How much of a $450 pot would you give to a charity that cuts carbon emissions by investing in renewable energy, and how much would you keep for yourself? That was the question posed in a recent academic experiment. The answers mattered: real money was handed out as a result to some randomly chosen participants.The average person gave away about half the money and kept the rest. 

But what if you had been told beforehand that the vast majority of other people think climate action is really important? Might you have given more to the charity? That is what a second experiment tested. Before dividing the cash, these participants were told that 79% of people thought citizens should try to fight the climate crisis. This mattered, because in earlier questions people had significantly underestimated the proportion at just 61%. Being informed about the true level of support boosted the donations by $16 per person.

The experiment was in the US, but the illusion that climate action is not popular is global. So imagine dispelling that myth: such a change, say experts, could be a game-changer, pushing the world over a social tipping point into unstoppable climate progress.Such a communication campaign, low cost and scalable, could be among the most powerful tools available to fight climate change, they say. Decades of psychological research indicates that correcting such misunderstandings can change people’s views across a swathe of issues, from participating in protests to voting for Donald Trump.

“We’re sitting on an enormous potential climate movement,” said Prof Anthony Leiserowitz, at Yale University in the US. “It’s latent. It hasn’t been activated or catalyzed. But when you break through these perception gaps, you help people understand that they’re not alone and there is in fact a global movement.”

The research started with a simple goal, says Prof Teodora Boneva, at the University of Bonn, Germany, who with colleagues undertook the experiments: “We wanted to make a difference to the world. So we asked ourselves, as social scientists and economists, what kind of research can we do.”Their biggest result was a huge, globe-spanning survey that revealed the remarkable fact that people across the world are united in wanting action to fight the climate crisis but remain a silent majority, because they wrongly think only a minority share their views.

“Before, just like everyone else, we would have underestimated the support,” she says. “So when we saw the numbers coming in, we thought, wow!” she says. “We had no idea we would find such consistent patterns in so many countries.”

The team found 89% of people across the world wanted their national governments to do more to fight global warming. Over two-thirds then said they were willing to give 1% of their income to fight climate change. Crucially, however, they thought only a minority of other people – 43% – would be willing to do the same.The survey involved 130,000 people in 125 countries, which account for 96% of the world’s carbon emissions, and was 

published in the journal Nature Climate Change

. People in China, the world’s biggest polluter, were among the most concerned, with 97% saying its government should do more to fight climate change and four out of five willing to give 1% of their income. The world’s second biggest polluter, the US, was near the bottom, but still had three-quarters of its citizens saying its government should do more and almost half willing to contribute.

Even in the petrostates of Saudi Arabia and UAE the vast majority – about 80% – were willing to give 1% of their income to climate action. How many of these wanted more government action is unknown – these countries did not allow the question to be asked.Those feeling the heat most directly had the strongest pro-climate views. Those in rich countries were significantly less willing to contribute 1%. And the countries where people most strongly wanted to fight the climate crisis had implemented significantly more climate policies, the researchers found. The more strongly people believed their fellow citizens would contribute their money to climate action, the more likely they were to give themselves, as Boneva’s later experiments with the $450 pots showed.“These positive interactions suggest that a change in one factor can unlock potent, self-reinforcing feedback cycles, triggering social-tipping dynamics,” the team concluded. “Our results suggest a concerted effort to correct these misperceptions could be powerful intervention, yielding large, positive effects.”

A single survey, like Boneva’s, is fascinating – but perhaps you are thinking it could be a freak result. It is not. Many major studies have shown that the public desire for climate action is deep and global, and that the misperceptions that fuel a “spiral of silence” on climate are found wherever researchers look.A large UN poll in 2024 – dubbed the 

 – questioned 75,000 people in countries representing 90% of the global population. It found 80% wanted their countries to strengthen their climate change commitments. Another recent 

 in 20 of the world’s most polluting countries found that 86% of people thought the same.How the question is phrased can change, but people’s hunger for climate action does not. A 

 in 187 countries by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) asked how high a priority climate change should be for the government of their country: 89% of people said very high, high or medium, with 67% saying very high or high.The perception gaps are real too. A US study 

 found people thought only about 40% of their fellow citizens supported major climate policies: the real proportion was about 75%. An earlier study found the 

Other commonly held beliefs have been revealed as false, including the idea that people in rich nations are unwilling to give money to poorer nations to help fight the climate crisis. A 

study testing support for the redistribution of money

 from a global emissions trading scheme from the rich to the poor found the scheme was backed by 76% of Europeans and 54% of those in the US.

