By hiding who’s really responsible for the crisis, the word 'we' provides political cover for the people who are happy to destroy a livable climate to gain more profit and power.
ClimateVoices · Episode 74 · 06-25-25
An interview with Dr. Genevieve Guenther, a former Renaissance scholar who turned to climate activism after having a child and becoming increasingly alarmed about the world her son could inherit after she died. Using her training in rhetoric and cultural politics, as well as social-science research, she works to revamp the ways that we talk about the urgent need to phase out coal, oil, and methane. She is guided by the conviction that our language for the climate crisis is largely inaccurate and misleading, and that fixing this problem requires us not just to reframe talking points, but to recognize how our speech itself – what we say and what we don’t say about climate change – upholds a dangerous status quo.
In 2018, Dr. Guenther founded End Climate Silence, a volunteer organization that pushes the news media to start talking about the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves. She directs strategy and outreach, helping journalists explain the links between global warming and extreme weather, headline the urgent findings of climate science, and foreground the role of climate breakdown in news about politics, energy, business and finance, immigration, real estate, health, travel, food, and even the arts.
Dr. Guenther’s activism and writing has been profiled in The New Yorker, and End Climate Silence has been cited in The New York Times Magazine as helping to set climate politics “on fire.” Her book, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, has been called a “revelatory study” by Publishers Weekly and “a gift to the world” by Bill McKibben.
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Dr. Genevieve Guenther
Founder of End Climate Silence
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