On 7 February, US President Donald Trump walked out of a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in Washington and announced what he presented as another quick trade win for his administration. Japan, Trump said, was about to start buying US gas “immediately”.

“We’re very happy that they’re going to start immediately,” he said.

No specific deals were announced, but in the moment it looked like the first clear step toward locking in Trump’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” approach to energy across south-east Asia, with its goal to establish US “energy dominance”, total disregard for the effects of human-caused climate change and willingness to rubber stamp new gas projects whatever the costs. By supplying American gas to major trading partners such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the Trump administration’s basic plan is to bind these countries closer to it by making them dependent on US fossil fuel production. According to analysts, however, the reality of the economic, political and even geographic landscape makes the Trump administration’s pitch more like an attempt to defy financial gravity.

For Ishiba, the moment has offered temporary relief. Days before, Trump imposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, and threatened Colombia – a country that supplies just over two two thirds (64%) of 

, with retaliatory tariffs over a diplomatic dispute concerning forcibly exported immigrants. The willingness of a US President to aggressively threaten its allies and the global economy was very bad news for Japan, a country particularly vulnerable to US tariffs.

Back in the 80s, Japanese car makers had crushed the American auto industry by pioneering ‘just in time’ manufacturing but four decades on in 2023 Japan was selling 1.49m cars to the US. Promising to buy US gas in the moment offered a cheap way to blunt Trump’s willingness to start a trade war by telling him what he wanted to hear – a strategy quickly picked up by

 in the following days. Before long European countries, too, pledged to buy US gas to keep Trump onside – Europe’s “

” went so far as to reference “the Japanese model” as a basis for this fossil-fuel-based diplomacy. Since then, Trump has announced reciprocal

 tariffs up to 25% on multiple industries, including Japanese-made cars

This crude attempt to redraw the global economic map has since put a spotlight on a corner of the world that has long been the focus of US and Chinese geopolitical manoeuvring, and whose fossil-fuel dependence has

 to justify expanding the production of oil and gas in countries such as the US, Canada and Australia. From claims about “bridging fuels” to “firming”, industry advocates in these countries have insisted gas displaces coal in southeast Asian countries to justify ongoing government support – a claim proved

 false by US Department of Energy modelling

 that found for every unit of coal displaced in South-east Asian economies,

As technical and convoluted as this can sometimes be, the flow of trade through southeast Asia is hugely significant both for climate change and for the world economy. Japan itself has a long, storied history in the global gas business as a foundational player in the global gas market and the second-largest consumer worldwide. Until the rise of China, the small island country, home to 124m people and a thirsty manufacturing base, has acted like a giant sponge, absorbing gas shipments off the ocean in a way that has kept the global trade ticking over for decades. Japanese gas consumption has been so consistent, its demand is factored in when oil and gas companies weigh whether to pursue a new development.

The Fukushima disaster in 2011 only intensified Japan’s reliance on gas and since that time, the country has prized stable and long-term relationships with its suppliers, two of which, Australia and Qatar, have vied to be the world’s top gas supplier in recent years. Qatar, however, has fallen away, leaving Australia to largely dominate. The country made up 38% of Japanese gas supply in 2024, according to Japanese government financial accounts. Meanwhile, Russia and the US each supplied 9% and 10% respectively.

 (EFA) – government-backed investment vehicles – have even acted as early investors on major new projects or the supporting infrastructure needed to make them work. When banks and other lending institutions began to shift away from fossil fuels, Japanese taxpayer money has 

LNG export and import terminals, processing plants and docks. Without the support of Japanese and South Korean EFA’s for instance, the $5bn Barossa gas field in northern Australia – described by 

 as a carbon-dioxide emissions factory, with an LNG by-product – would not have been able to get off the ground.

It was circumstance, however, that broke the Qatari hold on Japan. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this sort of flexibility became an extremely valuable clause in Japanese contracts. As European countries rushed to end their reliance on Russian gas, and prices began to spike, the long-term, fixed contracts Japan once prized suddenly became a liability.

Qatari gas contracts come with a catch, what’s known as a “destination clause”. These clauses force a gas buyer to consume the cargo, once purchased, at its destination, meaning it cannot be resold.

Australian gas contracts, by contrast, have had no such restrictions.

Meanwhile, as Russian tanks were attempting, and failing, to roll on Kyiv, Japan was consuming less gas than it was buying, partly because it began to switch its nuclear reactors back on. Between 2023 and 2024, Japanese gas

 -- a significant drop for a foundational buyer in the global gas market – and traders quickly sought to cash in. Cargos sailing out of Australia that were initially bound for Japan were redirected on the water to ports across southeast Asia in a process known as “reselling”. Where “re-export” refers to cargoes that enter Japan and are then re-exported back out, reselling refers to trades that take place before they ever arrive at the destination.

The decision earned Japanese gas traders eye-watering sums of money and worked to entrench the country’s regional influence in the short-term. Japan’s status as a major trading partner had already earned it a certain trust, but this reliance only deepened as it began to supply larger and larger amounts of energy to its neighbours.

It is against this backdrop that the US is now seeking to entrench Japan’s reliance on American gas, but Sam Reynolds, lead gas analyst with the Asia team from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says the structural environment means things may not work out as planned. Reynolds, who co-authored the

 research that helped expose Japan’s dealing in Australian gas in late 2024

, says revealing this open secret exposed the contradiction between the Japanese government’s public statements insisting it needed more Australian, Canadian and US gas and its actions. Any claims by Japan that it needed the gas to keep the lights on didn’t stack up when it had set itself up as a middle-man to on-sell Australian gas.

Between the need to cut carbon emissions to head off the existential threat of climate change, and an emerging gas glut, Reynolds says the financial risk taken on by Japanese traders represents a significant issue going forward. With Qatar on the verge of bringing new gas projects into production over the next few years, he says that the global gas market is about to be flooded with supply that would cause prices to fall in a way that threatens to catch out those trading gas, and those building new projects.

“The large reason all these gas projects are being built is they’re counting on demand by some of the largest historical buyers like Japan,” Reynolds says. “They’re counting on Japan to absorb cargos from off the water, to absorb cargos from the global market, rather than reselling them, which lowers prices.”

