00:55:14] I don't deal in hope. [laughter]Mila Atmos: [00:55:18] Okay. So what keeps you going every day?
Genevieve Guenther: [00:55:23] Okay. That that I can answer. So I got into climate after I became a mom, and I realized that my kid was going to inherit this world after I left it. And I started to really worry about what the world was going to be like after I died. And I just feel like I have a duty because I love him and because I love all his friends, and because I feel like it's a miracle that we're all here and I have relative privilege. I feel like I have a duty to do what I can on this problem, because we don't get another
chance, and I just happen to be alive right now. I have a duty to do what I can on this problem, so that I can look back on my life and say, I did my best, because that's really all you can ask of yourself or anybody else. And so I don't worry about the stuff I can't control. I don't worry about the future or the past. I try to live in the present moment and just accept responsibility and try to use my resources and my gifts to move the needle and just do what I can and do my best, because that's all I can ask.
Mila Atmos: [00:56:35] Thank you. That's really beautiful. Thank you very much. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us on Future Hindsight.
Genevieve Guenther: [00:56:42] Thank you for having me. It was great to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:56:45] Doctor Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of "End Climate Silence" and affiliate faculty at The New School. Her most recent book is The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we have a very special episode for you. At a live event at Columbia University, I was honored to moderate a discussion with Attorney General Eric Holder and President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, Michael Waldman. It was a potent look ahead to the 2024 elections, and we'll be sharing the full, unedited conversation next week, so be sure to tune in.
Thanks for listening. And until next time, see clearly, act boldly and spark the change you want to see.
And before I go, first of all, thanks so much for listening. If you liked this episode, you'll love what we have in store. Be sure to hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts or the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you'll catch all of our upcoming episodes. Thank you! Oh, and please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help.
Thank you. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me.
The Democracy Group: [00:58:26] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.