They’re good at what they do, no doubt about it. Scientists are not trained in rhetoric or propaganda. The strength and the consistency and the repetitive of the messaging was so strong.

This is a quote from a climate scientist who we can now say, thanks to a newly crafted verb for the ages, got well and truly ‘murdoched’.

This new verb has been coined by two journalists and academics, Andrew Dodd (who among other things founded The Media Report on ABC Radio National), and Matthew Ricketson, an award winning journalist who once worked at The Australian. They recently published Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s Media Wields Power and Punishment. It is a tale of many media attacks and an account of the many nasty strategies rolled out by Murdoch’s media outlets, referred to in the book by the name ‘News’ to capture all parts of the Murdoch machine.

Dodd and Ricketson, it turns out, are not the first to use ‘Murdoch’ as a verb. I searched ‘murdoched’ in the News on the Web corpus of news data, a data set of 10 billion words of news in English, across 20 countries, from January 1st 2010 to yesterday. A 2011 article published at newsfeed.time.com discusses ‘murdoch’ as a verb to mean ‘to bring under the control of Rupert Murdoch’, as in ‘The Wall Street Journal was totally Murdoched’.

Concordance lines for ‘murdoched’ from New on the Web corpus

It has one further usage in The New Yorker in an article on Prince Harry’s memoir by the prince’s ghostwriter, celebrating the success of the book that seemed to be connecting with readers who finally could read the book itself, ‘not Murdoched chunks laced with poison’. The writer’s usage foreshadowed the new and very strategic meaning that Dodd’s and Ricketson’s new book bestows on the word:

murdoched [mer-dokked] imaginary verb, past participle of murdoch. To be targeted or editorially attacked when one’s ideas or deeds to not account with a media proprietor’s programs or publications. Murdoching hinders or harms those targeted and distorts and debases public discussion. It manifests in many forms, some of which resemble journalism. As in ‘getting murdoched’.

If you know a bit of grammar, you will immediately see that that the verb is being used in the passive voice. If you know a bit more, you’ll know English grammar gives you a choice between a ‘neutral’ form of the passive voice, and a ‘mutative’ form, viz:

‘I was murdoched’ [neutral]

‘I got murdoched’ [mutative]

The experience is so profound that the verb ‘to murdoch’ needs the mutative form to really capture the full experience that those attacked by News are subject to. In the ‘mutative’ form - not just ‘being murdoched’, but ‘getting murdoched’ - the process causes the experiencer of the action to undergo a change of state. What the Murdoch victims/survivors in this book have gone through is heartbreaking and enraging. Various of them talk of how the process of getting murdoched led to suicidal feelings.

For the bullied

The dedication in this book is striking. On a mostly blank page, in small print, we find its dedication:

The book covers a small selection of Murdoch’s many victims: distinguished paediatrician Michelle Telfer working in gender medicine, distinguished First Nations author and academic Larissa Behrendt, a trans teacher who wrote about their story online to try to create a supportive community, an SBS journalist who dared to raise questions about Australia’s Gallipoli mythologizing, the Jewish Council of Australia and its executive director Sarah Schwartz. Celebrities, royals, Prime Ministers as well as attacks on random individuals from minority or vulnerable groups. Brittany Higgins and Shane Drumgold. Politicians who dare to raise questions about media ownership or regulation. Academics who study and critique the organization. And of course, some of the many victims of News’ phone hacking scandal.

I really appreciated the selection of material and the topical organization of the chapters around the various issues against which News has marshalled its very powerful symbolic violence. With so much material to review and organize, the authors make the profound personal and social harms this media empire has perpetrated digestible.

There are anecdotes that suggest the company’s homophobia and anti-LGBTQI+ stance is not simply performative, but reflects deeply held prejudices of Rupert Murdoch. The companies alignment with Israel also appears personal. One of Murdoch’s biographers wrote of Murdoch’s ‘personal identification with the Jewish state’. The authors note that News’ support for Israel is ‘decades old’ and ‘unwavering, even in the face of global condemnation of Israel for the atrocities committed in Gaza’. My colleague Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah is not a case study in this book, but could have been, as Dennis Altman noted in his review. The extent of her getting murdoched is extreme, even by the case studies reported in this book. All for talking about Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and Palestine. She is the survivor of a what the authors call ‘serial murdoching’.

In the chapter called ‘Addicted to Power’ the authors set out how Murdoch built the political power of his company, with politicians having the choice of being ‘boosted or bullied’ by Murdoch. Murdoch’s role in ending Whitlam’s government is described, as is the role this bullying played in setting the scene for Hawke and Keating to allow Murdoch’s expansion in Australian media, with Australia now the most concentrated newspaper market of any democracy around the world.

The authors reserve some of News’ most disgusting attacks for their final chapter detailing their studies of people who got murdoched, titled ‘People who haven’t suffered enough’. Here you will recall the phone hacking of a 13 year old missing girl, Milly Dowler, who would soon be discovered murdered. Imagine being a perpetrator of that kind of harassment.

The authors also give us the perfect way to understand News’ attacks on entire classes of people, such as Muslims, refugees, or the unhoused. They label this phenomena as a case of ‘mass murdoch’. ‘If you saw someone kicking a person in the gutter you’d be appalled’, they write. ‘What then to make of a company that routinely kicks people who are down?’. This is what mass murdoching is designed to do.

