Episode 228: Genevieve Guenther, End Climate Silence
Today’s guest is Genevieve Guenther, author, activist, and Founding Director of End Climate Silence.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther is a Renaissance scholar and literary critic who turned to climate activism after having a child and becoming increasingly alarmed about the world she might leave to her son. Using her training in rhetoric and cultural politics, she works to revamp the ways that we think and talk about the climate crisis. She is guided by the conviction that our language for the 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—reproduces fossil-fuel ideologies.
Mobilizing through digital and direct action, 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. Dr. Guenther also advises activist groups, corporations, and policymakers, and she serves as an Expert Reviewer for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Her next book, The Language of Climate Politics, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Jason and Genevieve have a great discussion in this episode about many of the topics we typically cover on the My Climate Journey podcast, but Dr. Guenther offers a unique perspective given her background. They also dig into some areas of disagreement and find that once again people who are dedicated to working on solving the crisis agree on a lot more than the polarized environment of Twitter may have them believe.
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Episode recorded on August 11, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
[3:39] Genevieve's background and her work in climate
[10:04] Use of the word "uncertainty" among scientists and in climate communications
[13:35] An overview of End Climate Silence
[16:06] How Genevieve's views about the nature of the problem have evolved
[24:40] Her views on the gravity of the problem, and challenges of modeling human behavior and warming
[35:46] Energy poverty and justifying fossil fuel production
[39:30] How Genevieve would transition to clean energy if she was in charge
[44:31] Her thoughts on carbon removal
[49:44] Challenges with direct air capture as a solution
[57:03] Issues with entrepreneurs overpromising carbon removal
Genevieve's book recommendations:
Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
Amitav Gosh, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
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Jason Jacobs (00:00:02):
Hello everyone, this is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:00:04):
And I'm Cody Sims.
Jason Jacobs (00:00:06):
And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:00:16):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:00:27):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change. Today's guest is Dr. Genevieve Guenther, who's an author, climate activist and native New Yorker. She is an expert in climate communication and fossil fuel disinformation, and also the founding director of End Climate Silence, which is a volunteer organization dedicated to helping the media cover the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves. Now, I was excited for this one because I have followed Genevieve or DoctorVive, her Twitter handle on Twitter, for quite a while. I've always found her to be extremely passionate about the same thing that I am, which is accelerating the clean energy transition. When it comes to tactics, I've bristled a few times when it comes to things like villainizing the fossil fuel industry and being so skeptical of carbon removal, and rather than get into a Twitter spat, I invited Dr. Guenther on the show to have a long-form discussion.
Jason Jacobs (00:01:37):
We have a really great discussion in this episode about Genevieve's journey to doing the work that she's doing, what she's learned along the way, how her views have evolved, whether she's an optimist, what types of solutions are most impactful, barriers holding us back, so similar types of topics that we cover in every episode, but Dr. Guenther has a pretty unique perspective on it and I learn a lot. Also, we double click on some of the areas of disagreement and find that while we don't always agree completely, we agree a lot more than the polarized environment of Twitter may lead us to believe, which is a good lesson that I'm learning again and again lately and that I encourage all of you to learn as well. At any rate, Genevieve, welcome to the show.
Genevieve Guenther (00:02:24):
Thanks for having me, Jason. I'm delighted to be here.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:27):
Well, I'm so thrilled that you agreed to come on the show and it's interesting. For a long time, I've been very active on Twitter pretty much like thinking out loud over the last four years as I've been navigating, getting a better understanding of the nature of the climate problem and how to help. You're someone that I've followed for a long time. You seem really well thought out in research well more than me, to be honest, and I think I have a lot to learn from you. I've seen certain viewpoints or a little sound by tweets, for example, that make me bristle a little bit and my old response would've been to probably to have some snarky tweet or something, but what I'm finding is that, actually, I hate to use the word double-click, so I'm now going to try to use a different word, but dig deeper and get live person-to-person and talk through the nuance is so much more beneficial because there is so much nuance involved. That's been my new thing. It's working awesome, and you're just someone I'm so excited to have the opportunity to learn from, so thank you.
Genevieve Guenther (00:03:29):
Well, that's kind of you to say. Thanks. I'm happy to be here.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:31):
Well, for starters, I did some prep, so I know this, but for listener's benefit, maybe just give a quick overview of the work that you currently do.
Genevieve Guenther (00:03:39):
Well, my background is actually in literary and cultural criticism. I was a Shakespeare scholar, my PhD is in English Renaissance Literature. But after I became a mom, I got really concerned with the future I was going to leave my son after I die, and so I had a journey that was akin to yours. I started reading a lot, teaching myself or attempting to teach myself climate science. There's this really wonderful platform called edX, which I recommend to all your listeners.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:07):
They're Boston Company, right?
Genevieve Guenther (00:04:08):
I'm not sure who owns them, but they have content from universities across the United States and Canada.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:15):
I meant actually located in Boston. I can't say that for sure, but I'm pretty sure they're Boston-based. I only say that because I'm Boston-based.
Genevieve Guenther (00:04:20):
Oh, you are? Okay. Yeah, they're fantastic. They offer these college level courses in climate science and climate communication and I did a few of those. Then, of course, I used my training in how to research subjects to do the deep research in climate communication and I was reading that, but I was also still teaching renaissance literature, I still had my feet in both camps. But then, in 2017, the New York Times hired a columnist named Brett Stevens from the Wall Street Journal. At that time, Mr. Stevens was on record as being a pretty inveterate climate denier. I was so shocked and outraged that the paper of record, who I considered my companion through 20th century America, or I guess at that point 21st century America, thought that climate denial was a legitimate political opinion at this point in history that I actually started a petition to try to get them to get Stevens canceled we would say now, to get them to rescind their offer to him.