“So not only is there a glut materialising but you have these legacy importers contributing to that glut by reselling, which increases the available supply and lowers prices further.”

Reynolds suggested this scenario would be “bad news financially” for Japanese traders caught out as prices drop. This was made more likely given the Trump administration’s plan to flood the global market with US gas – a plan that would ironically come at the expense of US consumers.

Despite Trump’s crude push to establish “energy dominance”, Climate Energy Finance founder Tim Buckley said it was more likely the new administration would only succeed in driving up domestic US gas prices.

“One of the reasons why America has had one of the biggest reindustrialisations is that it had the lowest energy price in the world. They effectively just traded that away for the profit of Exxon and Chevron,” Buckley says. “You’re removing one of the competitive advantages of America, which is one of the lowest price gas markets in the world. It’s

Cheap gas, high labour costs and higher costs for inputs like steel and transport mean any US oil and gas renaissance is unlikely to be competitive – and more likely short-lived. Many proposed new projects involve shale gas, a notoriously “flash in the pan” sector where operations run dry after a few years. Across southeast Asia, Reynolds says, new gas power plants in Asia are far more expensive to run when compared to coal and renewables. Gas producers and traders have been hanging on to the hope that a gas glut will drive the price of the fuel down far enough to change the calculus for southeast Asia, but it’s a risky move and one that marries short-term brinksmanship with expensive long-term infrastructure plans and contracts.

The balance of these dynamics does not bode well for one of the Trump administration’s signature projects: 

. The $44bn, decades-old proposal has become a centrepiece of the new approach thanks to the advocacy of Doug Burgum. As secretary of the US Department of Interior, Burgum, a former governor from North Dakota whose 

family owns property that directly benefits from fossil fuel extraction

, has pitched Alaska LNG as a much-needed 

 and the Russian gas that currently makes up a portion of Japan’s energy mix. The project, which would require building a 800m (1287km) perma-frost resistant pipeline through some of the most rugged, remote environments in North America, has so far failed to attract buyers for the gas it would produce. Even if commissioned today, the project would still be another decade before it enters production.

, citing unnamed government sources, found southeast Asian governments were considering their options as Trump administration officials asked Japan to take out long-term purchase agreements and make infrastructure investments in Alaska LNG. Using maps, these officials sought to impress upon the Japanese delegation that any US gas they buy would avoid global trade chokepoints in the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca and the South China Sea. According to the same report, Alaska LNG’s project developers have been lobbying Inpex, an oil and gas company partly-owned by the Japanese government, to invest in the project – a key step toward attracting the additional buyers needed to make it viable.

Inpex, however, has more than a few of its own problems,

 including the high carbon-dioxide levels in Australian gas

 underpinning its demand for the Australian government to subsidise the creation of

. For Japan and other southeast Asian countries, Reynolds says, the long-lead time on building Alaska-LNG and the complicated engineering challenges presented by its lengthy pipeline means any gas Japan agrees to buy will do nothing to help it in the short term. Even without the geopolitical risks created by Trump’s loose talk about taking back the Panama Canal and shaking down US allies, shipping gas from the east coast of the US, Canada or Mexico is an expensive proposition for southeast Asia, when Russia and Australia are on its doorstep. Where it might take eight days to ship cargo from Russia’s far eastern flank, it may take 30 days to bring the equivalent from the US – a time-premium that is going to factor into any decision making.

“None of these US Japanese announcements have been accompanied by any tangible, commercial deals,” Reynolds said. “Nothing has changed, except needing to placate the Trump administration, and I think that’s what’s happening.”

In Attempt to Avoid Trump Tariffs, Japan and Europe Make Questionable Gas Deals

 Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Last week was Climate Week in New York, and I went for the first time, actually.

The main reason I was there was to do a panel with with Bill McKibben and Kendra Pierre Louis, moderated by Genevieve Gunther on the language of climate politics, which is also the subject and title of Genevieve's new book. In it, she looks at the dominant narratives around climate policy and politics and whittles it down to six key words that just keep showing up over and over again. Each chapter is devoted to one of those words and offers a deep dive into how that word and the narrative it's attached to became so dominant, how it's been weaponized to block climate policy, and what kind of messaging you could use to combat it.

I got to sit down with Genevieve after our panel as well and talk about the book, why it's made some people so mad on the internet, and a lot more. After the break, you'll hear her reading from a bit of the book, and then we're going to have that conversation. That's coming up after this quick message.

 Fossil fuel propaganda is spun out of six terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, India and China, innovation and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this "yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need keep using them and 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."

This narrative is designed to foment the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels, either because climate change won't be that destructive or in some versions of the story because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.

 Yes. Awesome. Okay. I want to have you start by talking a little bit about where the idea from the book came in general and then how you whittled it down to these six key words that I do feel like really capture the essence of the sort of discourse that we're hearing

 so glad to hear Yeah. Yeah, because the book started out being much bigger. It was sprawling. I had like, you know, I don't know, almost almost 27 words that I was thinking about writing about. So definitely much smaller than it was in the beginning. But I conceived of this book in 2017, after the New York Times hired this commentator named Brett Stevens away from the Wall Street journal. favorite voice at the Times.

At the time though, Stevens was a pretty inveterate climate denier. Like he was definitely on the more extreme end of the skeptical spectrum, so to speak. Like he called, you know, climate change a religion or climate change science a religion, um, presided over by like, Singularly unattractive hairfans, which I just thought was a really obnoxious thing to say about anybody, right?

 And, you know, his hiring generated a ton of controversy, many climate scientists and activists tried to get the Times to rescind their offer to him because they just thought it was outrageous that someone who, you know, was spreading these overt falsehoods would take a position at the sort of paper of record. But, of course, the Times didn't want to... 

 respond to outside pressure very often or really ever so Stephens took his position and he wrote, arrogantly enough, his first column about climate change. And it was called the column was called a climate of complete certainty And what this piece did was sort of recycle the fossil fuel talking point that had been kind of dominant in the discourse . And that talking point as you know yourself You Was that the science of climate change is too uncertain to motivate or justify the kind of policy moves that we would need to make, or the behavior changes we would need to make in order to halt global heating and resolve the climate crisis because the climate crisis might not even be a thing.