“There is a silent majority in favor of [action on] climate change,” said Dr Adrien Fabre, at the International Center for Research on Environment and Development in France, who led the study. “Making people aware of this would help a lot and bring hope. I think a lot of people are self censoring and not fighting or voting [for climate action] because they think that their ideas are not in the zeitgeist.”

“There is also majority support for global redistribution policies, even among people in high income countries who understand that they would have to pay for it,” Fabre added. “This is because people attach value to the human rights and wellbeing of fellow human beings and to a stable climate.”

But is this huge support for climate action in surveys actually sincere, or is it just people saying what they think the researchers want to hear?

Fabre, Boneva and other academics routinely test the reliability of information from surveys using numerous tools. These include comparing people’s answers to their real world behaviour, for example finding correlations between people’s stated willingness to pay money for climate action and their actual donations to climate charities.Other tests link their answers to real world consequences, such as telling them their answers would be sent to the government, or by hiding the climate questions amongst others so the respondents cannot guess the “right” answer.In any case, Fabre said: “Polls are rarely wrong by more than 5%.” That can make a big difference in tight elections, but not when talking about large majorities such as the 89% wanting more climate action from their governments.

Do you think politicians suffer under the same illusions about the popularity of climate action as the public? You might think their political antennae are finely tuned to public opinion, but they are not – sometimes wildly underestimating public views. And that matters, said Dr Niall McLoughlin, at Climate Barometer, which analyses climate opinions in the UK.The group found in 2024 that 

72% of the UK public supported onshore wind

 being built in their areas, but only 19% of MPs thought a majority of their constituents did so. “That was a barrier to the approval and roll out of developments,” the analysts concluded. Similar results have been 

 on carbon regulations.Climate action is backed even by those who vote for political parties that are explicitly opposed to it, according to the UK’s More in Common think tank. The right-wing populist Reform UK Party recently labelled climate concern “

 said it was important that the government cares about tackling climate change.

The apparent contradiction results from very few (4%) Reform voters saying the party got their vote because of its environmental policies. Instead, 72% said it was because of its hardline anti-immigration policies.Boneva said: ‘Informing the policy debate on climate issues can be very helpful. If we make politicians more aware of what the people in their country want, they might actually act on the people’s preferences.”

Most people are social creatures, highly influenced by what others do and say. That is why correcting mistaken beliefs about the views of your fellow citizens can make an impact on what you think and do. There is a 

 showing this can shift people’s views on a range of social justice issues.First, people are drawn towards “social norms”, the perceived standard of acceptable behaviour. “There is a really strong motive among people to try to adhere to what they think is socially desirable,” said Boneva. “This has been shown in many, many different contexts.”People are also “conditional cooperators”: they are more likely to contribute to the public good if they think others are doing the same. “This motive has also been studied very extensively,” Boneva said. “If everyone else in a shared home is cleaning the dishes, you will do it too. If everyone else is just leaving their stuff, you won’t bother either.”

 how popular environmental action is with others can increase their own actions, for example in 

 about the climate views of people in China increased support for a climate treaty.However, studies specifically on green issues are relatively rare to date and have shown mixed results, said Dr Sandra Geiger, at Princeton University in the US. Her soon-to-be published work in 11 countries did show a 

 to talk about climate change when they were told a majority agreed with them.That could be important, she said: “Correcting these misperceptions can disrupt this 

. If you then believe that a majority agrees with you, you’re more likely to talk about the issue and this, in turn, corrects misperceptions in other people.

”But correcting the misperception did not lead to people putting more priority on government climate action, or living greener lives themselves, Geiger said. Another 

 found correcting misperceptions had no impact on people’s climate views, as did another on the acceptance of 

The impact of dispelling mistaken views might depend on how it is corrected, for example using stories rather than data or correcting repeatedly not just once. “We haven’t really found out yet,” said Geiger. 

, such as entrenched ideologies.But she highlighted one approach clearly shown to work – correcting people’s misperception about the 

 that agree that global heating is human-caused and a serious problem, which is extremely high.Despite the varying results to date, Geiger still backs campaigns to correct misperceptions: “People deserve to know and campaigns are cheap and scalable.”