The company’s political agenda has been described by Murdoch biographer Michael Woolf as based on Murdoch having, at any one moment in time, ‘an amalgamation of half facts, quasi prejudices, shorthand analysis, and cockeyed assumptions, with a smattering of gossip’.

The book ends with a handy set of survival tips for those picked on by News, called ‘A Guide for the Abused’.

The public whipping of climate scientists

The book is so useful for revealing a persistent and consistent modus operandi. Attacks on different individuals at different times over recent decades can now be so clearly seen as part of both its business model, and its cultivation of political power. It also shows News’ profound understanding of both the power of language, and how the media ecosystem can be appropriated and dominated for political and ideological purposes.

The authors devote a whole chapter to climate. Summarizing the anti-climate tactics of News, the authors note that Murdoch’s news outlets:

have mauled governments working to act on climate change and lavished editorial support on those that have opposed or run dead on it. They have worked with and supported the array of fossil fuel industry-backed denialist ‘experts’, think tanks and politicians, providing them with ample space on their opinion pages and time on their shows on Fox.

The book reports that the founding head of Fox News, Robert Ailes, believed climate change to be a global conspiracy backed for ‘foreign interests’ trying to take over American natural resources.

It takes readers back to ‘Climategate’, when the email accounts of climate scientists were hacked and thousands of their emails were stolen. The thieves were never found - and Murdoch media showed no interest in this question. It was, as the authors write ‘like focusing on what the Watergate burglars found without ever mentioning their crime or its cover-up by the Nixon White House’. They note that web servers in Saudi Arabia, the country with the largest oil exports, were among the first places where the stolen emails were posted. Fox News called the email leak ‘Global warming’s Waterloo’.

The emails were cherrypicked by climate predators to undermine climate science and scientists. Michael Mann was one of these scientists. In a co-authored paper published in the prestigious journal Nature in 1998 - that’s now nearly 3 decades ago - the authors included what came to be know as the ‘hockey stick graph’. It simply showed their findings about rising temperatures, contextualised with careful account of methods, data sources, uncertainties and error margins.

The discursive distance between this careful scientific account and Mann’s murdoching by News Ltd has no measure. They are poles apart. Using selected quotes from the stolen emails, News began to denigrate Mann’s work by dismissing it as ‘Mike’s Nature trick’, with the implication that the findings from this careful scientific work was manufactured. This is the ‘one sticky, misleading turn of phrase’ that was repeated by News over and over. Climate fraudsters were recruited to News programs to denounce Mann’s work. One Fox host declared that Mann and his scientific colleagues had so disgraced themselves ‘there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for [the] hari-kiri that should have occurred’. In an interview with the authors of Getting Murdoched, Michael Mann said:

The experiences that we climate scientists had back then, with Climategate, have metastasised to infect the whole body politic.

Attacks on Australian climate scientists Tim Flannery, David Karoly and Joëlle Girgis are also detailed in the book, and is its platforming of climate predator Professor Bob Carter, who has been identified as ‘one of the world’s most vocal climate deniers’.

Just last month I was writing about News Ltd’s disinformation campaign at the time of Australia’s horror bushfires in late 2019 and early 2020. A complaint about this disinformation was made to the Australian Press Council based on an article that continued to attribute these bushfires to arson. The Council found the article did not contravene its journalistic principles. I have never thought to wonder about the money behind the Australian Press Council, the media industry’s self-regulatory body.

It receives nearly two thirds of its funding from News Corp Australia. Australia’s self regulatory media bodies, write the authors, are ‘so ineffectual if they disappeared tomorrow they would barely be missed’.

Let’s get ‘getting murdoched’ into the dictionary

As I was reading, I wondered if the authors had prepared themselves for a murdoching. But most likely, as News has done with biographies of Murdoch, his media minions will most likely just ignore this book.

While the authors’ suggest their newly coined verb is imaginary, it names something very real. By murdoching its victims, News Ltd has ruined careers, broken up marriages, and done untold psychological harm. It has enabled far right actors, and has hamstrung governments on matters of great public interest, from climate to media diversity.

It is hard to fathom the scale of the damage this symbolic violence has wrought.

But now we know how to name it, we need to get some energy behind this new word. If enough of us share it with others, over time it could become a new entry into our dictionaries. Do your bit to help this term grow into public consciousness.

anti-climate-action propaganda and disinformation networks have grown into multibillion dollar permanent campaigns, largely funded by fossil-fuel interests and their allies

The argument of the report is that fossil fuel interests are now waging permanent disinformation warfare to stall climate action. For those in the back row:

As I also previously noted, the people telling us this are not long standing environmental activists - they are former fossil fuel corporates and defence personnel.

Once you understand the reality of this permanent information anti-climate warfare, you see it everywhere - the ordinary, everyday, ongoing promotion of fossil fuel lifestyles as part of our national identity, as essential to daily life, and as our only avenue to true fun, relaxation and glamorous recreation.

Monday last week the team at Comms Declare (an organisation dedicated to reducing the social licence of climate polluters and supporting PR firms and professionals who work for climate) published a stark warning to Australians about how insinuated fossil fuel ideologies are into our schools.

Across just 6 identified programs, the report details $54.5 million from BHP, Chevron, Glencore Shell, BHP, and Woodside of publicly disclosed funding to schools, educational institutions, and child-centred initiatives. This figure, says Comms Declare, should be treated as the minimum estimate for this kind of funding.

