Climate Deniers and the Language of Climate Obstruction

By Stella Levantesi, an Italian climate journalist, photographer and author. Her book “I bugiardi del clima” (Climate Liars), published in Italy with Laterza, investigates climate change denial history and tactics. She has an MA from New York University’s Journalism Institute. Her work has been published in The New Republic, Nature Italy, Wired Italy, the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico, Mint India, Internazionale, il manifesto, 7 Corriere della Sera, LifeGate and others. Originally published at DeSmog.

On a recent episode of the Fox Business show “Mornings with Maria,” American Petroleum Institute CEO and President, Mike Sommers, said that “the most important environmental movement in the world is the American oil and gas industry.”

“A super absurd example of oil and gas companies appropriating and weaponizing the language of climate advocates for their own greenwashing,” commented author and climate activist Genevieve Guenther on Twitter.

Sommers’ statement may be, in fact, one of the most literal examples of how fossil fuel companies are using language to perpetuate their climate denial and fend off action. And because public perception and awareness of the climate crisis are, at least in part, driven by how we talk about it, the fossil fuel industry has used language “to create smoke and mirrors and false impressions around what they’re really doing,” said Christine Arena, author, expert on climate disinformation, and former Executive Vice President at the PR firm Edelman. Arena was one of six employees to resign in 2015 following revelations of the firm’s greenwashing work with fossil fuel lobbies and associations.

PR firms — or “the enablers,” as Arena calls them — have played a key role in exploiting communication and manipulating language to their advantage, all while working on behalf of the fossil fuel industry and using a tobacco industry playbook. Ultimately, they’ve been using it to obstruct climate action, a longtime goal of the oil, gas, and coal industries. “If we take a step back and ask ourselves, why has meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proven to be so difficult? It is at least in part because of communications and because of the language coming from the fossil fuel industry,” said Arena.  

Today, the fossil fuel industry and its allies are “appropriating and weaponizing” language from climate advocates, usually in ways that are much less obvious than Sommers’ recent comment.

“The industry is repeating the same phrases it’s hearing from the climate movement to use for their own advertising purposes. They are commandeering the language of sustainability and of the climate movement,” Arena said of fossil fuel companies, adding that they are doing so “to create a false perception that they’re on our side.”

Fossil Fuel Solutionism

Language around climate solutions is particularly susceptible to this treatment, especially as polluting companies invest in strategies and tactics to present themselves as part of the solution to climate change when, clearly —as they continue to prioritize drilling for globe-warming fuels — they are not. That’s ExxonMobil touting its “lower-emission solutions” and staff working to “develop our global strategy for creating sustainable energy” while planning a $10 billion investment in new oil and gas reserves in South America. Some researchers have called this “fossil fuel solutionism.”

“This sort of inevitability of fossil fuels — I think that’s a place where language is really important,” said Timmons Roberts, social scientist and executive director of the Climate Social Science Network at Brown University. He says the fossil fuel industry encourages this perception that everyone is complicit in climate change by using its products and is therefore too reliant on them to ever transition away  

The strategy is part of a broader communications shift among polluters and their advocates. No longer are oil and gas executives straight-up “denying” that the climate is changing; instead the message becomes one that ultimately slow-walks real climate action — saying, it’s too expensive to address, it’s too late to do anything. “We call these ‘climate delay’ discourses, since they often lead to deadlock or a sense that there are intractable obstacles to taking action,” write Roberts and his colleagues in their  “Discourses of climate delay” analysis.

Fossil fuel companies and their allies may use delay arguments and tactics across a range of platforms: in promotional campaigns, public declarations, online ads, social media, or political lobbying. Nowadays, the messaging may contain “a blend” of factual omissions and rhetorical distortions, according to Arena, that can be more confusing to people and, therefore, more dangerous than outright lies.

“If you say ‘clean coal’ a lot of people are going to know that there’s no such thing, so that’s easier for the audience to identify,” said Arena. “But then when you look at ExxonMobil’s language around carbon capture, for example, they’ll say things like ‘it’s going to take an all-of-the-above approach,’ and when the oil and gas industry says ‘all of the above,’ they mean oil and gas first.”