Why do these collective illusions about the level of support for climate action exist at all? What is the root cause? The answer remains uncertain but is likely to be a complex mix of human psychology – people tend to think worse of others than themselves, for example – and fossil-fuelled disinformation.

“One reason is just fundamentally human, because we can’t easily read the hearts and minds of our fellow human beings,” said Leiserowitz. “It’s made doubly hard because climate change is an issue that is abstract and often cloaked in scientific information.”“A third critical reason is the existence of a very large, sophisticated, well-funded and long-standing misinformation campaign being driven by the fossil fuel industry and its allies, sowing doubt and division, to maintain their profits,” he said.

 This campaign has acted as an “enormous megaphone” for the small but vocal minority that dismiss climate change – about 10% in the US – he said: “As a result, they tend to dominate the public square. Climate change has joined sex, religion and politics 

 at the Thanksgiving Day table. So communicating social norms is one of the most powerful interventions you can make.”

What about today’s rapidly changing geopolitics, with rising nationalism, Trump entrenching climate denial in the US, and the threat of trade wars and recessions? This makes the data on people’s real climate views more important than ever, said Cassie Flynn, global director of climate change at the UN Development Programme, which ran the People’s Climate Vote.“People are actually very multilateral,” she said. “The result that always sticks with me is this: 86% of people thought that countries should put aside their differences on other issues and work together. People understand our fates are tied together when it comes to the climate crisis and they want world leaders to act on it.”And everyone can help break the “spiral of silence”, 

 Prof Cynthia Frantz, at Oberlin College in the US: “[Change] simply requires that people be exposed, over and over, from sources they trust or identify with, to the fact that they are not alone in their concern and their willingness to take action.”

Frantz said: “The empowering truth is that every public statement counts, and the more diverse the voices, the more effective the message will be.”

, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration 

Activate Climate’s ‘Silent Majority’ to Supercharge Action, Experts Say

 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

A superpower in the fight against global warming is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world—between 

 according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies—want their governments to take stronger climate action.

As co-founders of a non-profit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us.   And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about climate change.

For years– and especially at this fraught political moment – most press coverage of the climate crisis has been defensive. People who support climate action are implicitly told – by their elected officials, by the fossil fuel industry, by news stories and social media discourse – that theirs is a minority, even a fringe, view.

The most recent study, "People’s Climate Vote 2024,” was conducted by Oxford University as part of a program the UN launched after the 2015 Paris Agreement. Among poorer countries, where roughly four out of five of the world’s inhabitants live, 89% of the public wanted stronger climate action. In richer, industrialized countries, roughly two out of three people wanted stronger action. Combining rich and poor populations, “80% [of people globally] want more climate action from their governments.”

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication — which along with its partner, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, is arguably the global gold standard in climate opinion research — has published numerous studies documenting the same point: Most people, in most countries, want stronger action on climate change.

A fascinating additional 89 percent angle was documented in a study published by Nature Climate Change, which noted that the overwhelming global majority does not know it is the majority: “[I]ndividuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act,” the report states.

In other words, an overwhelming majority of people want stronger action against climate change.  But at least for now, this global climate majority is a silent majority.

Taken together, the new research turns the conventional wisdom about climate opinion on its ear.   At a time when many governments and companies are stalling or retreating from rapidly phasing out the fossil fuels that are driving deadly heat, fires and floods, the fact that more than eight out of ten human beings on the planet want their political representatives to preserve a livable future offers a much-needed ray of hope.

The question is whether and how that mass sentiment might be translated into effective action.

What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up–if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do? How might this majority’s actions—as citizens, as consumers, as voters—change?  If the current narrative in news and social media shifted from one of retreat and despair to one of self-confidence and common purpose, would people shift from being passive observers to active shapers of their shared future?  If so, what kinds of climate action would they demand from their leaders?

These are the animating questions behind the 89 Percent Project, a year-long media initiative launching this week. The journalistic nonprofit we run, 

, has invited newsrooms from around the world to report, independently or together, on the climate majorities found in their communities.

Who are the people who comprise the 89 percent?  Given that support for climate action varies by country—the figure is 74% in the US, 80% in India, 90% in Burkina Faso — does support also vary by age, gender, political affiliation, and economic status?  What do members of the climate majority want from their political and community leaders?  And what has been standing in the way?

