Writing
“Moving forward, journalists—and citizens as well—should recognize that oil and gas producers increasingly sound like climate advocates, using the same words and phrases that call for the end of the fossil fuel era. This is their new greenwashing strategy. It is all the more important never to take anyone’s words at face value, but to interpret them in the context of an entire statement—whether an industry advertisement, a think-tank report, or a text from U.N. climate talks—assessing that statement in relation to both the latest climate silence and actual industry investments. Propaganda shouldn’t be amplified. It should be exposed.”
“Language Wars Could Decide the Climate Fight.” The New Republic, 2023
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“The IPCC’s statement signals the time for playing pretend is over. No country or leader can excuse more new coal, oil or gas development with fossil fuel producers’ false promises of magically effective technologies to reduce or recapture fossil energy emissions. The world must halt new fossil fuel development and dismantle current fossil energy infrastructure in a way that is fair to workers in the industry and people in the developing world. And this must be done now, so we can give our children a livable world.”
“The New UN Climate Report Airs the Dirty Truth about Fossil Fuels.” MSNBC, 2023
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“The genre that offers us [a] pattern of extended political struggle is, of course, the epic. Its sweeping, episodic, iterative form attempts to narrate the labor of overthrowing an old or illegitimate order and building a new world. It tells stories about fighting to shape history. (If the idea of shaping history seems impossibly naive to you, then you may be part of the problem.) For all its oppressive uses as the literature of empire, the epic can equally be the literature of resistance.”
“The Epic of Survival.” TDR: The Drama Review, 2023
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“I will admit that nihilism and despair are very attractive—sexy, even, considering also they’re the affects that all too easily signify ‘intellectual sophistication’ in the Anthropocene. Embracing cynicism and hopelessness allows you both to look tough, as if you have the backbone to face devastating truths about global warming, and to take yourself off the hook of the duty to work toward resolving the crisis.”
“The Practice of Anger in a Warming World.” The Kenyon Review, 2022
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“‘Driving’ signifies something very different for the American worker at a big-box store who is forced to commute in her car to the mall versus the private equity manager speeding a gleaming Lamborghini around the cliffs of the Italian Riviera. One act is the expression of entanglement in an exploitative economic system that makes it impossible not to emit carbon; the other is the expression of the injustice of that very system.”
“We Need to Talk about the Carbon Footprints of the Rich.” Noema Magazine, 2022 (Top 10 Noema articles, 2022; Winner, Best Commentary Award, 65th SoCal Journalism Awards, 2022)
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“The models saying ‘we need CDR’ are not establishing scientific facts. They are positing political futures…The whole idea of carbon removal was developed to keep the fossil-fuel system going.”
“Carbon Removal Isn’t the Solution to Climate Change.” The New Republic, 2022
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“Newspapers and television news programs should not only inform news consumers about the climate crisis, but also acknowledge the climate crisis in their business practices. Making ads for fossil fuel companies is a betrayal of the public and a dereliction of duty. It’s flat-out a form of climate denial.”
“Fossil Fuel Branded Content Is a Form of Climate Denial and Propaganda.” Teen Vogue, 2021
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“As rhetoricians have known for thousands of years, communicators must appeal to the imagination, using vivid images that conjure visceral emotions, to move people to act. In the case of the climate crisis, communicators should help voters feel a complex of three specific emotions: fear of climate breakdown, outrage that powerful actors are blocking the passage of effective climate policy, and desire for a transformed global economy. Fear motivates us to protect ourselves and the people we love; outrage empowers us to experience the climate crisis as a political problem with clear antagonists; and desire enables us to accept the costs of decarbonization as greatly outweighed by the benefits of preserving the living world.”
“Imagination, Emotion, Action: Communicating the Climate Emergency.” Standing Up for a Sustainable World: Voices of Change, Eds. Claude Henry, Johan Rockström, and Sir Nicholas Stern, Edward Elgar, 2020
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“The media has a responsibility to inform viewers of the connections between climate change and the increasingly unstable world around them. It's not just climate activists and policy wonks who want to see this kind of coverage; our polling shows that a broad base of voters do too.”
“Voters Want to See More Climate Coverage in the Media.” With Danielle Deiseroth and Marcela Mulholland. Data for Progress, 2020
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“More than 7 in 10 Americans (72 percent) say that if there is a connection between an extreme weather event and climate change, they want to hear about it in the news, including 85 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans.”
“Americans Want Climate Change News. Media Should Give it to Them.” Boston Globe, 2020
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“Why should The New York Times legitimate...anti-science falsehoods? The Times opinion page would not, I think, print an op-ed arguing that people don't need to wear masks in public, even though the Centers for Disease Control has seemed uncertain about its recommendations in the past, and mask-wearing has been politicized by Republican politicians and right-wing media elites. Yet this is what they do when they print climate denial.”
“As The New York Times Thinks Through Its Op-ed Policy, Will It Stop Publishing Climate Denial?” Drilled News, 2020
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“Climate change requires us to keep two perspectives in mind at once: we must feel and accept the essential limits of the planetary system on which we entirely depend, and we must embrace our capacity to remake our collective fictions and thereby redistribute social and political power. In that double consciousness we may find an idea of humanity that will save us.”
“What Climate Change Tells Us about Being Human.” Scientific American, 2019
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“When the news media suppresses the truth about the full scope of the climate crisis and the fact that climate change has already begun to destroy our world, it enables and normalizes...climate denial.”
