Climate accountability under Trump: disinformation
Author and researcher Genevieve Guenther discusses the importance of continuing to counter climate disinformation — and demand the phaseout of fossil fuels — during this next Trump administration.
This is Part 2 of a series in which we’ll examine what holding the fossil fuel industry accountable looks like under the incoming Trump administration. For this second piece, we’re taking a look at what it means to confront climate disinformation under Trump 2.0.
President-elect Trump’s second administration promises to bring old-school climate denial back to the federal government. His pick for energy secretary, Chris Wright, is an oil and fracking executive who has claimed, falsely, that “there is no climate crisis,” “there’s been no increase in extreme weather in the roughly 100 years of datasets we have,” and “the annual deaths globally from extreme weather events have dropped 95 percent over the last century.” Every member of Trump’s potential cabinet has downplayed or misrepresented the climate crisis in some way, according to an analysis by HEATED; his new pick for U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, sued BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but also challenged the Clean Power Plan as Florida’s Attorney General and has refused to discuss climate change in the past. And some former Trump administration officials are pushing for a “debate” about the reality and severity of climate change between climate scientists and the few researchers who deny the problem, E&E has reported.
Trump will also return to office on the heels of a growing effort by climate advocates, researchers, and Democratic members of Congress to expose and combat more evolved forms of climate disinformation, which are coming largely from the fossil fuel industry itself. In recent years, Big Oil companies — and the various institutions on both ends of the political spectrum that uphold their messaging — have turned away from denying the reality of climate change to instead dismissing the need to transition away from fossil fuels and promoting industry technologies as key to solving the problem.
To explore the impact Trump 2.0 could have on the already challenged climate information space, I wanted to speak with Dr. Genevieve Guenther, whose new book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, unravels common fossil fuel industry talking points that have infiltrated the political center and provides readers with the messaging and tools to counter them. We talked about how to take on fossil fuel disinformation — especially as Trump returns to power.
Our interview, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Your book opens with Trump calling climate change a hoax, in contrast with your real subject: centrists and would-be allies who acknowledge climate change as a threat but say we can’t realistically get off fossil fuels, or we don’t need to. Now that Trump is in office, what exactly are we up against, and what do you make of this moment?
So it is true that the book is a lot about centrists and Democrats who espouse and advance what I'm calling “the new climate denial,” which is this belief that we can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still deal with global heating anyway. They talk about science, economics, and geopolitics in a really misleading way in order to justify that belief and make it seem like the reasonable mainstream policy position. So it may seem as if that kind of climate denial isn't really relevant anymore, but I think it's actually just as relevant now that we have someone who calls climate change a hoax in the White House, and his [proposed] Secretary of Defense is someone who calls climate change a “religion.”
You have people like Matthew Yglesias, the Democratic centrist blogger who's very influential with Democratic policymakers, making an argument that we should expand liquid natural gas exports out of this country, which makes the boundaries between the actions that fossil fuel interests want to take and the actions that we need to take to halt global heating very fuzzy and very confusing for lower information voters, or even people who read the news but aren't as steeped in climate change as scientists are, or climate journalists are, or climate researchers are.
A lot of the book is also about the economics that make people think that our prosperity relies on fossil fuels. The truth is that the longer we use fossil fuels, the more damaging it's going to be to the economy, and it's going to cost us a lot more not to phase out fossil fuels than it is for us to phase out fossil fuels, even in the United States. So it's important for people to understand the institutional assumptions that underlie these false beliefs, all the more now that they are being advanced by, you know, basically fossil fascists who have now taken over the federal government.
I’ve already been seeing some people in the climate space rationalize Trump’s DOE and EPA picks, Chris Wright and Lee Zeldin. How do we push back against this preemptive capitulation to climate deniers and normalization of climate obstruction and disinformation? How do we avoid lowering the bar and shifting our expectations further and further away from what science says is necessary?
I think for people who believe that we will achieve decarbonization by collaborating with the people who hold power — that [approach] as a strategy now that we have an authoritarian in office is, I think, extremely dangerous and guarantees that whatever good the climate movement has done or wants still to do is going to easily get co-opted. We're going to get divided by the people who want to appropriate the authority of some people in the climate movement to justify the more horrific things that they're going to do. So I think it's really important now to be very, very, very clear that actually halting global heating requires phasing out fossil fuels. Not just reducing emissions, but actually phasing out fossil fuels, because that is a line that these authoritarians in government now will never cross. That'll help us clarify what the stakes are for the electorate, for decision makers, for stakeholders who in some cases are denying this fact because it hasn't been clearly explained to them.
We know that just giving people information doesn't lead them to take the actions that are necessary — I'm not suggesting that — but it is also the case that people cannot begin to do what needs to happen if they don't know what needs to happen.