Genevieve Guenther (00:05:22):
At first, I was a real Luddite, I was a Renaissance scholar. I was one of the last people in my circle of friends to get an iPhone or at that point, it was a flip phone I guess, but I wrote this petition on change.org, this online platform, and just coincidentally, this started circulating just before the climate strike and the march on science that happened in DC one week apart from each other. What I did was I went to Kinko's, I think it was, and Xeroxed multiple copies of this petition and took train from New York City where I'm based down to DC and literally walked around these marches handing out this petition. I targeted college green groups, the leaders of these college green groups, and asked them to send their petition out through their networks to try to use a network approach to get the most impact.
Genevieve Guenther (00:06:14):
The petition really took off because I was not the only one who was really shocked and pissed about this. As the petition's numbers started climbing, the climate campaigner at change.org called me up and said, "We want to help you with this petition. You should get on Twitter to promote it." I was like, "I don't really understand Twitter. What is Twitter?" I had an account since 2009, but I literally never used it because I didn't understand it. She really encouraged me to get onto Twitter to promote this promotion and petition, and when I did, I encountered the climate scientists who were also circulating an open letter to the New York Times arguing that Steven's positions were untenable, they were unscientific, they were a form of misinformation and they had no place at the New York Times. Then, I got connected with other activists, I got connected to climate journalists, and all of a sudden, I was thrusted to this community, which, as you know, is incredibly vibrant. People are extremely generous.
Genevieve Guenther (00:07:12):
I have always been able to ask climate scientists questions about the science and have them answered via there on Twitter or in conversations off Twitter. I have made connections to other activists and it's become, in some sense, a context for learning that the university could be if there were more interdisciplinary conversations between different departments. There I was on Twitter and that has given me a community for my activism. But then, what happened from there was when Stevens, who incidentally did obviously keep his position at the Times because the Times does not respond to activism, when he wrote his first column, I had this insight about the way the language of climate politics actually works. He wrote his column, his first column at the Times about climate change because he knew about this petition, he addressed me on Twitter and he was very smug about the fact that the New York Times doesn't respond to activist pressure, and then, he went ahead and wrote about climate change.
Genevieve Guenther (00:08:13):
This column was called Climate of Complete Certainty, and it used the messaging of the past decade plus among right wing circles, which is to highlight scientific uncertainty and to suggest that there is enough scientific uncertainty about climate science that you can't really justify any government or even private investment in clean energy or other forms of climate action because the science isn't really certain enough to say that climate change is real, it's human caused and it'll be dangerous. This was the last gasp of that argument, which was basically swept out of the public sphere with the release in 2018 of the 1.5 degree Celsius report by the IPCC.
Jason Jacobs (00:08:55):
Although, I see some pockets of it still on Twitter. There's that Alex guy, I forget his last name, whose hashtag is like climate catastrophism or whatever and he is tweeting like-
Genevieve Guenther (00:09:04):
Well, that's a slightly different argument actually. That's the argument of accusing climate scientists and climate activists of alarmism, which we can get into in a moment. It has a similar structure but it's a slightly orthogonal argument. Anyway, about uncertainty, he's making this argument that the science is too uncertain to motivate any policy. Because A, I'm trained in literary criticism and I am trained to recognize how words are ambiguous and mean different things to different people and in different contexts and in different subcultures, and because I had just done all of this climate science online in books by myself, I realized that the way that Stevens was using the word uncertainty was not the way that climate scientists were using this word. When most people hear the word uncertainty, they think about the state of not really being sure, needing more time or needing more information to come to a decision or come to a state of knowledge or certainty.
Genevieve Guenther (00:10:04):
If you're in a restaurant and the service says to you, "Do you want the chicken or the fish?", and you're like, "I don't really know. Go around the table, come back, I'm still uncertain." But this is not necessarily what uncertainty means to climate scientists. It has this disciplinary meaning, which is range of possible outcomes. When you say that the uncertainty of the model is X, you're saying that the model shows that the outcome here could be anything in this range. You can project that uncertainty with confidence. Paradoxically, in climate science, a synonym of uncertainty is actually confidence. You can talk about the uncertainty interval or you can talk about the confidence interval. I recognized that the deniers were using uncertainty in this way that the climate scientists weren't always using it. But what was really interesting was the deniers, the right wing, was actually governing the way that the news media talk about climate science.
Genevieve Guenther (00:11:04):
The news media was picking up the colloquial meaning of uncertainty and circulating that, and so reporters would ask scientists about these projections and the scientists, being scrupulous as they usually are by nature and by training, would say, "Yes, there is an uncertainty here and we have to acknowledge the uncertainty." But they didn't mean they were acknowledging not knowing what they were talking about or not having some consensus, what they were acknowledging is a range of possible outcomes. But because the discussion in the public sphere had been dominated by this right wing disinformation, every time scientists used the word uncertainty, they were actually amplifying climate denial unwittingly.
Genevieve Guenther (00:11:50):
I saw this dynamic from Stevens' first column and then I started to see it everywhere, and so I came up with this book project, which I'm now writing for Oxford University Press, the politics list there, called the Language of Climate Politics, where I look at these words, no longer uncertainty, but other words like alarmist or cost or growth or innovation or resilience that have this role in climate politics, where the meaning that we ascribe to them has been, in some sense, influenced by right wing disinformation, which is then somehow weaponizing a legitimate or scientific or economic understanding of what this word means, but the way that we're talking about it in the public sphere actually amplifies this information. My book tries to of piece that out and reframe things so that to circumvent that dynamic.