Arena considers this type of wording to be a form of greenwashing, where a company uses “selective micro truths,” she explained, in order to create a misleading impression. This type of language is more insidious because it’s creating the perception that oil and gas companies really are “part of the solution” and don’t need regulatory intervention — which they are often lobbying against elsewhere.

“Cleaner burning.” “Lower emissions fuels.” “Lower carbon future.” These phrases are all examples of this, Arena said. 

Many of these terms appear on fossil fuel companies’ social media accounts or websites. ExxonMobil uses the phrase “advancing climate solutions” and “lower emission energy future.” Shell is “working…to accelerate the transition to net-zero emissions.” Chevron is “advancing a lower carbon future.”

By participating in the public discourse in this way, fossil fuel companies can manipulate public perceptions by making “support” seem like action. “‘Supporting the Paris agreement’ is also deceptive because it makes it look like they are in line with Paris,” said Arena. “They’re not.”

A new report from more than 40 groups, published by Oil Change International, has found that major U.S. and European oil and gas companies “still fail to meet the bare minimum for alignment with the Paris Agreement.” These companies’ pledges and commitments are far from credible, the report concludes, when they are planning more than 200 fossil fuel expansion projects between now and 2025.

The History of Junk Science, Alarmists, and Climate Prophets

Denier and delayer communication strategies aren’t new; in fact they have always been central to the fossil fuel industry and its allies’ climate obstruction.

In the 1990s, for example, “sound science” was an expression used by climate deniers to attack and counter climate science — or “junk science,” as some deniers, such as former Fox News columnist and founder of the website JunkScience.com Steve Milloy, referred to the work of climate scientists like Michael E.Mann.  

In another past strategy, that’s now regaining steam, climate deniers and delayers have been employing the terms “realists” and “alarmists.” In 2020, Cambridge University researcher Giulio Corsi and I analyzed the use of these terms on Twitter, finding a 900 percent increase in their use over the previous four years. As the climate movement was gaining international attention with massive protests between 2018 and 2019, we saw that spikes in tweets about “alarmism” and “realism” often corresponded to high-profile speeches by activist Greta Thunberg. The trend also coincided with the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank and notorious promoter of climate disinformation, enlisting young German YouTuber Naomi Seibt as a counter-figure to Thunberg to denounce her and climate scientists’ “alarmism.”

This framing exploits the negative connotation of the term “alarmist” in order to discredit a legitimate scientific warning, while trying to associate backers of fringe theories about, say, sunspots causing global warming, with rationality and realism.

Milloy employed a combination of these terms when he wrote in 2002: “When the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, air pollution in the U.S. was more of an aesthetic than a public health problem. […] Few people realize this after 30 years of non-stop junk science-fueled alarmism from environmental activists.” [Emphasis added.]

For decades, deniers have used rhetoric likening those who warn about the catastrophic impacts of the climate emergency to someone who is “out of touch with reality.” You can find it in the 1998 American Petroleum Institute “action plan,” born just a few months after the Kyoto Protocol and developed by Exxon, Chevron, Southern Company, and representatives from conservative organizations, including Milloy. The memo clearly stated that: “Victory will be achieved when those promoting the treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.” [Emphasis added.]

Both uses of language – “sound science” versus “junk science” and “alarmists” versus “realists” – create an “us versus them” dynamic. The result is two polarizing, and utterly fabricated, positions on climate science. 

We can see the fossil fuel industry using language in a similar way in its public-facing propaganda, projecting political meaning on its opponents.

“Propaganda is about manipulating public opinions, stoking fears, and sewing divisions,” said Arena. “When they talk about ‘the woke’ or the ‘climate industrial complex’ or ‘activist extremists,’ that is all propaganda. The industry is blaming rising gas prices on ‘woke liberals’ or on renewables or on climate activism.  Those are false narratives and they are propaganda-based.”

According to John Cook, founder of Skeptical Science and research fellow at Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub in Australia, fossil fuel industry propaganda has been intensifying the “othering” of climate scientists and advocates for climate action for some time.

“There’s a lot of terminology that has become more powerful in sending that signal that climate advocates are different,” said Cook. “Labels to say, ‘these people who care about climate change are trying to change society.’” Climate denial is intimately connected to values like individual freedom and free market fundamentalism, he explained. That’s why those labels are often extended in meaning to accuse climate advocates of a “radical liberal agenda,” said Arena. 