This week of coverage will be followed by months of further reporting that explores additional aspects of public opinion about climate change. If most of the climate majority have no idea they are the majority, do they also not realize that defusing the climate crisis is by no means impossible?  Scientists have long said that humanity possesses the tools and know-how necessary to limit temperature rise to the Paris Agreement’s aspirational target of the 1.5C above preindustrial levels.  What’s been lacking is the political will to implement those tools and leave fossil fuels behind.  The 89 Percent Project will culminate in a second joint week of coverage prior to the COP30 United Nations climate meeting in Brazil in November.

While it’s impossible to know how many newsrooms will participate in this week’s 89 percent coverage, early signs are heartening. The Guardian newspaper and the Agence France-Presse news agency have joined as lead partners of the project. Other newsrooms offering coverage include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, TIME, Drilled, Crooked Media and Indian Country Today (ICT) in the US; the National Observer newspaper in Canada; the Deutsche Welle global broadcaster in Germany; the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy; the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan; and the multinational collaborative Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism based in Jordan.

We believe the current mismatch between public will and government action amounts to a deficit in democracy.  Can that deficit be addressed if the climate majority awakens to its existence?  Would people elect different leaders?  Buy (or not buy) different products?  Would they talk differently to family, friends, and co-workers about what can be done to build a cleaner, safer future?

The first step to answering such questions is to give the silent climate majority a voice. That will happen, finally, this week in news coverage around the world.

This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

A Silent Climate Majority

An elephant wanders through the vast savannah of Murchison Falls National Park. Photo by Diana Taremwa Karakire.

In the middle of the savannah grasslands, a herd of elephants graze by the roadside inside Uganda’s largest national park, Murchison Falls Park. Giraffes, elephants, bushbucks, and buffalo strut across the vast expanses of this savannah. A few meters away, the noise of bulldozers clearing an oil drilling site jars the calm of a sunny June day, as French oil giant TotalEnergies’ long-delayed Tilenga crude oil project roars to life.

“We have co-existed peacefully with these animals for a long time,” said Alex Wakitinti, a senior elder of the Bagungu community, a native tribe that has for generations lived near the rim of the park. “The people, the animals, and the land have always been together.”

These same wild landscapes, however, also host over 6.5 billions of barrels of oil deep underground. Last year, TotalEnergies kicked off drilling operations in the park as part of its 230,000 barrels-a-day Tilenga project, which by early 2025 will catapult Uganda into the league of top oil producers in Africa. And while environmental advocates and Indigenous communities alike continue to raise concerns about the impact of the company’s operations on biodiversity in the protected area, Total claims not only that it won’t damage the area, but that it will leave it better than it found it and deliver a “net biodiversity gain.”

Philippe Groueix, the general manager TotalEnergies Uganda, said that the company conducted

 an environmental impact assessment for its drilling

 in 2019, before undertaking any activities in the park.

“We are committed to having a net gain on biodiversity. We have a detailed environment management plan and are working with partners like Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)  and Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) to implement it,” said Groueix.

Ultimately, delivering a “net gain on biodiversity” will require biodiversity offsetting—the preservation of natural habitats elsewhere to compensate for the loss of biodiversity in Murchison. But to date, the research on biodiversity credits or offsets doesn’t paint a rosy picture. A 

 of available research on the efficacy of “no net loss” approaches to biodiversity, for example, “identified large gaps between the global implementation of offsets and the evidence for their effectiveness.” Writing in 

 in 2023, Australian researchers Michael Vardon and David Lindenmayer warned about “the risk that trading ill-defined generic biodiversity credits will result in biodiversity loss, not conservation.”

Total has announced plans to deliver on its biodiversity promises via various conservation actions in line with the 

, an international framework for environmental mitigation based on four iterative actions: avoidance, minimizing any negative impacts (prevention), before restoring and finally offsetting residual impacts (remediation).

“We work with partners to implement the mitigation hierarchy,” said Pauline Macronald, the Biodiversity Director at TotalEnergies. “Together with UWA [Uganda Wildlife Association] and the WCS [Wildlife Conservation Society], we conduct monthly surveys to monitor animal migration patterns. This approach helps us understand how wildlife interacts with our operations. We closely monitor changes in habitat, ecology, and animal behavior within the project footprint.”