Genevieve Guenther (00:12:44):
That's what I've been doing basically since, I would say, early 2018, is doing the research for this book, which is really writing another dissertation in a way. Really, I've had to read all of climate economics, I've had to read lots of political theory, lots of things that I didn't necessarily have deep expertise in before, but I've been reading it as a literary critic reading the stuff as a literary critic and trying to see where the assumptions of this legitimate discourse are actually also amplifying right-wing disinformation. I did all this research, I wrote a book proposal, I also had eight months of long COVID, which slowed me down a little bit, but now I'm writing this book and the manuscript is going to be delivered in April of 2023 and the book itself will come out just before the election in '24.
Genevieve Guenther (00:13:35):
That's the one thing I'm working on and then additionally, I founded this little activist group, all-volunteer called End the Climate Silence, which originally had the mission of simply trying to get journalists to mention climate change and the stories they were telling about its causes and effects, which almost never happened, and to, more broadly, change the paradigm of a climate change story from something that you would read or hear about in a science section or an environment section to something that is a worthy story for any beat, any desk, and any time you report on extreme weather or you report on energy markets or you report on even travel or real estate in some places, you really do need to contextualize it in the climate crisis because climate change really does influence all of these things in our economy, in our lives and in the stories that we tell.
Genevieve Guenther (00:14:31):
I founded that in 2018 and I do feel that climate coverage has improved significantly, and now, I think the next announcement is going to be that our new mission is to get journalists, not just to mention climate change, but to tie climate change to fossil fuel production and consumption. That's the next step, because what my book is ultimately going to argue is that, at this political moment, the problem is most of us are proceeding under the false belief that we can continue to invest in downstream oil and gas production, we can continue to use fossil fuels and still halt global heating anyway, and this is absolutely false. We need to actually really come to grips with that in our public discourse, in our messaging, in our politics, and we absolutely have not done that right now. We have an all of the above approach politically, economically, and also conceptually. Anyway, so that's a very long answer to your question, but that's the answer.
Jason Jacobs (00:15:33):
Thank you for that. I've heard you say in other interviews that you became more and more concerned about the gravity of the problem and you had a kid, and I think you said 2010, and that you want to be able to tell your kid that you, you didn't use these words but essentially left it all on the field, that you did your best and that's a very similar approach to the one that I have and how I think about it. I'm curious though, how did you think about the nature of the problem when you first started working on it? How has that evolved over the time that you've been working on it, if at all?
Genevieve Guenther (00:16:06):
That is a great question. When I started thinking about climate communication, the focus in policy circles was on carbon taxes. People would talk about the way climate change was constructed in the media sphere was something like what follows. They would talk about the science of climate change and how uncertain it was, and they would very much downplay the systemic effects of global heating and simultaneously say, "And we need a carbon tax in order to solve the problem." To me, this was absolutely backwards, a completely ass backwards way to talk about it.
Genevieve Guenther (00:16:50):
To me, the point was not that it was this minor scientific problem that we didn't know anything about. To me, the problem was that, if you apply the precautionary principle and you piece this out to what's going to happen to our planet and our civilization if we don't stop using fossil fuels, this is actually the biggest problem we've ever faced and we're in tremendous danger, and that's the point and not tremendous danger in two centuries, three centuries, but in this century, our children in America, even though we're wealthy as a nation, although we can talk about how GDP hides just the massive amount of poverty in the United States later if you wish.
Genevieve Guenther (00:17:27):
Anyway, to me, the point was to have a really precautionary principle-oriented form of messaging about climate change itself, but then talk about solving climate change as a tremendous economic opportunity. In the same way that moving from the horse and buggy to the car created all sorts of new markets and new wealth, you can talk about the clean energy revolution as a tremendous economic opportunity. That's how I was sort of conceptualizing it, I would say, back in 2015, 2016, even 2017, when I was really starting to think about this stuff. The idea with most political messaging is, here's this danger that our opponents are actually leading you into and we're going to fix it, and fixing it also means you're going to be richer. That's the basic structure of all effective political messaging.
Genevieve Guenther (00:18:24):
That's how I came into it, and ironically, a messaging around the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, which just passed the Senate and hopefully will pass the House today, was almost entirely centered on the economic opportunity that these investments in clean energy will provide and the way that these investments will ultimately save rate payers and other consumers money. That is an absolutely important part of any climate messaging to show how it's going to benefit the pocketbook of voters today.
Genevieve Guenther (00:18:55):
That said, my ideas about what it's going to take actually to solve the climate crisis in reality and also how you get people on board to fighting incumbent interests have evolved. I don't think that messaging the climate problem and its solution only in terms of danger and economic opportunity is actually enough anymore. At this point, I think that there's A, lot of deeper ideological work that needs to be done, which is something that I'm trying to do in my book, but also B, I think it's really important to make this a epochal struggle between the forces, leaving aside whether you think there is actually evil in the world, this is just a narrative trope, an epochal struggle between the forces of good and evil. There has to be more political conflict foregrounded and normalized, I think, or else we're never really going to make the changes that we need to make quickly enough to halt global heating at a safe level.
Jason Jacobs (00:19:59):
Well, a few places I'd love to go from there. One is, if you take it one zoom level higher, because I asked you about the problem and how you're thinking the problem evolved, then you talked about the climate communications problem, I'm interested to understand your views on the problem of climate change. The IPCC report, for example, talks about 12 years. Some describe it as a climate emergency, others say we shouldn't use the word emergency. Some say that we're at risk of catastrophic tipping points and life on this planet may not continue and others say, "No, it's a slider. There'll be more suffering over time and we want to minimize that, but there's no deadline that's a manufactured date." I've done a very poor now job as a host of asking a leading question, where I shouldn't have, how do you think about the problem of climate change and how has that evolved since you started doing this work?