Petro-pedagogy

We have enough evidence of the poisoning of classrooms by fossil fuel propaganda to now have the term ‘petro-pedagogy’ coined by Canadian researchers to describe teaching practices which are designed to ‘restrict the imagination of possible climate solutions to individual acts of conservation that fail to challenge the structural growth of fossil fuel consumption’.

These practices, in effect, create and maintain a kind of shared consciousness that perpetuates our fossil-fuel-burning status quo. We are teaching kids to use paper rather than plastic straws, while withholding from them a full understanding of the science of climate and the sociologies of power that would enable them to truly see how f$%ked their futures are looking.

These researchers argue that public education has become ‘a key site for securing and maintaining the hegemony of the oil and gas industry and obstructing transitions to low-carbon economies’, and function as a ‘pedagogical arm of the regime of obstruction’. Add coal in there for Aussie kids.

It’s fossil fuel grooming of young people. Ugh.

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And let me pop something else in here which needs further investigation: a paper showing that the most recent significant policy development on the Australian Higher Education sector (the Australian Universities Accord) has the dirty hands of Australia’s fossil fuel industry all over it. These guys leave no stone unturned.

How hot does it need to get before climate disinformation doesn’t work anymore?

It is important to appreciate just how deep these fossil fuelled ideologies run, as we watch the extreme heat descending on parts of Europe. For those those of us paying attention, whose brains are not entirely polluted by fossil fuel interests, the impact of this kind of heat on daily lives is instructive - because we are headed for more of the same and worse.

Source: https://eu-space.europa.eu/components/earth-observation-copernicus/image-of-the-day/heatwave-affecting-western-europe-third-decade-june-2026 [24/06/26]

Forty people drowned in France trying to cool off. With Parisian hospitals at capacity, French authorities restricted alcohol sales and public consumption of alcohol to reduce further demand on its health system.

Across 16 cities in Italy, construction and delivery workers were told not to work between the hours of 12.30 and 4pm. Hundreds of schools in the UK planned partial closures in response to the heat. The heat also played havoc with public transport in England, with passengers urged to avoid non-essential travel, and to bring water if they have to take the train.

It will take time to calculate the excess deaths as a result of this heatwave, brought to you by the ongoing burning of fossil fuels - but attribution scientists can now do these calculations.

Rest assured there are many people already happy to dismiss this lived experience as evidence for global warming. As I have spent my academic career teaching students in linguistics units now deleted from our oh so streamlined new curriculum, ‘reality’ is a function of the meaning-making climates we live in. Sure, it’s hot in Europe - but as I heard recently from someone who consumes a lot of anti-climate propaganda, ‘the poms just can’t stand the heat’.

We can now confidently predict that an extreme weather event like this will bring on climate disinformation: here’s a short report on some of the disinformation messages circulating at the moment (also fuelling harassment of climate scientists). We should expect some of these memes to grow in circulation as the heat keeps rolling on.

Murdoch disinformation warfare

As I read this coverage, I get flashbacks to the horror bushfires in Australia in 2019 and 2020, my own personal moment of really understanding that climate breakdown was not something in the future. It was already here.

A quick recap: Australia’s global-warming fuelled bushfires burnt burnt 10.7 million hectares (the size of South Korea) and were estimated to have caused $100 billion in damages. Three billion animals perished or were displaced by these fires. Thirty four humans died directly in the fire, and a further estimated 445 died from smoke inhalation.

The grief hit me very hard. I honestly, naively, believed that the scale of the material impact of this evidence of climate breakdown would generate the political will and necessity to act. More fool me.

In real time I watched the Murdoch disinformation vultures feasting on the smouldering corpses of humans and and over a billion animals. Ably assisted by elected politicians and social media giants.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-18/fact-check-peter-dutton-arson-250-charged/11971454

Even Rupert Murdoch’s son James called out News Corp for being climate deniers.

And remember this email?

I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies.

The reporting I have witnessed in The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun is not only irresponsible but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet that needs us more than ever to acknowledge the destruction we have caused and start doing something about it.

Its writer, then an employee of News Corp, would later that day walk out its door never to return.

The unholy alliance between social media, right wing news, and politicians

How do you fan the flame of disinformation? There is more and more research in this field, and I found some studies about the disinformation which followed the terrible Australian bushfires. One study reports Twitter accounts busy promoting claims that the fires were caused by arson, by green activists stopping preventative backburning processes, or simply claims that Australia has always had bushfires, and that they have nothing to do with global warming.

These researchers collected data to study this process. The graphs below show the growth in accounts and tweets using the hashtag #ArsonEmergency, compared with a couple of other popular hashtags of the moment.

Diagram reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

In this middle of this desperate time, Murdoch’s The Australian and other newspapers opened its media channels to anything-but-global-warming explanations - here’s a selection of snippits from an ABC Media Watch program about the role of News Corp in fanning the flames of anti-science, pro-fossil fuel disinformation:

Donald Trump Jr. shared one of these articles published by The Australian, giving this narrative a boost across his social media followers:

A complaint was submitted to the Australian Press Council about this particular article. Sorry kids - the Press Council didn’t step up to defend your present and future, concluding instead the article was not misleading.