“#EndClimateSilence.” Sallan Foundation, 2019
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“To think of climate change as something that we are doing, instead of something we are being prevented from undoing, perpetuates the very ideology of the fossil-fuel economy we’re trying to transform.”
“Who is the 'We' in 'We are Causing Climate Change'?” Slate, 2018
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“Stories about the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities are not universally understood as evidence for the reality and the danger of climate change [because] the dynamic of racial othering still structures political identifications in America.”
“The Racism of Climate Denial.” Public Seminar, 2018
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“Most of us would do anything for our children, and most of us are at least somewhat reconciled to our deaths by the hope that our children will be safe and thriving even after we’re gone. That hope is both consolation and one of the great political motivators in American democracy.”
“How the Republicans Silenced the Democrats after Harvey.” Medium, 2017
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“In both sixteenth-century German and English, the word "charm" denoted a magical incantation or spell. And in the instrumental aesthetics of the English Renaissance, the charm and the poem had yet to be entirely distinguished...The Elizabethan Parliament outlawed the practice of "charming" as a felony in 1563, and English theologians worried over the etymological connections between "charm" and "carmen" (Latin for "poem"), but Philip Sidney still attributed poetry's [political] efficacy to its "charming force." Edmund Spenser called the spells of the demonic magicians in The Faerie Queene both "charms" and "verses." And Shakespeare staged Prospero's theatrical power over his enemies as an effect of his "high charms." The connection between magic and poetry became purely metaphorical only in the eighteenth century, when "charm" emerged as a term in British empiricist aesthetics designating the merely natural, if alluring force of beauty.”
Magical Imaginations: Instrumental Aesthetics in the English Renaissance, 2012
Speaking
“The Language of Climate Politics,” Harvard Bookstore, East Hampton Author’s Night, City Lights Bookstore, The San Francisco Commonwealth Club, Hamilton College, 2024
“Why You Need to Talk about Climate Change,” Keynote, Language and Climate: Making Connections for a Sustainable Future, Columbia University, 2024
“Toxic Discourses: Hope and Hazards in Environmental Storytelling,” Moderator, Forum on the Environment, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University, 2023
“Narratives for Social Impact: Empowering Narratives and Fostering Collaboration for Sustainable Social Impact,” Panel, Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Conference, Harvard Kennedy School, 2023
“Robert Solow and the Theory of Perpetual Growth,” The New School, 2022
“Is there a Role for Carbon Credits in Accelerating a Fair, Net-Zero World?” TED Countdown, 2022
“Tallking about the Climate Crisis to Wake Adults Up,” The Dalton School, 2022
“Lessons from Covid 19 for Climate Change,” Panel, United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2022
“‘Don’t Look Up’ and the Climate Crisis,” Panel, Duke University, 2022
“Social Media and Climate Communication,” Panel, Noons for Now, Carleton University Climate Commons Working Group, 2022
“Communicating Climate.” Mirrors or Movers? 9th Annual Conference of the Responsible Media Forum, London UK (virtual), 2021
“How to Talk about the ‘Cost’ of Climate Action.” Google, 2021
“Climate Communication.” Guest Lecture, “Applications in Climate and Society,” Graduate Course, The Climate School, Columbia University, 2021
“Climate Communication.” Guest Lecture, Project Drawdown, 2021
“Seeing Vs. Believing: The Public Perception of Climate,” Panel, NYC Sierra Club, 2021
“End Climate Silence: Climate Communication in the Media and Beyond.” Panel lead, “Research to Action: Science and Solutions for a Planet Under Pressure,” Global Council for Science and the Environment and Project Drawdown Annual Conference (Steering Committee), 2021
“A New Climate News Team Aims to Cut Through the Clean-Energy Fog.” Panel, Earth Institute, Columbia University, 2021
“Communicating the Climate Emergency.” The Climate Reality Project, New York State Chapter Coalition Annual Retreat, 2021
“Covering Climate: What is the Media Missing?” Panel, 350Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Public Library, 2021
“Courage, Faith, and Climate Action.” Keynote, Rochester Youth Climate Summit, Rochester NY, 2021
“Communicating the Climate Emergency.” The Climate Reality Project, New York State Chapter Coalition, 2020
“Media, Mayhem, and Mass Movements.” Panel, University of St. Andrews, 2020
“What's Next for the Media Covering Climate Change?” Panel, Earth Institute, Columbia University, NYC Climate Week, 2020
“Renaissance Literary Theory and Eco-Storytelling.” Saint John's University, 2020
“The New Republic and The New School Present: Covering Climate Change (How to Turn Up the Heat).” Panel, The New School, NYC Climate Week, 2019
“Keywords for a New Climate.” New York Society for Ethical Culture, NYC Climate Week, 2019
“The Climate Emergency.” Saint Ann's School, 2019
“The Climate Crisis and the 2020 Election: Let’s Unpack This.” Panel, The New School, 2019
“The Language of Climate Change.” Commons Series Speakers, Rochester NY, 2019
“The Racism of Climate Denial.” Faculty Seminar, The New School, 2018
“Disrupting Climate Injustice: Curriculum Disruption at The New School.” AASHE national meeting, 2018
“Dear Mr. Pruitt.” Invited testimony, The People’s Hearing on the EPA’s repeal of the Clean Power Plan, 2018
“Keywords for a New Climate.” Faculty Seminar, The New School, 2018
“What Renaissance Literary Theory Tells Us about Climate Communication.” American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting, 2017