Genevieve Guenther (00:20:48):
I have become more frightened of climate change since I've started doing this work. I have been deeply, deeply shocked by how late in the game it really is. About that target, that 12 years and then 2050, this is the thing. Climate science has a pretty robust understanding of the relationship between carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and temperatures. That is something that is extremely settled science as it were. Now, what we need to do to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere so that the stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stabilizes and hopefully begins to draw down, that stuff is politics and economics, it's not science. That's where political conflict, ideology, true colloquial uncertainty comes in because, of course, humans are not ... we're these unique animals where our behavior is so much less circumscribed than other kinds of animals and we actually don't follow deterministic laws in the way that the atmosphere does with respect to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's one issue.
Genevieve Guenther (00:22:26):
What the IPCC said about these targets is that they have looked at these economic models which game out how we might mitigate emissions extrusions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in time to stabilize the stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in their models, draw it down significantly so that we can halt warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. What they've said is that in order to have a two-thirds chance of halting warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need A, to half global emissions by 2030, B, draw down those emissions to net zero by 2050, which means no longer adding any carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that isn't immediately removed by either nature-based or anthropological carbon dioxide removal. Then, in addition, we will probably have to deliver negative emissions after 2050 in order to keep warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's what those targets are.
Genevieve Guenther (00:23:43):
If we warm the planet more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, this is not all of a sudden an asteroid is going to crash into our planet and we're all going to die in a fiery hell. It means that the harms that we're already seeing from global heating are just going to get worse and the likelihood of tipping points is just going to get higher. This is true for every 10th of a degree of warming. It's never going to be too late to halt global heating. It's never going to be too late to achieve net zero emissions. Every 10th of a degree matters. The political process has said that we want to halt warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to preserve island nations and ecosystems that will be destroyed if we heat the planet more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Genevieve Guenther (00:24:40):
Now, talking about what will be destroyed from global heating is another area of our understanding about climate change, which is really hard to say anything definitive about, because you can't model in climate models. In scientific models, you cannot model the relationship between warming and ecosystems in any kind of systemic way. You can't model the relationship between warming ecosystems and human behavior in any kind of robust way. We don't know how human societies are going to respond to, say California running out of water or North Africa and the Mediterranean becoming deserts in the next decades, or all of a sudden people dying en masse in Southeast Asia because these heat waves come so hard and fast and so many people don't have air conditioning that people start dying en masse and what that's going to do to our politics.
Genevieve Guenther (00:25:44):
This is the thing. It's like, we think of our human civilizations as somehow being separate from the planet's ecology or being separate from the climate. We think of nature as this externality to human civilization and it's not at all. It's all integrated. We just know yet how the breakdown of our ecology, of our biosphere due to global heating and also just due to pollution. The rise of plastics, for example, will affect our human systems and how that will have knockoff effects, et cetera.
Genevieve Guenther (00:26:22):
There are these three different areas, which is the relationship between CO2 and temperature, the relationship between temperature and ecological devastation, and then, how do we mitigate this and what are the ideological assumptions that we bring to our understanding of how to mitigate it and what does that mean for actually what we do and how fast we can achieve these targets? I hope that's a helpful answer. I don't know that I explained to you what my position on this was. I'll just confess that I think that it seems clear to me that the ecological damage of global heating is happening a lot faster than anybody anticipated. Nobody modeled the heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest last summer. Just yesterday, there was a study released that showed there are deciduous trees growing in the Arctic all of a sudden. They jumped a mountain and they've established a new forest four kilometers past this mountain range. The scientists who discovered them had to take a plane and then hike over icy bogs to find them, but there they are.
Genevieve Guenther (00:27:26):
To me, that is so much more terrifying than really, it's just absolutely terrifying, because it means that if there's a forest being established in the Arctic, that the temperate band that we grow food in that we live in is also changing in ways that means we're not going to be able to interact with it as we've done in the past. Where are we going to grow food? These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night, and these are the kinds of things that are inadequately modeled, really can't robustly be modeled in the kinds of models that we've used to-date to discuss the climate crisis, but this to me is the stuff that needs to be really deeply understood and talked about and even speculated about how do these things interact with each other and compound each other.
Jason Jacobs (00:28:18):
We're going to take a short break so our partner, Yin, can talk about the MCJ membership option.
Yin Lu (00:28:24):
Hey folks, Yin here, a partner at MCJ Collective. Want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of the collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019, have since then grown to 2000 members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with differing backgrounds and perspectives. While those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change, some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, non-profits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done, many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women-in-climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more.
Yin Lu (00:29:13):
Whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and then click on the Members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Jason Jacobs (00:29:26):
Back to the show. Well, I want to start by saying that I'm with you in terms of the gravity of the problem. I've heard you talk about, and you touched briefly earlier in this discussion on how you think it's important to cast the narrative from a communications standpoint as good versus evil. Certainly, from this point forward, there's very little debate, at least in credible circles on the fact that ultimately, we need to decarbonize. I think how fast and staging and trade offs and energy poverty, I think there's a lot to unpack there. One thing I want to touch on before we get into any of that is just, looking backwards, do you wish we never burned fossil fuels to begin with? They essentially powered our way of life here in the west over the last couple hundred years. Have we benefited from them historically?
Genevieve Guenther (00:30:17):
It's indubitable that the economic development of Europe and America relies on fossil fuel extraction. That's just a given. The current destruction of Africa and Asia whose GDPs are already cratering is the flip side that growth. Yes, so I wouldn't use the word we in this question either. I think that it's really important to look at the whole global picture and understand the climate colonialism that has enabled the growth of the United States and Europe and the development of those economies. I don't know that it's ... I'm not going to deny that fossil fuels have made us richer. I will actually argue against this idea that it's simply becoming richer that has given us longevity or changed the infant mortality rate. Those markers which people like to point to to prove that fossil fuel use was worth it could equally well be attributed to public sanitation, to the rise of antibiotics, to modern medical care, to lots of things that stay out of the discussion when economic growth has afforded all the role for making us happier and for living longer and being healthier.
