Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Dr. Genevieve Gunther. She is the author of the book, The Language of

Climate Politics, Fossil Fuel Propaganda, and How to Fight It. Dr. Goethe, welcome to current affairs.

Thank you so much for having me, please call me Genevievee of goodness.

Okay, Genevieve, welcome to current affairs. Well, look, we're talking at, I think, a rather

bleak moment in a moment that I think we both wish we hadn't had to get to.

That is to say, at the time of this recording, President Donald Trump was inaugurated yesterday

for a second term in office.

One of his immediate vows upon taking office was to undo every possible piece of climate action

that he could to, in his words, the words the Republican Party,

drill baby, drill. Donald Trump is an outright climate denier. J.D. Vance calls climate science

weird science. And I think basically there is a consensus on the Republican right that

it's not a problem or if it is a problem, we don't have to do anything about it.

Unfortunately, it seems as if in some ways we've taken a step backwards

in the last few years in the way that we talk about and think about climate change,

which is one of the reasons your book is so important

is it's forward-looking, like, how are we going to talk and think about climate change? So perhaps we could start with, if you could tell us a little bit about the kind of distressing

direction that discourse and action on climate has taken in recent years.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show.

Second of all, I think that this is an argument that's going to sound plausible

to your readers and listeners. And it is that as I was researching this book, I realized

that we think of climate politics as being polarized. So you've got the outright climate

...