The “othering” of climate advocates isn’t only by fossil fuel companies. In September 2021, the Italian Minister of the Ecological Transition called climate activists “radical chic” and said that the “extremist and ideological ones” are “worse than the climate catastrophe.” 

Over time, the language of climate deniers and delayers has evolved from “basic climate denial” to “culture wars,” said Arena Culture wars are strictly linked to political ideology: that’s why some words are chosen by deniers and delayers over others, because they “tap into broader values” and “activate” their supports, added Cook. For example, deniers might pose the argument that “[climate action] is going to impinge on their freedom,” he said.

The Supposed Church of Climate Change

Another linguistic tactic used to denigrate those who support climate action is to cast an issue with roots in science — climate change — as one of religion. In Italy, for example, the daily newspaper Il Foglio uses pseudo-religious terms when referencing climate change: ecology becomes “a religion to replace canceled Christianity” where “you kiss trees and worship whales;” switching to an electric car is “fanatical;” climate change is referred to as “dogma.” And Friday, the Italian paper writes, has become the day of “forced conversion to sustainability” when youth climate activists go on strike from school, as part of Greta’s “children’s crusade.”

Associating climate change with religion reinforces the denier message that the build-up of greenhouse gases and its far-reaching global impacts is actually a matter of faith and has nothing to do with a factual, physical reality in the form of heatwaves and hurricanes. In this scenario, climate advocates seem unreasonable, disconnected from reality and unable to see things clearly. The effect is to relegate those supporting climate science to one end of the spectrum, one where we don’t need to address the intensifying impacts of heating the globe. 

But this zealous religious framing happens  beyond the pages of Il Foglio. According to Cook, deniers also use words like “cult” and “high priests” to describe climate advocates, while emphasizing that they themselves are “treated like heretics.”

“They are framing themselves as the rational scientific person and the scientists or advocates as the hysterical, biased, faith-based and not evidence-based,” said Cook of climate deniers. “They’re trying to flip reality because ideology is driving their denial.”

Don’t Worry, Just Adapt!

Another narrative emerging from the denial and delayer camp is that “adapting” to climate change will be our lifeline: Those perpetuating it end up downplaying the impacts of the climate crisis because they say we will be able to adapt to it.

In a May 31 Slate article about Alex Epstein’s new book Fossil Future, which advocates for fossil fuels, Nitish Pahwa writes: “The new style of climate denial is here: It’s not that carbon emissions aren’t increasing, or aren’t warming the world, but look, you’re doing fine right now, right? So, we’ll be just fine!”

On May 20, Stuart Kirk, the head of responsible investing for HSBC’s asset management division, said at a Financial Times conference, “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six meters underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.” Kirk was later suspended for his comments.

Stuart Kirk, head of responsible investing for HSBC’s asset management division, was suspended for his comments to investors in which he downplayed the risks of climate change.

This argument implies that working to slow climate change is futile and offers adaptation as “the only possible response” to the climate crisis, according to Roberts and his colleagues in their “Discourses of delay” analysis.

“Every day there’s new discourses being invented either by the actors in these industries that don’t want to make the energy transition or by their public relations firms with tremendous capacity in terms of developing new language discourses,” said Roberts. 

Effective PR is a key element to designing a convincing greenwashing campaign. “The PR and ad industry plays a central role in enabling climate obstruction,” said Arena. And the American Petroleum Institute’s “We’re on it” campaign is the perfect example of this. “They’re not on it. The only thing that they’re on is architecting and spreading more disinformation, which they are the quarterbacks of doing,” she added.

From fossil fuel solutionism to adaptation-only narratives, these climate obstruction tactics commandeer language in an attempt to undermine one of the most urgent and far-reaching challenges of our day. And the momentum behind such deceptive language is only building.

“We are on a dangerous trajectory,” Arena said. “I would say broadly that climate disinformation and greenwashing are getting much worse, and today we have many more examples to point to than we even did back when the industry was trying to deny climate change altogether.”

Understanding how opponents of climate action employ these discourses of delay is essential to recognizing climate disinformation and misinformation, Arena said, and ultimately to disrupting it. “We have to redouble our efforts to hold these companies and their enablers accountable.”