Genevieve Guenther (00:31:51):
Of course, wealth actually does insulate you from many harms and wealthy people tend to live longer because they have less stress, they can eat healthier food. Poverty is a tremendous, tremendous stressor. Even that alone, aside from all of its other harms, can shave years off your life by contributing to the rise of cardiovascular disease and cancer and various other forms of physical illness. I'm not going to say that there's no benefit to being wealthy, obviously not, but I'm not going to allow people to say that economic growth in itself is what has changed the infant mortality rate or extended our average longevity or even made us happier necessarily. I'm a Shakespeare scholar, I know that people were happy and lived lives of incredibly rich meaning before fossil fuels. This idea that somehow that this is the pinnacle of our civilization, that this is the height of human flourishing is so preposterous to me that I just don't find it credible at all.
Jason Jacobs (00:33:07):
Kind of a related question, the people that work in the fossil fuel industry, do you believe that they are evil as people?
Genevieve Guenther (00:33:15):
I believe that the people who are actively trying to prevent the clean energy transition are people that need to be fought with every fiber of our being. They are mortal enemies. That I am perfectly comfortable saying. The people who ... I'll just tell you right now. My father, who is the reason that there's any good in me whatsoever, anything that makes me a halfway decent person comes from my dad. He died in 2000. He was a steel person. He was a steel guy who sold steel directly to coal mines. He would leave, he would be away three days of every week because he would be in West Virginia or other places where there were coal mines. I have a picture of him in my office in this beautiful suit, this really natty suit with his boutonnière but ear and his handkerchief writing a poem, because he was an aspiring poet, covered in coal dust. He would go to Australia, he would go to South Africa, so he was a fossil fuel guy. He was absolutely not evil, a hundred percent not evil, but he didn't know.
Genevieve Guenther (00:34:30):
The people who work in the fossil fuel industry, if this is the jobs their fathers have had, these are the jobs they want to give to their sons. The world is messy, that doesn't make them evil. There are also people who disagree profoundly about how we should decarbonize. There are people who believe that continued fossil fuel use with carbon capture or carbon dioxide removal is probably, on net, more beneficial than trying to get fossil fuels out of our energy system entirely. Are they evil? I would say that they're profoundly misguided and I will do everything I can to try to persuade them to see it differently, but that doesn't mean they're evil, because they are also trying to help us through this transition. It's really just the people who are doing what they can to make sure that we don't phase out fossil fuel production, to make sure that we don't hit net zero, don't seem to care about our children and their future and the lives they're already destroying now. That's how I would answer that question.
Jason Jacobs (00:35:34):
How do you think about energy poverty and the billion plus people that don't have access to basic electricity? Is that a problem that's worthy of consideration?
Genevieve Guenther (00:35:46):
A hundred percent, that's absolutely, because right now those people are suffering equally from energy poverty and the climate crisis. We know that more resilient infrastructure, better forms of energy will save lives in extreme weather situations. It's all the same problem, but I don't see how energy poverty justifies continued fossil fuel production in the United States. This is the problem, is that people point to energy property in the global south as a reason to keep producing fossil fuels in the United States, and that those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Fundamentally, the things that ... there are two further things I want to say about this, three things.
Genevieve Guenther (00:36:34):
First thing, if people really cared about poor people in the global south, they would be pushing for a huge transfer of wealth from the global north to the global south. They would be there at the cops pushing for loss and damage not only to be paid, which to-date has never been paid, but to be multiplied tenfold. None of these people are doing that. They're using the poor as a fate, as alleged in that, "Oh, let's not look what we're doing over here. Let's look at the poor over there."
Genevieve Guenther (00:37:06):
The second thing is, if you really believe that energy poverty is such a huge problem and we need fossil fuels to address it, then you need to start calling for low consumption in the west today, because we have a very limited carbon budget left. We have, at this point, I think about 420 gigatons of carbon dioxide left to emit before we will crash over the gate of a safe temperature rise. If you really think that the global south needs to use fossil fuels to address their energy poverty, then you need to be calling for cessation of airplanes, rationing on energy here because there's a limited carbon budget and we need to let the global south use it. Nobody's doing that either. Again, they're looking at the poor as a fate.
Genevieve Guenther (00:37:54):
Finally, I will say that there, I'm sorry, we will need perhaps to emit carbon to create cement and to produce steel. Although I am hopeful that as soon as people stop thinking that the only innovation we need is carbon dioxide removal and really start throwing capital at green steel and even carbon negative cement, that maybe that will no longer be true. But at least today, people in the global south will need to emit carbon to pour cement, to create steel, to build up their infrastructure, to do all to build out transmission lines, to do all sorts of things with their agriculture, et cetera. But they do not need fossil fuels for electricity. In the United States, we're already trying to get fossil fuels out of the electricity grid and we know that we can do it, so why would we say that people in the global south need fossil fuels for electricity?
Genevieve Guenther (00:38:50):
It's just absolute propaganda, it drives me insane that these people are setting themselves up as the protectors of the poor when the greatest danger to the poor is continued global heating, which is being compounded by energy poverty, but the thing that we need to do as much as we need to get electricity and better infrastructure to these people is halt global Heating. We can do both. We can absolutely do both. We do not need fossil fuels to solve energy poverty a hundred percent.
Jason Jacobs (00:39:23):
If you ruled the world, would you stop burning fossil fuels immediately?
Genevieve Guenther (00:39:30):
No. Fossil fuel demand is pretty inelastic. We don't even have charging infrastructure. We don't even have secure supply chain for batteries. We don't have any of that in place yet. If I were ruling the world, what I would do was do the biggest public works project you've ever seen to build out clean energy infrastructure and to essentially give clean energy infrastructure to the global south and southeast Asia, and then pay Saudi Arabia to do carbon dioxide removal, have some global mandate that phases out fossil fuel production over a period of 10 years or less. That's how I would do it. That's very rough. I've never really thought about that before, what I would do if I were in charge. Off the cuff, that's my first idea about what I would do.