The researchers studying the circulation of the ‘arson’ hashtag on Twitter found a strong response online to spreaders of the arson narrative. This funky graph shows these polarised communities - with red being the arson narrative tweeters, and blue those seeking to correct this disinformation. But the scale of the damage done by high reach media, and high reach climate predators, is difficult to combat.

Diagram reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Greenpeace also conducted a study of this disinformation campaign by the Murdoch press.

Their report found:

News Corp outlets were fertile ground for climate denialism and contested analysis during the fire crisis. News Corp and News Corp-owned APN Newspapers produced 75% of all articles that denied the influence of climate change on the bushfires over summer, despite publishing only 46% of total articles about the bushfires and climate change over the same period.

Following this disgraceful information pollution campaign at this time of a desperate national crisis, more than half a million Australians signed a petition for a Royal Commission into the Murdoch media, launched by one former Labor PM and supported by another former PM from an opposing party. Without party political support, this call from so many Australians fizzed into nothing.

What a missed opportunity. As I said earlier:

Where is the ongoing, counter campaign? One that shifts Australian hearts and minds to pro-climate, decarbonizing lifestyles and choices.

BHP was once a leader in acknowledging the impact of climate pollution on global warming. Burning fossil fuels, its pre-COVID CEO said back in 2017, was an existential threat to humanity. It began to make plans to electrify its operations. It would build a $400 million solar farm and battery in the Pilbara, and invest in big electric dump trucks. It trumpeted various other decarbonisation plans.

BHP was in fact among the first companies to commit to net zero. It positioned itself to make real cuts in its climate pollution. But as recently reported by The Guardian and The ABC, BHP talked itself out of its commitments.

In its 2025 Annual Report, BHP’s CEO stated that the company’s climate commitments ‘remain unchanged’. Meanwhile, As The Guardian reported in its review of leaked documents, BHP told itself:

‘The urgency to source renewable generation and storage services by 2030 has diminished’.

BHP markets itself as a company producing ‘resources that make the future possible’. ‘Building what’s next is what BHP does best’, they say. On its glossy Annual Report cover, it boasts that it is ‘bringing people and resources together to build a better world’.

Its profits last year came at the cost of 8.7 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution - a figure higher than 80 individual nations - you can see the figures yourself here at Climate Trace’s inventory by country for climate pollution in 2025.

The largest mining company in the world, marketing itself on what it is doing FOR the future, has been revealed instead for what it is doing TO the future.

The Bloody Huge Polluter’s best friend

As always, the Bloody Huge Polluter’s best friend in its future-eating endeavours is language. With language to hand, it can hide its wanton carelessness about its climate pollution behind goals, plans, aspirations, commitments - all ideas that put action off into an unspecified future.

Of course big organizations need the language of goals, plans and commitments to project and calibrate its future directions. Used honestly, these terms offer ways to think and plan ahead. But these words are big and free to blow in the breeze if that’s what you want them to do. At its sustainability webpage, the Bloody Huge Polluter summarizes its ‘ambition’:

Nice. And linguistically clever, with lots of words that are vague and future oriented (‘commitment’, ‘finding new ways’, ‘transition’) while claiming their products are ‘essential’ for a sustainable future, even apparently its thermal coal operations at Mt Arthur, one of Australia’s largest coal mines.

BHP found ways to operate more sustainably - it just decided not to adopt them.

BHP’s 2025 annual report is full of references to emissions and climate. ‘Emissions’ is in fact one of the most frequent words in the report - more frequent even than words like ‘operations’ and ‘production’. The word ‘climate’ is also pretty frequent - even more than the use of the word ‘income’.

That suggests a lot of attention to climate and emissions in its annual report. And BHP states that it is ‘unequivocal’ in its position that global warming is anthropogenic.

Here is the company in its own words:

‘Unequivocal’ is such a strong word to use: un-equi-vocal. It is to speak with a single voice. But this statement is undermined in the very next sentence, by linking their recognition of ‘actual’ impacts to ‘potential’ - i.e. maybe not real or maybe never happening - impacts, as if we still can’t quite reasonably make a distinction between them.

They go on to muddy these waters - the claim that climate impacts are ‘complex’ is a stock standard delay tactic. It means ‘we are still waiting for science to catch up before we can take concrete action’.

And while ‘climate’ is a high frequency word in the annual report, a collocation network - that is, a map of the typical words around it - shows that climate is associated with words that push its risk out to the future - ‘transition’, ‘adaptation’, ‘plan’, ‘goals’, etc. What we don’t find in this map is reference to global warming, CO2 emissions, or actual temperature increases.

There’s a lot to look into here - I need a PhD student to work on Australian corporate greenwashing. BHP’s annual report is 188K words. But on a side note: It is very interesting to browse around BHP’s section on legal proceedings reports which includes not only cases and environmental and health impacts of their operations in Brazil and South Africa, but also a class action case in the Federal Court of Australia on sexual harassment and sex discrimination on behalf of ‘all women who worked at BHP’s Australian workplaces at any time during the period from 12 November 2003 to 11 March 2024 who were impacted by the alleged conduct’. The annual report provides no details - but read about it here at the ABC’s news site.

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What should we call these climate wreckers?

What kind of future is the Bloody Huge Polluter building when it is happy to profit from climate destabilization? How do we make the key decision makers - from corporates to government - pay some kind of social license price for these decisions that lock the world into ever increasing climate pollution?