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

28 comments

    1. Anthony G Stegman

      Corporations lie all the time – to customers, suppliers, employees, investors, you name it. If a corporate executive’s lips are moving he or she is lying. Remember, most CEO behavior fits the definition of a psychopath.

    2. clarky90

      When I see “denier” used as a suffix for any word, my “spidey senses” start tingling………

      incoming narrative……. incoming narrative………..!…. beware…..
      .

      So instead, let us talk about “logos”. “Words” increasingly being appropriated and redefined. FI, “Our Democracy”. but but but….

      The Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic..

      Abwoon d’bwashmaya

      Abwoon d’bwashmaya,
      Nethqadash shmakh,
      Teytey malkuthakh.
      Nehwey tzevyanach aykanna d’bwashmaya aph b’arha.
      Hawvlan lachma d’sunqanan yaomana.
      Washboqlan khaubayn (wakhtahayn)
      aykana daph khnan shbwoqan l’khayyabayn.
      Wela tahlan l’nesyuna.
      Ela patzan min bisha.
      Metol dilakhie malkutha wahayla wateshbukhta l’ahlam almin.
      Amen

    3. Spinoza's Offspring

      You might anticipate the following communiqué:

      Earth,

      This is G_d.
      You pharaohs have ruined planet Earth.
      You will suffer plagues the likes of which would make Moses cry out.

  1. Herb

    These cynical and effective techniques to create doubt are all but impossible to counteract absence a massive marketing and advertising rebuttal campaign either required by government as in the case of tobacco or financed by some Michael Bloomberg type multi billionaire.

    Another type of climate delay however made in the best of faith has a similar effect as the disinformation campaigns. And that is the almost pervasive and yes almost religious faith that the decades long strategy of what I call ERA or emission reductions alone is the only tool available to the world community to address the climate crisis.

    More and more of us though still a small proportion of scientists and public policy experts are recommending that I have called the Climate Triad – A combination of emission reductions, large scale greenhouse gas removal and Urgent direct Climate Cooling – using a variety of techniques – particularly of the Arctic.

    Emission reductions even in the best case are much too slow to stop the loss of arctic sea ice which will generate additional heating equal to many many years of planetary greenhouse gas emissions. A 2019 paper estimated two decades worth of additional greenhouse gas heating would occur with the loss of summer sea ice something all but inevitable in the coming decades.

    Yet most well-meaning but misguided climate activists appear to have more fear of actually cooling the planet directly to save untold millions of lives and reduce harm than they do of the continuing all but futile efforts to reduce emissions. This triad along with a degrowth well-being economy agenda is the only thing that can save humanity and most all other creatures.

    1. drumlin woodchuckles

      ” Cooling the planet” often means “filling the upper atmosphere with sulfuric acid droplets”, which is one of the basic geo-engineering proposals.

      Is that what “cooling the planet” means here?

    2. Peter

      Both parties are involved in an insane poker game – the winner and the loser BOTH get to die and no one benefits the saddest part is if we only played together we could minimize the damage and everyone wins. Huh?? Do what we are doing and we all die or do what we could do for magnitudes LESS money we all win PLUS save trillions.

      1. drumlin woodchuckles

        Your mistake is to think there is some kind of “we” that us and them can all come together as.

        But us is them’s target and them is us’s mortal enemy. The only way us can save a habitable planet for us to live on is if us can effectively exterminate them from political and cultural and civic and public existence first, in order to get them out of the way of us’s attempts to preserve a planet livable for us to live on.

        If us can destroy them from political existence, then us will be free to save us’s planet and us selves.

        If them destroy us’s political existence, then them all die along with all of us. But them are the kind of “people” who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.

        Its a free country, and you are free to pursue your vain kumbaya liberal illusion of ” we all work together”. If you can recruit other millions of kumbaya liberals to pursue the same vain illusion, that is your right too.

        But I won’t go along for the ride. If us don’t win everything, then us lose everything. And trying to work with them is to accept pre-defeat right there. ” Hug-a-nazi make-a-liberal just doesn’t work” as Congressman Dana Rohrabacher once said in a different context.