 Now, I had just taken level course in climate science. so while I was reading this column, was like, wait a minute. this man is using the word uncertainty in a kind common sense, colloquial way. He's using the of word to say uncertainty means not enough information or knowing enough come to some sort of decision or judgment. Right. But this is actually the way that climate scientists use the word research. So in...

 or that scientists in general, like this is the language of science in which uncertainty means something very different.

 Exactly. And what it means is the range of outcomes you can project out of a model with confidence. I mean confidence and uncertainty are actually synonyms say the confidence interval or the uncertainty interval. So when scientists would talk about the uncertainty of their research, they were not saying they weren't sure whether their results were correct or that what they were studying was real. What they were saying was there's a range of possible outcomes from bad to really bad that they project confidence. But the problem was that because fossil fuel interests put this sort other meaning of uncertainty out into the public discourse through the mediasphere, anytime a climate scientist in his or her public communications would talk about uncertainty of their research, seem to be confirming that they weren't sure whether climate change was real or not.

What fossil fuel interests had done was appropriate, weaponize, and kind of distort the meaning of the scientific term order kind manipulate scientists into confirming fossil fuel propaganda. So I saw this dynamic uncertainty, I started see everywhere.

 So I like, you know, I got all these folder files because I'm very old school. And I, you know, made files email and I started research into the words that seemed to have salience for me connected climate change. And I was doing sort of database academic style research. I was reading, research in the social sciences, in rhetoric, um, in climate science. But I was also sort of pulling news articles and like press releases and advertisements and tweets and sort of, high and low discourse, um, news media and I was dumping it all into files.

And after about 18 months of this kind of very broad, almost sloppy way of doing research, I noticed that the files for these words were much thicker than the other ones.

 And that in these files were often, um, you know, language that had been produced by policymakers, by scientists themselves in oil and gas advertisements, like all the things that we sort of centered and focused on. What we're going to do to try to resolve this crisis. And I was like, okay, these are the words that dominate the language of climate politics.

And I need to focus the book on these words. So that's what I decided to do.

 And they all kind of relate to each other in this way too, that I think is really interesting to create this, well, I think of it as like a narrowing of climate solutions too, it sort of puts these parameters on how we're allowed to even talk about or think about this issue that's very limiting.

 Well, it's interesting you say that because, you know, for the chapter on growth, it took a long time to write this chapter because, you know, first I had to sort of really get my head around kind of neoclassical resource economics, how standard economists talked about environmental concerns the climate crisis in order to understand you counter voices might be arguing

 And then I read all the degrowth literature. Um, and I sort of first thought to myself, well, am I going to try to talk about the language of growth in in degrowth framework?

What am I going to do here? And then I realized that actually, we can't even have the conversation about degrowth, I don't think, while everybody universally believes that growth itself is a climate solution. Like, as long as you believe that being rich will protect you from climate devastation, why would anyone embrace degrowth? And so I thought, okay, this is what I keep bumping up against as I'm researching this belief that growth itself is a climate solution that will be available to us. even if the planet sort of heats up three degrees or more

 and that will be available to everyone infinitely

 A hundred percent. Exactly. Like growth will never end. So I started digging into this, you know, because as you said, I felt like it was really kind limiting our imagination of how we might need to transform the world in order to halt global heating. Yeah, and I discovered as I say in the chapter that belief growth will just Yeah. no matter what we do to the planet is based on absolutely nothing. It's based on beliefs that have no empirical foundation whatsoever.

 It's almost itself a form of religious faith. So one of these beliefs is that human beings will be able to adapt to climate change no matter how bad it gets. And you know, humans are pretty ingenious. we are adaptable, but in fact, there is no research showing that any country, including developed nations in the global north, have to date adapted to climate change. And It's just going to get harder to do that. And there's something nonlinear about these climate change impacts. So, you know, if you have a seawall, it'll keep the water out until the day that the water gets so high that it won't keep the water out anymore. But none of those complicated risks that we're facing and none this sort of lack of historical evidence that 

 going to be able to adapt to the climate crisis, make it into economic models. In fact, what economists do is the opposite. They look at sort of historical relationships between say heat and GDP growth And try to project those out into the future. And then they adjust their results by using a mathematical variable called adaptation, which allows them to downplay or adjust the dangers that they project. by at the past and... And drawing it out into the future, by using this mathematical variable that they give value to, simply based on the economist's belief in how much we're going to be able to adapt in the future. So at the bottom, it's just about the individual economist's trust that adaptation is possible, and it's something that we're going to do. Not based any kind of empirical data whatsoever. And that's just one of the fantasies or the, the ephemeral beliefs that support, or at least, um, justify this fundamental belief of the entire planet, that growth will just continue even if we ruin our climate system.

 It's so interesting because a lot of the things in here had me also thinking about how a lot of this stuff gets painted in very gendered terms too, or even just science versus humanities kind of language too, where it's like, oh, economists are, , hard science, objective measurement, whatever.

But climate activists don't understand that or certain technologies. It's like, oh, well, you just don't understand the engineering behind it or whatever. I've had this experience of digging into an economic model and realizing that it's just based on, yeah, one person's assumptions or beliefs or whatever.

And being like, no, I must be wrong. It can't be that. You know, I must not be understanding the numbers or whatever. And like...

 I had that experience too, but let me be clear. Every single chapter in this book. Yeah. chapters on economics were read by some of the, Most respected climate economists working today and the chapter that I wrote on innovation, which turned out in climate discourse to be, code for carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and sequestration. So CDR and CCS. So in that chapter I had. not only one of the most prominent scientists who's working on CDR read this chapter But I had two other climate scientists read this chapter. So I also thought is this possible like it it as flimsy as I think it is? Exactly. in fact It is. And it's hard to tell because very often when we encounter these things in our public discourse, it's through news media articles or sort of treatments that are decontextualized or just sort of touch on one thing. But they marshal these like ideological beliefs that I try to sort of disabuse in the book. And it only becomes clear how this ideology is very often based no information like in the growth case or false information like in the CDR case.

