The event is free to attend. Please sign up in advance here:
https://cape.ku.dk/eng/calendar/2025/the-language-of-climate-politics/
Fossil fascism is rising in the United States. To build a permission structure for its actions, the Trump regime is suppressing science, taking control of the news media, and silencing communities harmed by extreme weather. Yet at the same time, it does not exactly deny that climate change is real. Rather, while spreading falsehoods about clean energy, the regime advances a more nuanced propaganda that goes something like this: “Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is alarmist. And, anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, which enable innovation and increase our resilience.”
This story has power because it articulates the ideological matrix of fossil capitalism — the overlapping consensus shared by both the fascist right and the liberal center — that we can keep using coal, oil, and methane and still deal with climate change anyway. Yet climate propaganda is powerful also because it is skillfully manufactured by fossil-fuel interests. These interests appropriate discourse from science, economics, and even activism, exploiting the literary qualities of language such as ambiguity or implicature, so as to normalize disinformation. Genevieve Guenther ultimately explores the ways this appropriation works and offers strategies to combat it.
After Guenther’s talk, she will be joined in discussion by postdoc at CApE Frederik Appel Olsen. They will explore the shifts in climate denial discourse in the last decades and what activists, scientists, and citizens broadly can do to counter the language of fossil capitalism and the rise of fossil fascism. The event will be moderated by Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen.
After the event, there will be a small reception.
Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence and the author of the acclaimed The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It. While writing for both scholarly and popular audiences, Dr. Guenther advises NGOs, corporations, and policymakers on climate communication and disinformation, and she serves as a featured climate expert in media such as The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
Frederik Appel Olsen holds a PhD in rhetoric from the University of Copenhagen and is currently postdoc and acting deputy director at CApE. His work examines the rhetoric of scientist activists and ecological writing in the climate and environmental debate.
Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen is the director at CApE and PI of the research project Climate Justice Temporalities in Denmark (JusTiDe).
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