  2. Bellatrix

    The pot calls the kettle black and the kettle calls the pot black. This article is one or the other.

    As to Michael Mann, it was not just “junk science” it was an embarrassment to science!

      1. Bellatrix

        Who can forget Billy Pilgrim, Montana Wildhack and Kilgore Trout!

        Contrary to basic scientific principles, Michael Mann et al hoarded their data thus preventing effective peer review. I understand it was only eventually made available under freedom of information legislation. When it was finally reviewed it was found to be highly flawed, with omissions, selective choice of dates and a major change of methodology at a critical point. It was a gross deviation from the most basic scientific principles and an embarrassment to science, which is why it rapidly dropped out of circulation. The fact he is still out there speaks volumes about the state of “science” today.

        If a dozen studies now replicate his “hockey stick”, then I can only assume that all of them have failed to recognize the Medieval Warm Period, so perhaps “junk science” is now entrenched. I understand there were also earlier warming periods during the Minoan civilization and when Rome turned to empire, so the current situation is by no means unique. The current warming is basically exactly what you would expect given that the Mini Ice Age ended between around 1820-1850. Is it a coincidence that most climate charts you see today start around 1850 so they can leave out the first half of the upside down bell curve so as not to confuse the Big Public and raise inconvenient questions?

        I’m not saying climate change is not an important issue, because it is, but anyone who cannot see the irony in the title of this article is just part of the mob and needs to open their other eye.

        1. Aumua

          [citations needed] for just about your entire list of assertions there, which is pretty standard climate denier fare.

  3. Hypocritus

    All I want to know is how do I get a grant to recruit lots of volunteers to put “Save The Climate” stickers on Priuses, and to pay myself a generous salary for my ideas?

    1. Anthony G Stegman

      How about “Keep Tahoe Blue” stickers on giant SUVs. Some people are just clueless.

  4. Rod

    It’s complicated.
    I just burned through a barrel moving gear up the road about 600 miles—‘tina’ of a different sort.

    Sad to say the article is a Solid recap of what we all have become accustomed to wading through daily with passing attention, mostly.
    And ramping up the ‘Realism’ -v- ‘Alarmism’ under the cover of Covid, too. I hope everyone is well compensated for their efforts.
    Getting played once, or continuously, stirs Emotional Wariness and Resentment—at least in myself and others I know.
    Backlash.
    Let ‘er rip…

  5. Philip Ebersole

    Mitigate and prevent are not mutually exclusive. The writer of the article was right about fossil fuel industry propaganda, but—

    I think the world has reached the tipping point in climate change, and it is going to be necessary to spent a lot of money and effort to deal with droughts, floods, hurricanes, fires and other climate-related catastrophes, as well as to prepare the same.

    That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to stop things that will make climate change even worse.

  6. Anthony G Stegman

    When the climate change deniers talk about “radical social change” they are correct. Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels will require radical social change. The climate activists need to embrace this requirement for radical social change as necessary to avoid utter catastrophe. There is no point in being shy about this. Strong language is necessary in order to get the message across loud and clear.

    1. renko19

      Please remove all access/use in your life to the energy that comes from fossil fuel sources and all petroleum-derived products and then get back to us. Once you prove you can survive without them, then maybe we’ll listen to your message. Otherwise, virtual signaling is you.

  7. Jeremy Grimm

    I believe there is another kind of climate change agnotology not mentioned here or elsewhere that I am aware of — the agnotology inherent in seeking a solution to climate change through the application of economics. Every several years the IPCC conjures measures and refinements to a carbon budget. This budget suggests we have some amount of greenhouse gas emissions — [for sake of argument assume the only greenhouse gas we need to worry about is CO2] — that we can spend guided by Market mechanisms to most efficiently arrive at a tolerable climate. A budget and CO2 kitty to allocate is useful for dealing with the political and “climate justice” issues and suggests using some form of money measure to cost actions and price damages. A magic number, the CO2 sensitivity, which I believe was invented in the Charney Report, offers a most useful tool for estimating the CO2 budget using simple linear models. I believe these simple linear models tend to suggest that climate change acts in a similarly linear fashion. It is comforting to believe climate change is nicely related to CO2 by an easily understood linear model that appears to map gradual increases in CO2 to gradual, predictable changes in the climate. The IPCC also maps the budget and the various combinations of action into the time domain to arrive at measures for how much time remains before various combinations of actions spend down the CO2 budget. This time remaining is useful for enabling delay, which in turn is very useful for dealing with political issues.