 So once you compile all the information and put it together, it becomes easier to show how a lot of the beliefs that we hold about growth and technological innovation are influenced or shaped by fossil fuel propaganda themselves.

 Yes, totally. One of the very compelling things about this book is that you see it. You're just like, Oh, thank That's

 like how that has shaped. Um, okay. I want to ask you about the Breakthrough Institute cause they, they've been very mad about your book and also, you mentioned them in the book and they have been, quite, adamant proponents of some of these ideas and particularly in the vein of kind of castigating climate people for not thinking about growth in the right way or innovation in the right way.

But anyway, I wanted to ask you about just kind of your thoughts on how much they have shaped the public discourse and how they have been able to do that.

 I mean, i, you know, I got the climate movement, as I said, in 2017. so I perceive them as people who are instrumental in shaping the discourse. I do see them kind of, um, exemplifying a a kind of centrist position, center position climate crisis, which is why they're very with many centrist journalists, and leaders because they put the of imprimatur of environmentalism on this centrist position. Right. And the problem with this position, in my view, is not that it's, you know, advocating for developing new technologies. Clearly, we will need that. Like, I am a proponent of lab grown meat, To me, it is not that they are pushing for nuclear. I actually also think that nuclear energy would be an excellent alternative thing to bring into our energy mix, maybe for thermal heat things that are harder to produce with solar or wind, for example.

You know, like 8 million people a year die from fossil fuel pollution, right? And the number of people, that we can trace, of course, who have died from nuclear accidents is probably a lot smaller than that. So if you want to just judge two different forms of energy based on the number of people it kills historically, then obviously nuclear wins, right? problem with the Breakthrough Institute is they promote expanding fossil fuels.

That is my problem with them because this is to me, the belief, the false belief that is really preventing our politics, our, business leaders, even our, climate advocacy from Solving problem or even really knowing there is this idea we can do We can develop clean energy and we can support expanding fossil fuel extract extraction. We can have more evermore. more and gas and ever more clean energy. And somehow we're gonna deal with climate change anyway. So this is the false belief that is not just coming from fossil fuel interests on the right. It's also coming these center left groups, which give a permission structure for these fossil fuel interests to seem legitimate and not like the murderous monsters they really are. And so the Breakthrough Institute argues for increased fossil fuel production. They say that coal plants in the global south, quote, save lives.

Let's be clear, it's electricity that saves

that electricity does not need to be generated by coal, which is killing. Millions of people a year, mostly in the global south. And for them, they justify their argument for increasing fossil fuel production, not by even saying that with CDR, um, which is something that they, support.

It's a position that they support, and they platform people who do make that argument. But really, the reason they say we can to expand our fossil fuel production and consumption is that climate change will never be that bad, right?

It's never gonna be worse than I think Nordhaus called it a case of planetary right? Um, that you can just sort of manage with with what he calls, you know, medicine, which what he means is adaptation or whatever. Now, climate scientists like Joelle Gerges, the Australian climate scientist, who's one of the lead authors of the last IPCC report. She figures climate change as a cancer, as a disease in our planetary body has been established and is now getting worse and that we have to cure cut out. Before it metastasizes out of control. but Nordhaus and the Breakthrough Institute are very often um, on the opposite side of that. They would call her an alarmist, and they would claim that actually, People who think that climate change is like a cancer or will be very dangerous as the planet continues to heat up are emotional, hysterical, very often women in the climate movement people who aren't serious.

 And their kind of, um, lukewarmer position that, Oh, climate change isn't going to be that bad is actually somehow the serious position. But what I try to argue in the book is that in fact, it is. a dishonest position. It misrepresents what the science says is happening to our planet and will happen if not phase out fossil fuels, bring our emissions down to real zero , and halt global heating. So it's not a realism, it's actually a falsehood that they are advancing

 it's fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. I do find it really interesting that Nordhaus in particular takes these really strong stances on science when he has no scientific background. You know, He was a PR guy forever and then

 I know. I love that he was a that he's a PR guy.

 Yeah. And then started the breakthrough and like, you know, now kind of does PR for their ideas.

 Right? Right. Exactly. But like, um, I mean, I just say that. They've been coming after me for couple of weeks now, at the point we are recording this. They've been coming after for a couple of weeks now. And first he tried to suggest that I didn't have the credentials to write this book.

 And then I thought, wait a minute, I'm go look at his academic credentials. I have a Ph. D. in English literature from UC Berkeley, and he has a B. A. in history

 from UC Berkeley. So I don't understand how he's, you know, just on that metric, more credentialed to talk about the climate crisis than I am.

And I'm talking about the rhetoric that leads to political beliefs, which is literally something I've been studying since I went to graduate school, because that was what I was studying in the English Renaissance too. Like, it's not a different topic for me. It's just a different domain into which I'm bringing my expertise. But it's interesting because other ways, so, so once I sort of like disabused him of that strategy.

Then they started to suggest that somehow I wasn't a serious scholar because there were some, you know, sloppy errors in the footnotes. Um, they found what I would claim are two errors among 300 in three chapters.

The book has 600 footnotes and it's been peer reviewed and extensively fact checked and every single book in the world will have one or two details that are are wrong,

What they're doing is they're trying to come after me to suggest that I'm not serious I'm all vibes. I don't have research credentials, because they don't want to engage with my arguments they have never defended their position on supporting fossil fuel use.

They have never explained why they believe that economic growth will just continue indefinitely and shield the wealthy from climate devastation. They have never engaged any of the arguments that I make in the book and defended them. They have only come after me with these ad hominem attacks because they know they don't have a position from which to argue. In fact, Nordhaus on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it these days-- he got mad at me because I quoted him as having said that the agenda to phase out fossil fuels was impossible. And so I said, Okay, does that mean right here that you're gonna say that it is possible to phase out fossil fuels and he he sputtered and fulminated But then reiterated that the climate movement's agenda to phase out fossil fuels in the next decade is impossible And then I like tweeted a screenshot of my book which is quoting him saying that exact thing and I was like, what? Dude, what is your problem?