We saw the Harris-Walz campaign lean heavily on “all of the above” messaging, or the idea that we can boost clean energy and address climate change and still drill for more oil and frack. If doing what scientists say we need to do — move off of fossil fuels — is posited as a radical position by both sides, how do we move forward? How do you think we can overcome these structural problems when people believe that moving away from fossil fuels isn’t “pragmatic” or politically popular? How do we get people on the same page?
It's a multi-pronged problem which requires more than one solution, but one solution is certainly trying to get the mainstream news media to correctly frame the problem for people who consume news. My research shows that most Americans first learn about the climate crisis from the news media, and many Democrats don't know that we need to transition away from fossil fuels if we're going to halt global heating. So part of it is simply education. We need to educate people. Considering there's so little science education in this country and no climate education, it really is up to the news media to report on the climate crisis accurately and report on the solutions clearly. So that's number one. Number two, you can use the messaging in my book to talk to people who are alarmed or concerned about the climate crisis to raise their support for phasing out fossil fuels. Focus groups have found that those messages raise the support for phasing out fossil fuels among those groups of people, both Democratic and Republican, by up to 10 points. That is quite a significant shift.
I know it seems almost naive or foolhardy to say that we just need to talk about the climate crisis more and talk about the phase out of fossil fuels at this moment in history, where so many people, if Trump does what he promises to do, will be in immediate danger. But we can do both, and we have to do both, because 2024 is going to be the first year in human history that we will have crossed the boundary of 1.5 degrees Celsius of heating since pre-industrial temperatures. There's no magic boundary between 1.4 and 1.6 degrees Celsius, but we know that the risks of catastrophic outcomes go up at an increasing rate with each tenth of a degree of warming. But the good news is, as I talk about in the book, the project of decarbonizing the United States's economy could indeed be the policy program that revives this country, that repairs the economic inequality and the crumbling infrastructure and the de-industrialization and the alienation that has been the result of 40 years of neoliberalism. So there is a way to do it and address a lot of the issues that have led, in my opinion, to Trump's election.
Speaking of the role of the media here — we’re already starting to see the oil companies positioning themselves as good guys in contrast to the Trump administration, like ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods telling Trump we should stay in the Paris Agreement. What are the traps that the media and others should avoid falling into when it comes to talking about oil companies’ actions and relationship with this administration?
[Woods has] used this opportunity to go on a press tour in order to greenwash his company's reputation because he knows that the Paris Agreement is not a legally binding agreement. Trump could easily stay in the Paris Agreement and still implement his entire “drill baby drill” agenda with no consequences whatsoever. So Woods certainly only wins by positioning himself as the grown-up in the room, the reasonable center, someone who is concerned about climate change and whose company is attempting to be part of the solution, because that hides what his company is actually doing in reality, and it allows them to extend their social license to operate. The strategy is that the oil and gas companies themselves, with their CEOs as their mouthpieces, are presenting themselves as allies in the climate fight, while their trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, lobbies Congress and the White House for the policies that will block the deployment of clean energy and encourage the expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption. The American Petroleum Institute [and other industry trade associations] have spent billions of dollars on advertising to attempt to block the legislation that supports climate action and raise support for legislation that leads to a “drill baby drill” agenda.
One other thing that Woods said on this little press tour was that he didn't want Trump to repeal the IRA. Well, I'm sure he doesn't want Trump to repeal the parts of the IRA that extended and increased fossil fuel subsidies for carbon capture with no verification whatsoever. It's really shocking to see journalists and even some very well respected climate researchers take Woods’ statement at face value and not contextualize it in the actions of his trade group that ExxonMobil supports with membership and funding, or in the decades of deception that his company has practiced since basically the 1960s.
One of the main premises of your book is that the dominant narratives in climate politics are still being shaped by fossil fuel companies (and of course their funding of discourses in PR, media, academia, etc) who continue to rally their forces to block climate action and the transition to renewable energy. Now under Trump, this industry has the keys to the castle with little threat of consequences for their actions, at least for now from the federal government. What would you say to people who feel hopeless to combat this industry and its disinformation?
I would actually take our focus off the fossil fuel industry a little bit — they’re some of the worst actors in human history by far, and they are destroying the habitability of our planet knowingly, but they’re still only an industry. I’m more concerned with the economists and the scientists and the academics and the journalists and the religious leaders and the CEOs and the small business people, all of whom are steeped in fossil fuel propaganda without knowing it. I still believe fundamentally in people power. We at least for now are still in a democracy. With a mobilized citizenry, a cross-class, cross-race organized group of people, we actually can start making a difference. I try to focus on the people on our side who are espousing fossil fuel propaganda whether knowingly or not, and trying to get everyone alarmed about the climate crisis and calling for the phaseout of fossil fuels. To me, that’s the work we have to do now.
Yes, physical reality does not change. People can say anything out of touch, but the GHGs already out there will continue to increase global heat.