In 2013, Total Energies and WCS in collaboration with the Uganda Wildlife Authority began collecting baseline data on elephant movements within Murchison Falls National Park. The goal of this monitoring is to track elephants' ranging patterns and behavior during different phases of oil and gas development in the park.

But biodiversity experts unaffiliated with the project—which includes new roads, electricity lines,  a network of buried pipelines and 31 well pads (including one located within Murchison Falls National Park) and the 1,443-kilometer East African Crude Oil Pipeline EACOP—have been doing similar monitoring, and what they are finding is not a “net positive” impact. An August 2024

 from Africa Institute for Energy Governance, or AFIEGO, for example, found that since production began in Murchison Park in July 2023, drilling noise has driven animals out of the park and into nearby communities, heightening human-wildlife conflicts in the region. Elephants, for example, have trampled and destroyed farmlands and even caused fatalities; the report found that at least five people in Buliisa district, which neighbors the park, were  killed by elephants between 2023 and April 2024. Vibrations from the drilling are also agitating the elephants, many of which are sensitive to noise and vibration.

“Oil activities have turned the animals against us. Elephants now stray into our lands more frequently, putting their lives and ours at risk,” Wakitinti warned.

Alex Wakitinti removes his shoes before stepping onto a sacred natural site used for traditional prayers by the Bagungu tribe in Buliisa District. Photo by Diana Taremwa Karakire

The report found that increased motor traffic in the park has also led to road accidents risks faced by wildlife. Construction of road networks has further opened up the park and increased human activity within the park, which poses significant conservation risks for wildlife, as these roads provide easier access for poachers.

“In January, an oil gravel dump truck knocked down two elephants,” said Diana Nabiruma,a spokesperson for  AFIEGO. “This has a lot to do with animal ranging patterns. Drilling is taking place in elephant home ranges.”

Ultimately, AFIEGO recommended that TotalEnergies halt all operations in the park and called on the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to engage with the Ugandan government to cease oil activities in this critical biodiversity hotpot.

AFIEGO’s findings came on the heels of a 2

  conducted at Makerere University in Uganda and published in the journal 

that came to similar conclusions about the impact of oil extraction in Murchison Falls National Park and the broader Murchison Falls Conservation Area. That study found that terrestrial wildlife were generally negatively impacted by oil extraction through road development, seismic surveys, installation of oil wells, contamination, and other extraction-related disturbances.

"We are aware of the increase in human-wildlife conflicts in the area and are conducting habitat-specific surveys to understand the causes,” Macronald said. “Elephants are a priority species for us, and we monitor their migration by using GPS collars to track ranging behavior."

Beyond monitoring the issues with wildlife in the park, it’s unclear what the company plans to do to mitigate it; details on their “net gain biodiversity” plan are scant.

Simon Nampindo, Executive Director of the Uganda Wildlife Conservation Society WCS, which is working with Total to address biodiversity concerns declined to comment, stating that “the issue [of drilling in Murchison] is too political.” At one of TotalEnergie’s stakeholder engagement meetings, another WCS employee confided that TotalEnergies restricts its partners from publicly discussing conservation initiatives around Murchison Falls National Park.

Bashir Hangi, the spokesperson for Total’s other local conservation partner, Uganda Wildlife Authority, did speak to Drilled, however. He said that the Albertine Region has faced considerable human-induced pressures for many years prior to the discovery of oil in 2006—including deforestation, habitat conversion for agriculture, and cattle rearing.

“We have human-wildlife conflicts in most of the parks Queen Elizabeth, Kidepo, Kibale national parks where there are no oil activities so we can't blame oil activities for the rise. The population in this area is also increasing and encroaching on the park land,” he said.

 published on its website, TotalEnergies states that it is “deploying eight biodiversity action plans on our new projects and operated production sites” in sensitive areas, and that it is  “committed to having a net gain on biodiversity” for the Tilenga project. The report states that the company also considers the EACOP project to have a “net gain” for biodiversity, as well as an LNG project in Mozambique.

Scientists and environmental advocates remain skeptical about such plans, and about “biodiversity credits” in general. “It is theoretically possible, but very challenging, and it requires a lot of investment and collaboration with conservation organizations. There are lots of studies that show offsets that have not worked very well,”said Sophus zu Ermgassen, a postdoctoral researcher and ecological economist at  Oxford  University.