Jason Jacobs (00:40:29):
In that scenario, where would the funding come from to fund everything that you just played out?
Genevieve Guenther (00:40:35):
Some combination of wealth taxes, caps on consumption, especially luxury consumption or taxes on luxury consumption that would also fund this stuff and simple appropriations. The thing is, is that inflation, this is one thing that the MMT crowd I think gets right, is that inflation happens. I know that traditionally economists have thought about inflation as a relationship that has to do with labor. But there's also an element to inflation, as far as I understand it, that has to do with supply and how supply affects prices, which is just what we've seen in this little episode of inflation that we've just had, that fossil fuel prices going up, food prices going up, created a kind of inflationary cycle in the economy just recently. This is one thing that I think the MMT people have gotten right, which is that putting more cash into circulation is only a problem if there isn't something that sops it up again, but we will be building out new objects.
Genevieve Guenther (00:41:41):
We're not giving people more cash to buy the same limited number of commodities. We're giving people cash to create a bigger economy, new market. I don't know. I like to think that some combination of wealth taxes and appropriations would enable us to pay for this. I think, in some sense, Keens was right. We can pay for anything that we want to. Money is fundamentally just made up and as long as what we've made up has some correspondence to the material world, then I think we'll be okay. But of course, I'm not an economist, so I don't know that I could make a really robust argument to that effect.
Jason Jacobs (00:42:21):
Nor am I, to be clear. We talked about how fossil fuel companies as obstructionist are extremely harmful, which I agree with. One thing I'm curious about is, putting aside the obstruction, which is a big thing to put aside, I've heard many people say that are close to the action that from a balance sheet standpoint, from an expertise standpoint, from an equipment standpoint, et cetera, if they weren't obstructionist, we actually could really benefit and some would even say require their help to facilitate the transition. How do you think about that?
Genevieve Guenther (00:42:58):
What would their help look like? I'm not quite sure what that means.
Jason Jacobs (00:43:01):
A lot of the infrastructure that needs to get built, for example, is the kind of infrastructure that they know how to build in their sleep, but if they're incentivized to keep living off the fat of the land from fossil fuels, for example, then they're a hindrance. If you could flip them so that they start aggressively moving towards building out the clean infrastructure that, like people say, the US can't build big things anymore, for example. The fossil fuel companies have been building big things for a long time quite effectively.
Genevieve Guenther (00:43:26):
Well, they build pipelines and they build drills and they frack. I'm not sure how that makes them qualified to build out an electricity grid or install solar panels or retrofit buildings. Yeah, I'm not sure why they need to have a role in this at all.
Jason Jacobs (00:43:44):
One thing we touched on briefly, and I've seen you write about, I think it was in the New Republic, for example, was carbon dioxide removal. In this discussion and on Twitter, I've heard you, a couple those things, couple carbon dioxide removal with permission to keep having business as usual. I guess, what I get confused about is, and I've also heard you be skeptical that it'll ever be effective at scale, and those are different issues. One thing I wonder about is why those things need to be coupled? Using it as an excuse for inaction is a problem, I agree, but if it could be helpful outside of that, why wouldn't we invest in it given the pickle that we're in and the carbon budgets and the emergency and the stakes and the tipping points and everything we just discussed?
Genevieve Guenther (00:44:31):
Here's the thing. I have actually read the scientific literature on carbon dioxide removal extremely carefully. It really does seem like it's going to be highly unlikely that we could have more than, at most miraculously so, 2 to 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide removal a year. That is because the two methods that are most often proposed for carbon dioxide removal, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and direct air capture, have limits, planetary limits that prevent them from being deployed at larger scales. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is an idea that we could cultivate millions and millions of acres of monocrops, which would draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and then we could burn them for energy and as we're burning them for energy, capture the carbon that gets released when we burn them and then burry that carbon underground. That would turn this energy-producing technology into a form of negative emissions. We would be ultimately drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and burring it.
Genevieve Guenther (00:46:00):
Here's the thing. Carbon capture doesn't really work. The industry has targets of 90% for bioenergy, 90% for coal, and 99% for gas combustion, but never once have those targets been met in the field, never even once. The technology even just to get the amount of carbon capture that we've seen historically, which is very often about 40% of target not even 40% of all emissions, the expense of that usually doubles the price of energy for rate payers. That's one problem with BECCS. Another problem with BECCS is that cultivating these vast acreages of monocrops would have horrible ecological effects. It would pollute with nitrogen, other pesticides, other fertilizers, it would destroy biodiversity, it would increase the extinction crisis, and I know that we all think about the climate crisis simply as a pollution problem, but it's actually not, it's also a biodiversity problem. It's all connected. BECCS would have horrible effects on human and ecological health.
Genevieve Guenther (00:47:26):
For all of these reasons, and I'm not the only one saying this, for all of these reasons, the scientific community itself has moved away from BECCS as a possible negative emissions technology. If you read the National Academy's report from 2019, I think it's 2019, they basically come out and say that they don't think BECCS is going to be viable. Now, people are looking at direct air capture as a possible way to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Basically, the largest carbon dioxide, direct air capture carbon dioxide removal plant in the world removes about, runs all year and removes about 15 minutes of our annual emissions. That's it. It does so at a very high expense. I think it's somewhere between $600 and $1,000 per ton of carbon dioxide.
Genevieve Guenther (00:48:25):
It is this expensive and it is this challenging to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere simply because of thermodynamics. If you think about a bowl of water, clear water, and think about how much time and energy it takes to pick up a dropper of dye and drop one drop of that dye into the water, maybe a second, not that much time, not that much energy. But now, think about how much effort it's going to take to somehow get that dye out of the water. Again, you would have to filter the water, you would have to do it multiple times. In terms of the thermodynamics to undo entropy is much more challenging to draw the energy back out of the atmosphere is much more challenging than to put it in there to begin with.