The dominant term in the news is still ‘climate denier’, although its frequency in the news is very low (0.10 words per million).

And ‘climate skeptics’ is still around, as if people like Trump are genuinely questioning the science of climate breakdown.

So we need to up our game here. I think we can take some inspiration from the Substack I Fucking Love Australia. Frankly, there is another PhD waiting to be done - on the many many ways and forms through which this author takes shots at US President Trump.

I Fucking Love Australia

TAKE A SEAT, DONALD, THE ADULTS ARE FUCKING TALKING.

How finland's president Disembowelled trump in front of 1,000 kids…

Read more

3 months ago · 1695 likes · 139 comments · I Fucking Love Australia

Here’s just a mere handful of Trump insults this Substacker has bequeathed us:

the melted traffic cone with abandonment issues; America’s loudest unmedicated retiree; the freezer-burnt despot; a man assembled from steakhouse leftovers and spite; this geriatric off-cut of a president; a man with the colour and approximate shelf life of servo sushi; the bargain-bin Berlusconi; the spray-tanned wall-builder; the geriatric tantrum machine; the spray-on emperor; the syphilitic landlord; the moist marshmallow with launch codes; a clapped-out fortune-telling machine; the clogged-artery Caligula; a deflating orange dirigible full of grievance and gas; the pumpkin-spiced bankruptcy engine; the leaking orange hot water bottle.

I promise you I have barely scratced the surface.

Get on board people. We need to firm up some insults for people with the power to change the future, to scale back every fraction of heating they can, but who instead decide that lining their pockets is a more noble aim.

A few years back Tim Flannery coined the term ‘climate predators’. It has sadly not taken off. The huge corpus of News data I regularly consult, from 20 different countries, with over 25 billion words of data, shows one single example.

It would be great to see this word doing the rounds. What else can we come up with? Here’s a few I’ve thought of:

climate wreckers; climate apocalistas; climate vampires; weather f$%kers, weather wreckers; future thieves …

If you can think of others, pop them in the chat. We need to shout them loud and often to be heard over the long standing and refined tactics of climate predators. They are a disgrace.

This is Precious

Wild Series 2 launches today!

I announced a month or two back that I’d received some limited funding to run a new series of my Wild with Sarah Wilson podcast. Finally, Series 2 kicks off this week, and above is a brief overview of where we’ll be heading, as well as a recap on where I think many of us find ourselves in this very tender historical moment…

Listen now

5 months ago · 121 likes · 33 comments · Sarah Wilson

I’m sure she’s gonna appreciate my recommendation of her work, from my little newsletter with <500 subscribers, and hers heading up towards 65, 000 :)

In the intro to the new season, Sarah really spoke to me. I mean this metaphorically of course. In her short intro, she reflected on the first season of her podcast, where she did 200 interviews with all kinds of people - philosphers, scientists, energy futurists, at least 2 nuns, geophysicists, writers, musicians, and death walkers (if I heard that right!).

The aim of season 1 was to understand what is happening to our ways of living, and how and why this is happening. After 200 interviews, the situation had been clearly and deeply diagnosed. The polycrisis has arrived: climate breakdown, genocides, rise of tech bros and AI authoritarianism.

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‘How do we be?’

So now what? In this context, Sarah asks, ‘how do we be?’ I know I have never, ever, been asked this question before. Sarah herself didn’t expect to be where she is now - leading an international conversation on what it means to be ‘collapse aware’, and how communities prepare ourselves for new ways of living. But, as she says, we are the adults in the room at this cosmic moment in human history:

I never thought this would all happen in my lifetime … All of us here happen to be the adults in the room, born into this brain-explodingly difficult moment - what is before is the invite to own it fully and to make something of this stunning possibility ..

We are the adults in the room. So how do we go forward?

Becoming a good enough ancestor

Sarah has recently interviewed Audrey Tang. The title of my post comes from Audrey, who lives her life with this mantra in mind.

She was named one of TIME’s ‘100 Most Influential People in AI’ (2023.) Being ‘influential’ can be positive or negative. TIME’s list doesn’t define the direction of influence: it includes those who’ve had and used influence nefariously as well as some of who tried to use their influence for good. Audrey has a career of using technology for pro-democratic and pro-social purposes.

Audrey Tang, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Audrey is no ordinary human. She started writing computer code before she even had a computer. At 8 she wrote a computer game for her brother to learn fractions. At 14 she left school to start a search engine company.

As an activist hacker, Audrey was part of Taiwan’s g0v movement, an open decentralised tech community organized around information transparency and co-operation. The g0v team - using a zero to replace the letter ‘o’ in Gov and pronounced ‘gov zero’ - started to ‘fork the government’, that is, to present alternative versions of government webpages that offered readable, open and transparent government information to citizens.

Principles of g0v, from Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy

In 2014 when Taiwan saw a popular uprising of people wanting to be part of the process of shaping a new trade agreement with China, g0v was there providing internet coverage and digital tools to help mediate this conflict between demonstrators and government.

As a consequence, Tang was invited to join the Taiwanese government as the first Minister for Digital Affairs in Taiwan - its youngest ever minister, and the first transgender person to be in Taiwan’s executive cabinet. Her role was to help open up government to the people, something that g0v had been instrumental in demonstrating was good for democracy.