    The form of agnotology I sketched wraps an issue in a conceptual framing, with a ready made terminology and assumptions. I think it might be agnotology of a different kind. In contrast, the kind of agnotology this post describes uses words and slogans to label actors and actions in a form of ad hominem. It also describes deliberate construction, repetition and dissemination of lies.

  8. drumlin woodchuckles

    I offer a couple of counter-words and counter-phrases , in case anyone thinks they can be used one way or another.

    Non-profit sound science.

    Corporate junk science.

  9. drumlin woodchuckles

    In super simple terms, there are three groups of people. Us , Them, and the gray milling mass majority in the middle.

    If us can recruit more milling massmembers to us’s side of the conflict, then us can outnumber them. If them can recruit more milling massmembers to them’s side of the conflict, then them will outnumber us.

    Meanwhile, what can us do with whatever numbers of people us have? It is worth lifting a finger to try to conquer and occupy the FedGov from the upper class enemy which currently occupies it. If us could do that, us could then use our government to crush and destroy the upper class enemy which drives global warming for its own amusement and profit.

    What should us do with the other nine fingers? Perhaps try to create parallel levels of government (parallel sovereignty zones) in those parts of the country without a dominant coal, gas and oil industry presence? Try all different ways to create a low fossil politicultural social-economy in those no-inherent-fossil-dominance zones?

    R. Buckminster Fuller once noted that the only way to beat down and destroy a present model which is causing problems is to set up a viable and visible better counter-model to beat down and destroy the incumbent model with. If the no-fossil community can’t create that viable visible up-and-running better model somewhere in real space and real time, then the no-fossil economy has no weapons to crush and destroy the enemy with and the partisans of no-fossil will be crushed and destroyed themselves.

    Us or us not. There is no “we”.

    One side will march to victory on a road of the other side’s bones.

  10. TomDority

    I would recommend the book Double-speak by William Lutz – published 1989
    “An irrefutable indictment of those who subvert language to distort the truth…It should be read by all who care to know when, how, why and by whom they are being bamboozled.” – New York Times Book Review.

    So all that euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook, and inflated language has been maturing and progressing like a fine wine for many years longer than thought. Its everywhere in business, advertising, medicine, government, military, energy and on and on.

    There might even be a quarterly review of doublespeak still in existence

  11. Wukchumni

    Everything in the CVBB is pretty much based on denying that climate change is coming, but Jesus is and everybody better look busy.

    Big Orchard Ag rifles through ancient fossil water underfoot that is irreplaceable, to produce warehouses of unsold almonds among other foodstuffs.

    In time the Central Valley will run out of well water and once that happens the evangs will self-rapture themselves outta here.

    1. drumlin woodchuckles

      I remember once seeing on TV the TV preacher Pat Robertson saying that global warming is real and is part of God’s plan for the approaching End Times.

      He also said since Global Warming is God’s work and will for the coming End Times, anyone who tries to stop Global Warming or even slow it down is doing the work of Satan by trying to delay or slow down the End Times.

      That’s not exactly global warming denialism. It is more like global warming sanctificationism.

      By the way, what does CVBB stand for?

      1. Wukchumni

        CVBB = Central Valley Bible Belt

        Caldwell Avenue in Visalia is ground zero for Mega-MAGA-Churches

  12. drumlin woodchuckles

    Another form of global dewarming action-prevention is the setting up of decoy velcro tarbabies which people are then invited to waste their time and energy engaging with.

  13. nightdipper

    Why did Obama just buy two multi million dollar beach front mansions if the oceans are rising? Where did that filthy career civil servant get the money to buy those mansions?

  14. orlbucfan

    I wrote a MA/PhD level thesis on the positive application of psycho-linguistics. It was an analysis on how a writer’s word choice subtly changes as they get older. Advertising (PR) language can be either negative or positive. It can also be a blend of both. Propaganda is the worse use of psycho-linguistics. If a person can read, they’ll spot it. Believe me.

Comments are closed.