Jason Jacobs (00:49:18):
Have you spent time with any of the entrepreneurs that are working in this area?
Genevieve Guenther (00:49:24):
No, but I've had conversations with scientists who are working in this area. I haven't talked to the entrepreneurs about it.
Jason Jacobs (00:49:30):
Gosh, I'd be interested to hear that discussion, because I'm certainly not the best equipped to go toe to toe and talk through all the technological implications and risks and scaling challenges and things.
Genevieve Guenther (00:49:41):
Can I just finish about direct air capture though?
Jason Jacobs (00:49:43):
Yes, please.
Genevieve Guenther (00:49:44):
Because of that, the amount of energy it takes to take carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere, most of the credible estimates of how much that might cost don't go below $500 per ton of carbon dioxide. Other lower estimates come from entrepreneurs and people in the industry. If you think about how much that's going to cost, that I think would give anybody pause, especially because this would not be the creation of a new market, this would not be a commodity that we're creating, this would be a service like waste management that we would need to be doing in perpetuity, in essence. That's the cost, but then also the physical constraints of producing that much energy, there are two elements you need, electricity, but you also need a high level of thermal energy, which right now, we do not know how to produce with clean energy, with solar or wind.
Genevieve Guenther (00:50:44):
There are ideas floating around, but that in itself would be an area for innovation. Right now, all direct air capture is modeled as having its thermal energy produced by methane gas. It is, in itself, a fossil fuel technology, which means that it's not clear that would actually ever lead to negative emissions, and in fact, some of the life cycle analyses that have already been done on the technologies that exist today show that it's actually not carbon negative, it's carbon positive, because you actually have to add in the emissions that are created in creating the energy that powers the process. Look, we're going to need carbon dioxide removal to get to net zero if we're going to continue to have any kind of industrial economy. That means we're talking about potentially one to two, maybe three gigatons a year, and that would be extremely challenging, expensive and indeed miraculous to get there in the coming decades. That's what people need to be focusing on.
Genevieve Guenther (00:51:50):
The reason that the misinformation piece, the way that ideas about these technologies are being used to continue business as usual and the scientific limits of these technologies are related is that the reason you can't think of these technologies as things that can offset fossil fuel use is that they do have these physical limits. I know that Americans in particular really hate thinking about physical limits, but any parent with a toddler knows that one thing everybody needs to be taught to be a functioning human being on this planet is how to accept certain limits, and I really think that our public discourse needs a timeout. They need a timeout. They need to accept certain limits. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
Jason Jacobs (00:52:45):
Thank you for that. I have a few reactions. One reaction is, if I were a propagandist, I would probably be hunting for clips of people saying similar things about solar in the early days. Or I would be finding clips about Bill Gates talking about the Internet, or I would be finding clips about Blockbuster talking about Netflix or early skeptics of air travel or early skeptics of space exploration. Technological innovation in the earliest days, it looks like a toy, it feels like it'll never work. It can surprise them. I'm not saying it will surprise them.
Genevieve Guenther (00:53:19):
I don't think you're hearing what I'm saying. I'm not saying that the technology, I'm not saying that direct air capture doesn't pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. I'm saying that there is a certain amount of energy that that process takes and to power generate that energy safely doesn't seem to be possible. I also hear what you're saying, that we have been able to create amazing technologies and that there was a lot of skepticism about solar initially, but I think that there's a real difference between technologies that turn into commodities that can be produced and distributed and processes that interact with our planet to try to change its chemistry essentially in the context of ecological boundaries.
Genevieve Guenther (00:54:22):
Solar has that too, of course, because land use can be a problem, although there's new research showing that there could be benefits to solar farms that we haven't discovered yet. I hear what you're saying that human beings have been able to overcome tremendous limits in the past. The point is not to overcome limits. The point is to draw down carbon climate pollution to zero and repair ecological damage. That seems to me to be a slightly different task than catapulting ourselves to the moon.
Jason Jacobs (00:54:58):
I'm definitely not suggesting that we put all our eggs in one basket, and I think it would be catastrophic if we used it, if we just banked on the fact that it would happen and stopped pushing as hard or continually pushing harder on doing all the other hard work that needs to be done. I guess what's confusing to me is that it doesn't sound like you're rooting for the efforts that are being made from mission-aligned people that are trying to make it work despite the long hours, because if I ran a fitness company for 10 years, I can tell you that personal behavior change is hard and I also have heard and read that recycling, for example, was a concept that was invented by the fossil fuel companies to put the responsibility off of their shoulders and onto the consumers, so some techno heads, for example, would say that pushing on personal behavior change and demand side reductions is detrimental and polarizing and a waste of time and actually counterproductive to the effort.
Jason Jacobs (00:55:53):
I don't believe that. I'm all hands on deck. I think we should be pushing out all of it, so when I see people that don't think we should be pushing out all of it, it's just confusing to me and I'm certainly not an expert though, and that's the caveat.
Genevieve Guenther (00:56:03):
No, but let me just be very clear. My research has shown me that the next frontier of climate denial is pushing the idea that we can continue to use fossil fuels and still halt global heating anyway. That is what is structuring our politics right now, that's what's structuring our public understanding, that is the problem. The number one form of green washing being circulated by oil and gas companies and state producers like Saudi Arabia, is that they can keep producing and we can offset it with carbon dioxide removal. This, to me, is the problem. I'm not saying that I don't want carbon dioxide removal to work. I'm not saying that the entrepreneurs shouldn't be pushing and that we shouldn't be throwing public money at this, we absolutely should.
Jason Jacobs (00:56:57):
You wrote an article saying that we shouldn't though.