 Their problem is, is that they're scared of what I say in the book because I honestly think, and not to be arrogant about this, but I think this is the first book that ties what we think of as traditional climate denial on the right to these centrist democratic positions showing that actually the reason our climate politics is blocked is not that it's polarized, even though that's a problem, too, but because it's weirdly unified on this belief that we don't need to phase out fossil fuels when we absolutely do.

 Yes, I have been seeing this in the last couple of years, you know, increasingly, this weird hesitancy to just say, yeah, we need to phase out fossil fuels and almost a shift towards acting like that's a radical stance

 Well, there's comms, I mean, it's a, I'm not saying it's an easy problem. Because there is comms research that shows that people don't like it when you tell them they can't use something they're already using, right?

So that, I mean, it's, it's a fiercely challenging problem to communicate that we do need to phase out fossil fuels. I don't want to downplay that. And so I think people shy away from saying it because it does seem like like tricky or radical. Um, and it has radical implications for our whole world. economic system for sure. but if you believe that climate change is real, if you understand what the science is saying about what's going to happen to our climate system and our, the links between our planet and our economy, if the planet just keeps heating up, and if you understand that the planet will keep heating up until emissions. get to net zero or real zero, then, you know, every scientist will tell you that we need to stop using coal, oil, and gas. It's really not up for debate anymore.

 Including like, you know, the IEA, the IPCC, like it's,

 So this is what I quote in the, this is what I quote, In the introduction to the book In 2023, in synthesis report, IPCC said that we already have enough fossil fuel infrastructure. Because that infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for two degrees Celsius, which means that we actually have to like strand some that infrastructure, strand some of those assets, because the total carbon budget has to include like agriculture right and wildfires and other things. So people, so to me, you can say yes climate change is bad, yes I believe in climate change until the cows come home.

But if you are denying that fact, you are a climate denier. I mean, just think about being an alcoholic. Right. You're drinking a lot of booze. Your liver is about to croak and your doctor says to you, you're an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking. And you say, okay, yeah, I'm an alcoholic, but I'm not going to stop drinking.

Like we all know that that person is still in denial. If you say climate change is real, I want to help stop it, but I'm going to ignore the fact that we already have too many fossil fuels to halt global heating at a relatively safe level. I'm sorry. You are a climate denier.

 I want to talk about the innovation chapter in more detail because we've been doing this series too on like on CDR and carbon capture and we'll eventually get to like hydrogen and biofuels and all that stuff too.

 Yeah, exactly, exactly. But it is like, um, I find it interesting how the industry and then like people who are kind of carrying water for them do really. mess with the building blocks of information in this way of like because I feel like there's been um there has been like this real focus on on disinformation, which I almost see as like The end result of all of this stuff, right?

You know, it's like yeah, like that's what we end up with but like that gets built by very strategic investments in particular types of research or white papers from thought leaders or whatever it is, you know, it's like it gets built in that way. So, um, I'm curious how you honed in on CDR and, um, CCS as like the things that you wanted to focus on in that chapter.

 Yeah. I really, didn't set out to focus on those two technologies in particular, at all. I was just like, why are people talking about innovation in this way? Why are people talking about innovation as a independent climate solution? What does this word mean? That's so vague. And usually when you drill down, this was often in sort of, you know, climate journalism or, um, even just political journalism or business journalism. and you would drill down and it would be about these that would either capture or remove emissions. And then I started to see Exxon Mobil and other oil and gas companies use the word innovation in their advertising and on their websites and whatever, and then drilling down into that. I was like, Oh, for them, innovation also means carbon capture.

And, yeah, to some degree, also carbon dioxide removal. I was like, wow, this word is actually code in climate discourse for CCS and CDR. And it's interesting because I don't think it is anymore because I think that oil and gas companies were really Greenwashing themselves with very thick paint right after the IPCC report on 1.5 in 2018 and the rise of the global climate movement, blah, blah, blah, blah. They all came out with net zero, um, targets. They, you know, and they

 but partly because of all of this rhetoric that

 We can... it's fine because we can decarbonize oil and gas

 Exactly. Thank you. That's exactly the point. So what happened was around this question of innovation, oil and gas companies started to claim that they were going to turn themselves into carbon management companies. they were going to be able to either capture the emissions of their products, or they going be able decarbonize their products, decarbonize oil by removing the emissions, carbon from the atmosphere after their products have been used and combusted.

So, you know, usually I don't start with the research. Usually I start with the rhetoric. But I started this chapter with the research into how challenging it's going to be. Well, first, the historical account of the fact that most, I mean, if not all carbon capture projects, which is, you know, the technology that captures emissions at the source, most, if not all carbon capture products, to date have failed.

 a very large scale. They have captured nothing close to their targets. And very often they've had to build an additional fossil fuel plant to power the technology, which if you do a full life cycle assessment, they're actually carbon additive and not carbon neutral. neutral.

 That's right. There's really good research from Mark Jacobson on that in particular.

 So insofar as you use methane gas as a kind of, you know, firm generation instead of batteries or something else, you might want to slap CCS on that, but it would be very challenging to do it in a way that would actually be carbon neutral and it would be much, much more expensive, even potentially than building out a system of redundancy and lots of storage. or a nuclear or something else. So, and even if the economics pencil out better for CCS, CCS just doesn't work. So that's really what you need to come back to.

 And. The technology has been around for a really long time. Like exactly. It's it doesn't mean it's impossible that it will improve at some point, whatever. But yeah, there are a lot of plans being made with the assumption that CCS will somehow magically start to work better than it ever has.