Tang and the g0v team developed vTaiwan, a decentralised open consultation platform, designed to involve citizens in large-scale conversations over matters of public interest or controversy. Large groups of citizens have come together through this platform to have input into policies around AI governance and the set-up of Uber in Taiwan. vTaiwan was used to break a 6 year deadlock around how to legislate and regulate the online sale of alcohol. Through large scale civic conversations, new proposals were put forward and enacted by the government.

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The platform mediated 28 debates, with 80% of these deliberations resulting in legislative action. Social media, Tang argues, focusses on ‘engagement for enragement’. But it doesn’t have to be used this way. As reported in the multi-authored book on this recent history in Taiwan (freely available in six languages on the internet), these civic conversations:

can be seen simply as the harnessing of a small portion of the energy typically wasted on conflict on (anti-)social media towards solving public problems

The book, as indicated in the title, shows how plurality can be affirmed and extended in digital environments in a way to stengthen democracies. The book opens with this interesting example of polysemy - where the ‘same’ word means two different things:

In Mandarin, 數位 means both “digital” and “plural.” To be plural is to be digital. To be digital is to be plural.

Plurality captures the symbiotic relationship between democracy and collaborative technology. Together, democracy and collaborative technology can power infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Let’s free the future — together.

Tang and her technocommunitarians have made Taiwan the leader in the fight against disinformation. They founded CoFact, an NGO which built a chatbot to fact-check and flag disinformation. The system has over 2000 volunteer editors, and is used by more than 300, 000 people in Taiwan. Imagine not only the impact of finding and tagging and sharing disinformation posts, but of the education of the people about how disinformation works. It’s almost like getting a vaccine against it.

If you want more of Audrey Tang’s amazing life story, check out this short doco on YouTube:

Sarah’s interview with Audrey is absolutely boggling. The potential of tech for good is inspiring. Please share this episode with friends and family to seed these new ideas.

And if you are wondering ‘how to be’ in this era, maybe Audrey’s tagline, about being a ‘good enough ancestor’ can help to guide us?

Everyday I think about what my children, my grandson, my nieces and nephews, and all the other young people I know will think about me in 10 or 20 or 30 years. When I go to the anti-genocide protests in Hyde Park in Sydney, one reason is so my children will remember in the future that I cared enough to be there and be counted.

When I write about and protest on climate, when I make decisions to lower my consumption and change my ways of living to decarbonize, I want them to know that I did what I could when I was one of the adults in the room.

The dictum ‘we don’t just live in a bag of skin’ is one great line of many from a long dead white male linguist, J.R. Firth. A man writing from the 1930s to the 50s, his work is marked by the established gendered style of the era. It’s full of ‘man’ and ‘mankind’, with ‘he’ the unmarked pronoun choice. When I quote him in this piece I will bring his wisdom into the 21st century.

Firth was the first Chair of General Linguistics in the UK. By reports a conservative - and ‘emotionally extravagant’ - man, he died 5 years before I was born. Before I really even knew who he was, I was already a ‘Firthian’, my education in linguistics being wholly within the steady stream of his intellectual legacy.

As I finally got around to reading his dusty old tomes, it felt like coming home. It is funny to explain this point to people in the real world, but what made Firth so remarkable for his time is that he put meaning at the heart of the study of language.

Yep, there are linguists, super famous ones even, who study language and don’t bother with meaning. I wrote about one last month, Noam Chomsky, who built a linguistics empire ignoring the humanness of language, what Firth called its ‘choric’ dimension. As Firth wrote:

In the give and take of a great deal of conversation, far more than most of us realize, it is the key, mode or mood - perhaps I ought to say ‘keys’ and ‘moods’ - of the interplay of this ‘choric’ behaviour which matters, rather than what is loosely called the exchange of ideas.

Firth saw meaning in every aspect of language, embracing not merely the content of language, but its beautiful modes of connection and feeling. Firth insisted that linguists study authentic data, not examples made up by philosphers in armchairs. And he understood that language was outside of humans, a shared resource that binds and connects us to each other on both intimate and cosmic scales.

Gargantuan Propaganda

Forty years before linguistics (re)discovered1 ideology in the late 1970s, Firth could see how the forces of propaganda were growing in their strength. In a paper published in 1937, he urged linguists to study:

the language used for us and against us every day of our lives with that objective detachment and calm scrutiny which we are accustomed to give to the classics

Propaganda has long been part of what humans do with language - language is the perfect medium because unlike the claims of some philosphers, it has no regard for truth. As I wrote in this post back in 2024, language is not a truth machine, it’s a reality machine:

In 1937 Firth wrote that in the modern word propaganda has ‘the command of Gargantuan forces’, both in authoritarian and democratic societies. ‘Garguantuan’ is capitalised by Firth in recognition of its origins as the name of a voracious giant in Rabelais’ book of the same name.

Chapter 38 of Gargantua imagined by Gustave Doré (engraving, 1873). Public Domain.

When you see this image of Gargantua, think Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison, et al.

What Firth helps us see is not just the arrival of Gargantuan scale propaganda, but that these currents of meaning are the language all around us. We don’t just live in a bag of skin. The boundary between our insides and our outsides is permeable. Our brains, Firth wrote

give us a grip on our world, and the world a grip on us

With this understanding, and decades before social media, Firth understood the social networking character of language. Speech, he argued is the telephone network. It is operator, switchboard and wiring in control of our social currents and power. It is a network of bonds and obligations. It commands the power grid of the driving forces of the society. It is the nervous system of our society. It mobilizes the fundamental urges and drives of our animal nature and also our habits, which are our second nature.

