George Morrison
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Like a lot of people in the reality-based climate community, I have struggled with how to deal with Genevieve Guenther. How do you respond to someone so patently unserious without appearing to take them seriously? The problem, though, is that a lot of Very Serious People in the climate movement take her very seriously. Her book, “The Language of Climate Politics” was published this summer by Oxford University Press to rave advanced reviews.
Bill McKibben, the founder of the modern climate movement, cannot imagine “a savvier or more useful account of our greatest crisis.” Michael Mann, the movement’s most iconic scientist, asserts that Guenther expertly elucidates “the ways in which the modern climate discourse has been polluted by bad actors with an agenda of business-as-usual dependence on fossil fuels.” Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressperson from Silicon Valley calls the book, “an enlightening and inspiring journey through the politics of climate change” and Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell avers that “Guenther knows her subject and is a fabulous bullshit detector.”
Guenther claims the book was peer-reviewed and that she also personally hired a former New Yorker fact-checker to review its 600 plus citations. But anyone even remotely familiar with the literatures that Guenther cites will find themselves surprised by many of her claims. We are told, for instance, that global agricultural yield over the last 60 years has fallen; that Robert Solow, who invented modern economic growth theory, secretly knew that economic growth was constrained by the availability of agricultural land; and that crops grown for bioenergy produce ionizing radiation and deplete the ozone layer.
Some weeks ago, George Morrison, who some will know by his Twitter handle, @rustneversleepz, posted a reply to a tweet of mine in which I observed that the climate movement’s commitment to scientific consensus and evidence extends exactly as far as that consensus and evidence comports with the movement’s agenda. In a threaded reply, George pointed to a series of claims in Guenther’s book that are obviously wrong, even as she purports to uncover the nuanced ways that the “language of climate politics” promotes climate denial and disinformation.*
I asked George if he would be interested in turning his thread into a more substantial factcheck, inclusive of any other claims he came across while reading the book and he generously agreed to do so. He limited his review to three chapters which deal with subjects he knows reasonably well: standard treatments of economic growth; the economic costs of climate change and its mitigation; and the carbon cycle and how it relates to negative CO₂ emissions. These subjects are covered in Chapters 2, 3 and 5, titled “Cost,” “Growth” and “Innovation,” respectively.*
What Morrison found was a variety of claims that consistently either misunderstand or misrepresent the literature they cite. What follows is far from an exhaustive factcheck of Guenther’s claims. Morrison simply read through these chapters, identified claims that he knew to be wrong, and went down the rabbit hole of Guenther’s citations to figure out what the evidential basis was—or was not—for her claims.*
I can’t speak for the rest of the book (although as someone who features prominently in the opening chapter of the book, I can say with certainty that she misrepresents my work, claiming that I have argued for the continuing and indefinite use of fossil fuels and that eliminating the world’s dependence on fossil fuels is “impossible.”). What I will say is that insofar as the claims that follow are representative of the rest of the book, it would seem that what Guenther has produced is in fact a classic example of climate disinformation, not its antidote.*
Ted Nordhaus
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LI 2 25
:{Head of Global Expansion at Lime