Genevieve Guenther (00:56:59):
No, I didn't. I did not say that, but I did not say that in the-
Jason Jacobs (00:57:02):
Okay, then I must have misread.
Genevieve Guenther (00:57:03):
No, no, no. I said that we cannot promise that carbon dioxide removal can help us draw down so much carbon from the atmosphere that we can overshoot our temperature targets and reverse that overshoot later, and that it can't offset fossil fuel use. What I'm trying to do in my public messaging is prevent entrepreneurs from making overpromising about what they're trying to do, and in that overpromising, amplify the disinformation that's being spread by oil and gas producers.
Genevieve Guenther (00:57:46):
Let's go back to the beginning of the podcast when I was talking about how uncertainty worked. For many years, the right, the people who were trying to block action, highlighted scientific uncertainty, and then the scientists who were just doing their jobs would talk about uncertainty and amplify that disinformation. What's happening now is that fossil fuel producers are saying, A, we can continue to use fossil fuels and end up making that production carbon negative by using carbon dioxide removal and B, that it's okay, we can overshoot our targets and just simply reverse climate change later and restore ecosystems using carbon dioxide removal. These are not true. Those are false claims. But the problem is there are well-meaning people over here, entrepreneurs who are trying to get capital for their technologies and even the economic models in the IPCC who are making these promises and thereby legitimizing and amplifying the disinformation that is keeping our politics a little bit stuck.
Jason Jacobs (00:58:52):
For what it's worth, I don't know any entrepreneur that's working and I know a lot of them that believes that propaganda that you just stated. I certainly don't believe it.
Genevieve Guenther (00:59:01):
But the entrepreneurs have promised that carbon dioxide removal can remove up to a trillion tons of carbon dioxide by 2100. I have heard promises like that.
Jason Jacobs (00:59:12):
Oh, I'm not debating from the people that we work with. I have not. I think they're realist. I think they know how much they don't know, and I don't think they'd be making bold promise. At least, the credible entrepreneurs that we work with, the most credible ones are the ones that have the self-awareness and the confidence to call out clearly the things that they don't know.
Genevieve Guenther (00:59:31):
Okay, so that's great. Those are the voices that we need to amplify if we're going to have a project, if we're going to have this area of innovation that isn't going to backfire and keeping our climate politics stuck. That is exactly the thing that I would want to amplify, people working on carbon dioxide removal who acknowledge limits, who acknowledge what they don't know, and who don't promise that carbon dioxide removal can deliver carbon negative oil or restore the climate or reverse global heating or remove a trillion tons by 2100. The more people who are working in the space who are not talking about that, the more we need to listen to those people.
Jason Jacobs (01:00:13):
This is progress. The one thing I'll say, and I know we're up on time here and I'm sorry about that, so we will move to wrap up here. What I would love to do looking forwards, and I'd love your input on this, if not participation, is it sounds like you believe that it's extremely harmful every day that we're on fossil fuels looking forward. You also believe that we can't just stop cold Turkey today. I believe both of those things, so on that, we are aligned. I think what I'm trying to get to the bottom of and I don't claim to understand it now is, is what is the most aggressive plan that we can do it while balancing the trade offs and limiting the suffering in the transition?
Jason Jacobs (01:00:52):
I don't want to talk to people that are shills of the fossil fuel industry and out there whose jobs it is to protect business as usual. I want to talk to the people who are eager to move as aggressively as possible, but just want to minimize the collateral damage as they transition and try to sort through that. If you have ideas for people, we should talk to, books I should read, formats that would be helpful to sort through this publicly for the good of everybody, I would really love that and I think it would be an important step, at least in my learning.
Genevieve Guenther (01:01:17):
I don't really have recommendations off the cuff. Right now, I've just been reading economics for the past two months straight. Why don't I think about that and send you an email and maybe you can put them in the show notes. How about that?
Jason Jacobs (01:01:38):
Sounds great, yeah. Genevieve, I typically ask this magic wand question, which is, if you had a magic wand and you could change any one thing to most accelerate our progress on addressing this grave problem, what would you change and how would you change it?
Genevieve Guenther (01:01:51):
That is such a great question. I don't really think I can answer that question, because I think what makes climate change unique among all the problems that humanity has based is that there isn't just one thing that you can do that's going to solve it. This problem has been produced by the way human beings, the way some human beings at least, live on this planet. When I say live on this planet, I mean that in the broadest sense. I don't know that there is really one thing that you can do to change everything. I think if I really had to pick though, I would say I wish there were a really mobilized and really passionate and really determined public who was marching on Washington weekly or monthly and doing general stripes repeatedly to insist that the US government really had to move on this in a way that would be unprecedented, except perhaps in the way they moved on World War II. If somehow I could wake up tomorrow and have everybody feel as passionate about this issue as everyone on climate Twitter feels, I would be a happy woman.
Jason Jacobs (01:03:05):
Anything I didn't ask that I should have or any parting words beyond those great parting words?
Genevieve Guenther (01:03:10):
Not at all. Again, thank you for having me on. It's been a great conversation.
Jason Jacobs (01:03:16):
I just want to end with a couple things. One, I feel like we could be debating through this for hours more, but I want to be clear about something, and that is that you are an ally. I consider you an ally. You are incredibly passionate and mission-driven and thoughtful and thorough, and a huge force of good for this space. While there might still be things that we're butting heads on a little bit, to me, they're on the edges. You are an ally and I'm just honored to be in this fight with you, so I just wanted to be clear about that.
Genevieve Guenther (01:03:42):
Well, I feel exactly the same way. Thank you.
Jason Jacobs (01:03:45):
Okay, thanks so much. Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey Podcast.
Cody Simms (01:03:51):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars, content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change and our member community to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (01:04:13):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com. If you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter @MCJPod.
Cody Simms (01:04:28):
Thanks and see you next episode.