It is, he argued, social magic, involving our whole organism.

This was language decades before the invention of the internet and social media, before the rise of the Tech Bro class, before the lethal concentration of social media ownership in the hands of few billionaires. Firth wrote back then that ‘We live in an age of “phones”- gramophones, telephones, microphones, and goodness knows how many other “phones”’. If only he lived to see us today.

The world outside our bag of skin is an even more potent mix of meanings than Firth imagined in the post-World War I period. Language is even more powerful and even more present in our daily lives. We have even more mediums of meaning exchange, available every second of every day.

This makes us, according to sociologist Siniša Malešević, the most ideologised humans who have ever lived on this remarkable planet. Our everyday lives and our brains are more shaped by ideologies than any other previous human communities.

Former Defense leaders call out the FF BS

The ever deepening information pollution in which we live is now so serious that a group of former defense leaders and staff released a warning report in late March on the dangers to Australia’s natural security of fossil fuel BS. This group, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG) includes the former head of the Australian Defence Force, Chris Barrie, and a former top fossil fuel executive and industry association Chair, Ian Dunlop.

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Here’s their opening paragraph, with my emphasis - and it pulls no punches:

Power in this digitally networked age comes from dominance in the information space and Australians are now living in a world increasingly shaped by propaganda and disinformation rather than factual information. Anti-climate-action propaganda and disinformation networks have grown into multibillion dollar permanent campaigns, largely funded by fossil-fuel interests and their allies. These campaigns may be best understood through a lens of information warfare, combining traditional media influence, coordinated online activity and algorithmic amplification to shape narratives and perceptions at scale.

If you read that quickly, can you please go back and read it again? These guys are telling us that the fossil fuel industry is funding information warfare. And it’s a ‘permanent’ campaign.

This is an information war on us, younger and coming generations, on every non-human species of life - I guess excepting those that will thrive in rising heat.

This message is not from environmental activists. It’s not even from the desperate scientists who have been trying to get this information understood by a wider public. It’s from people who’ve had careers reading security briefings, and deciding where Australia’s defense forces and hardware will be located.

What should we be doing in the face of this information warfare?

Where are our simple, pro-climate, PR campaigns?

Here’s a little experiment for you to try. For one day, take note of whether you get a message, from anyone anywhere, that reminds you the planet is heating and that we can do something about this. I expect you will find that these messages aren’t coming to you - you have to go looking for them. Those who control the platforms that feed news and advertising across your eyeballs don’t want you to know. And our government is pretty much OK with that.

Yes, we have pro-climate and clean energy NGOs - such as the Climate Council, and the Clean Energy Council - on this bandwagon. But they are fighting for airtime in an increasingly polluted information environment.

But we have no ‘permanent campaigns’ to get us to completely, 100% on board with moving off fossil fuels, and into sustainable ways of living.

This kind of campaign is the role of government - to counter this disinformation by steady clear messaging about how to move beyond fossil fuels. And how the alternatives are better: cleaner, safer, cheaper.

Instead, as David Spratt recently wrote at Pearls and Irritations, the government is wilfully squandering its opportunities to help Australians make the link between extreme weather and burning fossil fuels. Spratt noted the many opportunites that the government was recently handed to link climate change to extreme weather:

In January 2026, Australia experienced a series of unprecedented extreme weather events, including record-breaking heatwaves, fires and flooding, part of a global pattern of ever-more extreme weather events driven by global warming. Such events are a climate change “teachable moment”, that is, a critical opportunity to educate people about the connection between a current experience (whether first-hand or in the media) to its bigger-picture cause.

After all these climate induced crises, did our government try to help us see the links to global heating and fossil fuel burning? To find out, Spratt studied the press releases of four key Cabinet members: the Prime Minister (Albanese), the Climate Minister (Bowen), the Assistant Climate Minister (Wilson), and the Emergency Services Minister (McAllister). Across 125 media statements and transcripts of media events, the link between record-breaking weather and climate change was mentioned just twice, once by the Emergency Services Minister, and once, in equivocal terms, by the Prime Minister.

In fact the PM’s comment looks weirdly like a nod to climate deniers

Australia has always had natural weather events, so you can’t say any specific event is just because of climate change. What you can do, though, is say that the science told us that there would be more frequent events and they’d be more intense. That’s why my Government as well as the Victorian Government and most state governments are taking action on climate change.

Hey Albo, have you not heard of attribution science, like how actual scientists show the link between specific extreme weather events and climate change? Let the Union of Concerned Scientists explain what attribution science is:

It allows us to quantify the role climate change plays in shaping things like extreme weather events, sea level rise, or air temperature increases across the world.

Attribution science can now tell us not just whether an extreme weather event was caused by anthropogenic global heating, but how much this factor was relevant.