 You know what's so interesting? So the rhetoric And I'll get to CDR in a minute. But the rhetoric about CCS from oil and gas companies and from advocates um, trade advocates, is that CCS is a proven technology, right? That's what they say. Because it's been around for so long, right? And it's a proven technology. They've been using it for decades. This is great. And so now, The EPA has come up with a new regulation saying that by a certain date fossil fuel power plants need to have CCS

 And then in their public comments, they're all like, but it doesn't work. You can't hold us to this. It's

 So the climate guy at the Cato Institute requested a review copy of my book because he said he wanted to write a review about it. I don't know if he's actually going to write a

Transcription

Guenther digs into six key rhetorical devices that are being used to slow or block climate action. For an academic book, it's made some folks on the Internet awfully mad. In this episode we talk about why, what went into her research, and what it tells us about the coming months.

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

Denial to Delay

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

If there is a Holy Land for nuclear energy, Australian Shadow Climate Change and Energy Minister, Ted O’Brien, seems to think it's Ontario, Canada. Other countries have well-established nuclear power industries, of course. There’s the United Kingdom where the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor – dubbed “

” – where work began in 2007 with an expected start date of 2027 but is now at least

 ten years behind schedule and billions over budget

. Meanwhile, it’s sister project, Sizewell C, is estimated to cost the equivalent of AUD $80bn (GBP £40bn, USD $49bn). There’s France where, in mid-August 2022, half the country’s

 were forced offline, many as a direct result of climate impacts such as

. Over in the United States, storied home of the Manhattan Project, where newly minted energy secretary (and fracking CEO) Chris Wright has announced a commitment to “unleash” commercial nuclear energy, one of the last two new nuclear power builds attempted this century forced

 into bankruptcy protection, and a separate effort by NuScale to build a cutting edge small modular reactor (SMR) was cancelled

. There’s also Finland, a country of 5.6 million people, that finally turned on Europe’s newest nuclear reactor

 after construction began, finishing up with a price tag three times its budget. Though it

 had a noticeably positive effect on prices

 after start up, the cost of building Olkiluoto-3 was so high, its developer had to be bailed out by the French government. Since then, technical faults continue to

remarkably common occurrence among nuclear reactors

Ontario, however, is so far the only place in the world that has ripped out wind turbines and built reactors – though the AfD in Germany 

 if elected, and US President Donald Trump has already moved to 

. Thanks to much self-promotion by pro-nuclear activists and Canada’s resources sector, that move caught the imagination of O’Brien and Australia’s conservative party. Now, as Australians head to polls in 2025, the country’s conservatives are looking to claw back government from the incumbent Labor Party with a pro-nuclear power play that critics charge is nothing more than a climate-delay tactic meant to protect the status quo and keep fossil fuels burning. “This is your diversion tactic,” says Dave Sweeney, anti-nuclear campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation. “There’s a small group that have long held an ambition for an atomic Australia, from first shovel to last waste barrel to nuclear missile. Some of the people who support this are true believers, for others it’s just the perfect smoke screen for the continuation of coal and embedding gas as a future energy strategy.”

On the face of it, Ontario is an odd part of the world on which to model Australia’s energy future. Privatization in both places has evolved messy, complicated energy grids, but that’s about all they have in common. One is a province on the sprawling North American landmass, and the other is a nation that spans a continent. Ontario has half the population of Australia and spends five months a year under ice. Its energy system has traditionally relied on hydro power and nuclear, where Australia is famously the driest inhabited continent on the planet that used to depend on coal but now boasts nearly 40% renewable electricity as of 2024. One Australian state, South Australia, already draws more than 70% of its power from renewables and frequently records weeks where all its electricity needs are met with solar and wind. Unlike Ontario, and the rest of Canada, Australia has no nuclear industry aside from a single research reactor in the Sydney suburbs. The cost of transmitting power over vast distances in Australia makes up approximately two-fifths of retail power prices. Electricity prices in Ontario, meanwhile, have been artificially lowered by an $7.3bn a year bundle of subsidies for households and businesses. Comparing the two jurisdictions is stranger than comparing apples and oranges; it’s more like comparing apples and maple syrup.

None of this has stopped the province from becoming O’Brien’s touchstone for the marvels of nuclear energy, and “Ontario” from becoming his one-word reply to critics who question the wisdom of creating a new nuclear industry from scratch in Australia. If the country wanted to transition away from coal, the Coalition’s suggestion was it should be embracing nuclear energy — not more renewables — just look at Ontario. “We have to keep learning the lessons from overseas," O’Brien told 

 2024. “There’s a reason why countries like Canada, in particular the province of Ontario, has such cheap electricity. They’ve done this many years ago. They were very coal-reliant and eventually, as they retired those plants, they went into nuclear.”

Weirder still, O’Brien is not the only Australian political leader to be chugging the maple syrup. Ever since the conservative Liberal-National Coalition began to float the idea of an atomic Australia as part of their 2025 election pitch, its leader, Peter Dutton, has similarly pointed to the Canadian province as an example for Australia to follow. In

, Dutton referred to Ontario’s power prices to suggest that nuclear is the future for Australia – raising the question: how did Ontario capture the hearts and minds of Australia’s conservatives?

The idea of an atomic Australia has long lived in the heart of Australian conservatism. Former conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies once 

 the United Kingdom to supply Australia with nuclear weapons after World War II, going so far as to allow the British to nuke the desert and the local Indigenous people at a site known as 

suggestion for a civilian nuclear power industry evolved out of this defense program and has never been forgotten. 

 and his daughter, Gina Rinehart, today Australia’s richest woman, both remained fascinated by nuclear energy. In 1977, Hancock, a passionate supporter of conservative and libertarian causes, brought nuclear physicist Edward Teller to Australia on a speaking tour to promote nuclear power, including an

 where he promised thorium reactors would change the world.

Though Australian plans to build a domestic nuclear industry have failed due to eye-watering costs and public concerns about safety, the country today is the fourth largest exporter of uranium according to the World Nuclear Association, sending 4820 tonnes offshore in 2022 and providing 8% of the world’s supply. The country is also planning to acquire a nuclear-powered submarine fleet through AUKUS, an alliance with the US and UK. This increasingly tenuous defense deal is thought unlikely to happen thanks to issues with US and UK shipyards, but the existence of the program has been used to justify the creation of a civilian nuclear power sector. There have been at least eight inquiries or investigations into the viability of a nuclear industry in Australia since 2005, and five proposals to build government-owned nuclear waste dumps since 1990. Each inquiry has concluded that nuclear power would largely be a waste of time and money and, with the exception of two facilities in Western Australia that store low-level radioactive waste, efforts to build additional dumps capable of storing higher grades of waste have mostly foundered for lack of community support. This time around, with the current push to embrace nuclear energy, the federal Australian Coalition’s ideas appear to be shaped by the internet, where a pro-nuclear media ecosystem of influencers and podcasters has flourished just as nuclear has become attractive to conservative parties worldwide.

