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Henrik Nordborg's avatar

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." The problem is that accepting reality would mean ending the financial sector. No growth = no capital income = no capitalism. We need more than an apology. We need the world economy to write off some $22 trillion (or roughly 25%).

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Eric Brooks's avatar

While this is an excellent and important report on crucial history, it is vital that we use terms like Climate Crisis, Climate Emergency Climate Disruption, Climate Destabilization, Global Warming, and Global Heating (not the Republican PR spin term "Climate Change").

Widespread use of the term "Climate Change" originated in 2003 with Republican PR flack Frank Luntz (a brilliant corporate propagandist) who circulated a memo that got the Bush Administration to replace the properly alarming and accurate term "Global Warming" with the much more benign sounding term "Climate Change" in order to essentially disappear the problem in the public mind. Once Bush started using the term in speeches, all of mainstream media adopted it. This insidious shift in the narrative proved to be a master stroke by Luntz.

Here is a link to an important 2003 report about that very memo, in the UK Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange

Very shortly after Bush started using the term, activists like myself and Ralph Nader, immediately began countering Luntz's bullshit spin by pointing out that "Climate Crisis" was a far better term which fit the gravity of the emergency we are facing. But as noted above, Luntz's gambit was pretty effective, and far too many people still fall into using the weaker term that he popularized.

Continued constant use of the term (even by many environmentalists and scientists) drives a milquetoast corporate media narrative, which enables fossil fuel industry funded climate skeptics and deniers to more easily deceive the public.

Here is the link to a 2004 interview in Sierra Magazine with lefty messaging guru George Lakoff, in which he specifically recommends using the far better term "Climate Crisis" to describe the problem, in order to deflect Luntz's deceptive messaging.

"Winning Words: George Lakoff says environmentalists need to watch their language" link:

https://vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/200407/words.asp

To sum it up, it's a crisis, not 'change' and we need to say so.

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