“The  4 pillar biodiversity program by Total Energies seems to build on existing conservation efforts. Without proper monitoring and enforcement, environmental degradation could go unchecked,” Joshua Apamaku, a wildlife biologist currently studying at Oxford University, said.

Last year, over 500 community members living around the park

 petitioned the Uganda Wildlife Authority

 over elephant attacks caused by oil activities in the park.

Some activists say that they sounded the alarm about the potential harm of oil activities to the park’s biodiversity during public hearings on the Tilenga project’s environment impact assessments. Rather than address those concerns TotalEnergies has invested in massive public relations campaigns and climate-related projects aimed at offsetting the negative effects of its developments, including a community-based forest conservation and restoration initiative, which aims to plant 100,000 trees in the Tilenga project area, a framework agreement for the establishment of large-scale renewable energy projects, and a 

 that includes establishing a facility with a production capacity of 40,000–80,000 tonnes per year for Liquified Petroleum Gas LPG. This LPG recovery facility will provide a cleaner alternative to traditional cooking fuels.

“The scale of TotalEnergies’ crude oil extraction and transport through the EACOP pipeline is not mitigated by the company’s initiative to plant 100,000 trees, which might absorb some 5,000 tonnes CO2 per year,” Rick Heede the Co-founder & Director at Climate Accountability Institute, said.”The pipeline will transport approximately 79 million barrels of oil at peak production, which translates to 35 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Even if Total were to scale up, which is implausible and suggested by no one, there would be undesirable impacts of tree planting efforts.”

 shows that global wildlife populations have declined by 73% over the past 50 years, driven primarily by two human activities: burning fossil fuels, which raises global temperatures, and clearing forests for farmland, which destroys habitats.

 International Finance Corporation standards

, which highlight a number of measures for protection of wildlife from hazards associated with infrastructure developments.

“We advised TotalEnergies to build a wildlife overpass in the park as one of the ways to protect wild life but it ignored us,” Samuel Okulony, an environmental advocate and founder of  Environment Governance Institute said. Wildlife overpasses are recommended in the IFC standards.

The Ugandan government has, to date, supported Total’s conservation claims. “We have conducted comprehensive Environmental Impact Assessments…and TotalEnergies has put in place a robust environment management plan. We are also effectively monitoring the company’s activities and have established penalties for non-compliance with the environmental safeguards outlined in national legal frameworks and

 Dr Akankwasa Barirega , the Executive Director at the state environment agency NEMA 

Nonetheless, in June 2024, there was a standoff between TotalEnergies and Petroleum Authority Uganda, the industry regulator over plans to deploy a second rig in Murchison park before the company could conduct the necessary studies needed to safeguard the park’s sensitive ecosystem.

“They are destroying various natural carbon sinks,  several hectares of forest cover, rivers, over 158 wetlands with these oil projects,” Okulony said.  “I don’t see how that protects biodiversity, or protects us from climate change, especially when floods and landslides are already a reality.”

TotalEnergies Promises “Net Gain Biodiversity” as it Drills in Uganda’s Largest National Park  

We first published this guide in March 2024. Since then, the information ecosystem around climate has only gotten more muddled in some places—particularly in the United States, where the government is actively trying to rid the country of data and information on the subject. But there are efforts underway to deal with the problem, too. In the European Union the Digital Services Act is in effect and now it’s up to individual governments to implement guardrails around misleading information on social media. In late 2024, the Brazilian government, the United Nations and UNESCO launched the 

Activate Climate’s ‘Silent Majority’ to Supercharge Action, Experts Say

A Silent Climate Majority

TotalEnergies Promises “Net Gain Biodiversity” as it Drills in Uganda’s Largest National Park

The Drilled Guide to Global Climate Disinformation

Banks Back Away from Climate Commitments, Find the Business Case in Climate Risk

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

Activate Climate’s ‘Silent Majority’ to Supercharge Action, Experts Say

A Silent Climate Majority

TotalEnergies Promises “Net Gain Biodiversity” as it Drills in Uganda’s Largest National Park

The Drilled Guide to Global Climate Disinformation

Banks Back Away from Climate Commitments, Find the Business Case in Climate Risk

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!