When Australia LNP opposition leader Peter Dutton formally unveiled the gist of his “coal-to-nuclear” transition plan in June 2024, for example, he was asked what the plan would be to handle the waste and responded with a curious sleight of hand: “If you look at a 470MW [nuclear] reactor, it produces waste equivalent to the size of a can of Coke each year.” A fact check

 pointed out that nuclear reactors typically operate on much larger scales than 470 megawatts. Citing

 figures, it found a typical large-scale nuclear reactor with 1-gigawatt capacity will generate 30 tonnes of spent fuel each year – roughly 10 cubic metres, or 10,000 litres a year. It is unclear where Dutton or his speechwriters stumbled onto this talking point, but it appeared to be a corruption of the idea that one person’s lifetime waste from nuclear energy could fit inside a soda can – a common Facebook meme 

promoted by the Canadian Nuclear Association

 was repeated last year in a social media video by Brazilian model and Instagram influencer Isabelle Boemeke.

 and claims to be the “world’s first nuclear energy influencer," begins her video by outlining her daily diet, starting with black coffee and ending with a post-gym snack of energy-dense gummy bears. In a dramatic transition, she then compares the size of a gummy bear to the size of a uranium pellet, before launching into a didactic explanation of the role these pellets play in generating nuclear power.

“It also means the waste it creates is tiny. If I were to get all of my life’s energy from nuclear, my waste would fit inside of a soda can,” she says, before ending by advising her viewers not to drink soda because “it’s bad for you."

Neither the Canadian Nuclear Association nor Boemeke elaborated on how the world might dispose of the cumulative waste if a significant proportion of the Earth’s population drew their energy from nuclear power – but then that is not the point.

Boemeke is hardly alone. Online there is 

a small but determined band of highly networked, pro-nuclear

 advocates, podcasters and social media influencers working to present an alternate vision for an atomic world. Many of those involved in this information ecosystem are motivated by genuine belief or concern over environmental issues, even if their activities often align with right-wing causes and ideas. Nuclear is often positioned as an essential climate solution, as well, although it's typically a cynical promise: nuclear reactors take decades and billions of dollars to build, buying fossil power more time. In the U.S. especially, pro-fossil conservative politicians often use nuclear as a rhetorical wedge: they will ask any expert or advocate in favor of climate policy whether they support nuclear and imply that if they don't, they must not be serious about actually addressing the climate crisis by any means necessary.

One of those helping export the strategy from North America to Australia is Canadian pro-nuclear advocate, Chris Keefer, host of the Decouple podcast and the founder of Canadians for Nuclear Energy. A self-described “climate hawk”, Keefer is a practicing emergency physician in Toronto who built an online presence as an advocate for keeping existing nuclear power plants open. Through his public advocacy, he has been instrumental in cultivating the image of Canadian – and particularly Ontarian – nuclear excellence, a legend he has recently promoted in Australia through a series of meetings, speeches and his podcast.

According to Keefer, his first encounter with the man who may become Australia’s next Climate Change and Energy Minister took place in early 2023. A group including Ted O’Brien traveled from Australia to the United States and Canada on a nuclear “fact finding” trip. On the itinerary were meetings with center-left and center-right think tanks, energy policy advisors, technology companies, independent advisory services, utility companies, energy ministers and Keefer. Since then, Keefer says, he and O’Brien have “run into each other” at events where they have had “brief informal conversations”.

One such event was in September 2023, when Keefer traveled to Australia to give a keynote address 

, hosted by the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) at Parliament House in Canberra. Ahead of his visit, a write up published in the 

framed Keefer as a “leftie” and “long time campaigner on human rights and reversing climate change” who had previously “unthinkingly accepted long-standing left-wing arguments against nuclear” but had embraced nuclear due to his unionism. During his time in Australia, Keefer says he met with federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton to discuss “Ontario’s coal phaseout and just transition for coal workers”, Labor MP Dan Repacholi who represents the coal fields of the Hunter Valley, a senior staffer from Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s office, and the Australian Workers Union.

Like an evergreen in the desert, the shift in context made the Canadian’s appearance in the seat of Australian power a curiosity. Asked about whether he knew of the MCA’s historical activities on issues such as 

 and climate change, Keefer said he had no “detailed understanding” and that he was just happy to speak to “anyone who will listen” about nuclear – a common framing by pro-nuclear advocates. His speech, “How Ontario Decarbonised”, was scheduled before a lunch session with federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton and told how Ontario arranged a “truly just transition for Ontario coal workers”. The pivotal moment, according to Keefer, was Ontario’s 2018 provincial election. The contest represented a fork in the road on energy policy that Keefer framed as a “referendum on The Green Energy Act,” a bill introduced in 2009 that sought to massively expand renewable energy production in the province. The result delivered a thundering win for Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party.

“The center-left Ontario Liberal Party suffered a humiliating defeat, going from a majority in parliament to losing their official party status and dropping to only seven seats,” Keefer said.

As political folklore this was a tale that would have appealed deeply to Keefer’s audience, whose constituencies were threatened by renewable energy projects. The MCA itself has historically been hostile to Indigenous land rights and campaigned heavily to stop or delay any government response to climate change during the 90s, largely in defence of coal producers. The association again mobilised in 2009, spending AUD$22m 

 and bring down the incumbent Labor government in the process, ushering in a decade-long conservative government. To the Coalition members in the audience, Keefer’s story represented hope. The party has been losing ground to climate-conscious independent candidates in recent years, particularly in the wake of the Black Summer Bushfires and the devastating Northern Rivers floods. The promise of an Ontario-style “blue-blue alliance” – a political alignment between certain blue-collar unions and conservatives – would be alluring, especially given how well a pro-nuclear campaign paired with anti-wind scaremongering. Even a nuclear-curious Labor member may have spotted a way to stem the flow of votes to Greens.

What Keefer presented to the Australian resources sector as a glorious triumph, Don Ross, 70, recalls as a difficult time in his small community that became a flashpoint in a fight over Ontario’s future. When he and his partner Heather first moved to Prince Edward County, an island in Lake Ontario, his neighbors in Ottawa described the tiny rural community as an isolated backwater. Upon arrival, they found the total opposite: a home with people who were warm, kind and generous. The year was 1980 and in those that followed, the idyllic setting began to attract money. With time, vineyards were planted, art galleries opened and restaurants began to cater to the newcomers. So much money eventually rolled into Prince Edward County, that the people with money began working to preserve their favorite rustic retreat exactly as is – and that meant stopping the wind turbines. Today the population sits around 26,000 people, at least until the snowbirds fly south for the winter. Then the population drops with the mercury, even as the winters are getting shorter. It still gets cold – it’s 12C below zero at this time in early January – but the snow isn’t falling like it used to.

“Winter is about two months long instead of four. We get lake snow. Snow doesn’t stay, it comes, then it’s gone in a couple of days. We’ve still noticed a huge change in just our lifetime,” Ross says.

As a longtime member of the County Sustainability Group, Ross says an awareness that the climate is changing pushed him and others to fight for the White Pines Wind development back in 2018. In his telling, the community had the best wind resource in the area and had been pitched as a site for development since the year 2000. There were six or seven serious efforts over the years, all small projects in the range of 20 megawatts that would have allowed the community to be largely self-reliant in terms of power. Only White Pines came closest to completion. It was a ten year development process that Ross says was fought at every step by an anti-wind campaign, with some of the campaigners active since 2001.

“They just took all the information from Australia or America or around the world to fight the same fight – they used the same information, same tactics, played on the same fears and uncertainties,” Ross says. “They were very effective. They had the media backing them, and the conservatives saw an opportunity to drive a wedge.”

By that point the incumbent centrist Liberal government, having wiped out the previous conservative government, was flagging after almost 15-years in power, and Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives were sensing blood. The feeling was that Ford, the brother of

 former Toronto mayor, the late Robert Ford

, would do or say almost anything to take office – and he did. During one campaign Town Hall event, Ford – who turned cultivating outrage as a public relations strategy into an artform – accused the wind developers of corruption and the governing Liberal Party of “forcing its ideology down the backs of small-town conservatives” with all this green, renewable energy.

“I’m dead against these turbines,” he

. “This is just a big scam. These things are just a big scam.”

By election day, four of the nine towers at the White Pines windfarm development were already built, the cranes were on site, and the other towers were laying in position ready to go. The development was just four weeks from completion when the election was called for Ford.

On his first day in office, Ford cancelled 758 renewable energy contracts. These were not industrial-scale power generation. Most were small, community-scale projects that had been supported by the previous government. The White Pines wind farm outside Milford was the last significant wind development yet to be finished and firmly within the new government’s sights.

Ontario’s future Energy Minister, Todd Smith – a former radio presenter who has since left politics and now serves as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at the Canadian nuclear technology firm, Candu Energy, a subsidiary of AtkinsRealis

– had opposed White Pines from its inception. If Smith wanted it gone, he would get his way. The Ford government passed legislation, the 

, to kill the project. Its provisions stopped the developers from suing the government but outlined a formula for compensation. Ross and members of the County Sustainability Group tried to protest the decision. They pulled together a 19,360 signature petition to save the wind farm and presented it to the provincial parliament in Toronto. As Ross recalls, the new administration wasn’t interested in what they had to say and the turbines came down.

“None of us thought that would happen,” Ross says. “None of us actually thought for a second they would tear down a windfarm that was so close to being done.”

“Even the people who don’t really care one way or another couldn’t believe it happened. Why would they do that? They spent all this energy, all this money, to put these things in the ground, spent more money and more fossil energy to take it out of the ground. For what? Nothing.”

News clipping of Jen Ackerman on top of the foundation of a demolished wind turbine. Photo courtesy Don Ross.

Next the Ford government slammed the brakes on renewables investment. It shredded a cap-and-trade program that was driving investment in the province, a successful

 that was working to reduce demand and a deal

 to buy low-cost hydropower from neighbouring Quebec

. During the campaign, Ford promised Ontario’s voters that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the cost of literally ripping the turbines out of the ground and ending the other 750 or so projects. He had pledged that doing so would actually save CAD $790 million. When the final tally came in, that decision alone

 to compensate those who had contracts with the province. The amount finally paid to the German-company behind the White Pines development is unknown. The former developers remain bound by a non-disclosure clause.

At heart, the fight in Ontario was over power prices. Those on the political right charged that renewable energy was responsible for driving up the cost of power, but others, like Professor Mark Winfield from York University, point to an electricity system that had been badly managed over decades. “It was insane,” says Professor Winfield. “If you break down what was driving the capital costs in the whole system, nuclear was still the number one driver, but the way the narratives played out, renewables got blamed.”

Under Ford, Ontario – and later, Canada itself – fell into a nuclear embrace. Much of this, Professor Winfield says, played on a historical amnesia and nostalgia for what was considered a hero industry that traced its origins to the dawn of the atomic era. The province supplied the

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Denial to Delay

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

In Attempt to Avoid Trump Tariffs, Japan and Europe Make Questionable Gas Deals

How Australia’s CANDU Conservatives Fell in Love with Canadian Nuclear

The Drilled List: A Running Tally of Trump’s Climate Impacts

Biden May Have Quietly Thrown a Wrench in Trump’s Plan to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’

The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a Primer

Denial to Delay

Information Pollution

La Lucha En La Jungla

The Real Free Speech Threat

Support our reporting,donate today!

Genevieve Guenther on the Language of Climate Politics

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

Support our reporting,
donate today!