Neither our Minister nor our Assistance Minister for Climate mentioned climate change is their press releases or conferences. Yet there is evidence that at these moments where climate change becomes real for ordinary people, it helps grow public awareness of climate change to have these links explicitly made.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. This is the government that released a 284 page National Climate Risk Assessment with one single mention, in brackets, of fossil fuels - see my post from October last year on this:

About the only thing I agree with George Lakoff about is how good the Right is at agreeing on, sticking to, and repeating their core messages. So imagine this: each day your eyes meet a simple message about how good renewables are. Bus shelters, TV and social media ads, bill boards. Saying the same thing, designed to create in Australians a general good feeling about renewable energy, with Firth’s idea of ‘choric behaviour’ in mind.

Here’s my dodgy AI version. Can someone send this to Albanese and Bowen?

Coda: can we have more sense than nonsense in linguistics?

Firth’s antedote to propaganda was not censorship - although of course he did not live to see the scale of the information pollution we live in now. He argued for better education about language - to ‘make our young people actively and critically aware of the sort of language which is used for them and against them every day of their lives’. If only our discipline had been able to deliver on his request: ‘Let us have more sense than nonsense in linguistic education’.

I have been wondering lately about why my discipline has not embraced the considerable problem of climate disinformation - at least not in any way commensurate with the scale of the current and impending impacts of global heating.

Chomsky is a part of the explanation for linguistics’ failure to take on one of the most important language issues of our time. I’ll get to that, via a little excursus into the Epstein files.

But first, here’s some evidence for my claim. This recent and significant book called Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment was put together by 110 academics. It has a lot to say on fossil fuel discourse-related issues. But there are no linguists in this mix. The word ‘linguistics’ does not appear in this 389 page book, even though the word ‘discourse’ is central to explanations of climate denial and delay, appearing on almost one in every five pages of the book.

The work on language and climate, with a few notable exceptions, is being done by academics outside linguistics, and in a whole range of disciplines. Some of them are adjacent to linguistics, like media and communication, but I’ve come across great papers on language and climate obstruction by climate scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and even one by a mathematician. I’m working on an academic journal article on this topic at the moment.

It is so obvious that language is powerful and important and needs to be studied - you don’t need a PhD in linguistics to see this. And it is obvious that language is a weapon in the hands of the fossil fuel industry, wanting to keep its business afloat at whatever planetary cost. Researchers in many disciplines have been working on this problem for a couple of decades at least. They know that the management and manipulation of public discourse, and therefore, of hearts and minds of ordinary people, has been essential to stalling action on climate.

But not Chomsky.

Chomsky and Epstein

In 2023 Chomsky defended knowing Epstein, presenting him as a man who’d served his time, and whose crimes were just like any other. Chomsky explained his relationship to Epstein as if it was like other professional meetings he had had in the course of his extended career. In his defence of his meetings with Epstein, Chomsky argued it was no worse than his colleagues, and institutions like MIT and Harvard, accepting money from some of the ‘worst criminals’ in the world. Perhaps not. But Chomsky was saying: everyone else was doing it.

When asked if he regretted his relationship with Epstein, Chomsky resolutely said no. And by this time he must have been in full possession of the knowledge of Epstein’s arrest in 2019 for trafficking scores of underage girls.

No regrets. In 2023.

We now have access to more than 6, 300 documents on their relationship: it’s the number of files that are returned when you search for ‘Chomsky’ at the Department of Justice portal.

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In her public statement on their relationship with Epstein, Valeria Chomsky writes as if the relationship between Chomsky and Epstein was professional and intellectual. And she writes as if her husband, someone routinely called ‘the greatest living intellectual’ was another one of Epstein’s victims: Epstein ‘encircled’ Noam, and with gifts and invitations which ‘ensnared’ Chomsky and his wife.

I have seen various pieces by male commentators trying to retrieve Chomsky’s reputation by telling us how charming Epstein was. As if this towering intellectual and trenchant critic of American imperialism could not be expected to wonder where Epstein’s money came from, or why he wanted to befriend Chomsky. Or to wonder why Epstein had such expansive connections, including to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

You have to laugh sometimes. Here’s one such defense in which the explanation for Chomsky’s friendship with Epstein goes like this:

What the files actually reveal, once you set aside the outrage, is a textbook case of predatory manipulation targeting a vulnerable person.

This is not a statement about Epstein and his many victims. It is about Epstein and Chomsky. If it’s such a ‘textbook case’, why were the Chomskys apparently so blind to it?

As this commentator serves us up excuses for Chomsky - another man not held accountable for his behaviour - we are told to ‘set aside the outrage’, in other words, to put aside emotions and to get rational. It’s an echo of Chomsky’s ‘hysteria’ comment - on which, see below.

I’m won’t link you to the column by a well-known Australian male commentator who defends Chomsky as a victim of the Epstein ‘charm’, a poor old man at the mercy of his children, and hey, what about all the women who worked for Epstein, and aren’t we getting too hot under the collar about sex with teenagers?

It’s enraging. This male can’t even be bothered even to think about his phrase ‘sex with teenagers’. Is the sec consenting? Are we talking about 14 year olds or 19 year olds? And, of course, the gendered dog-whistling going on here: in ‘sex with teenagers’, the male writer does not need to unpack the gender of the teenagers (female), and the gender of the non-teenagers (male).

A purely professional relationship?

Did the Chomskys really not know who Epstein was? I’ll get to that. But first, let’s be clear: from the many many socializing emails, the claims that the meetings were essentially in the line of duty, that ‘In all cases, these visits were related to Noam's professional commitments’ as Valeria Chomsky wrote in her apology - is rubbish. Complete rubbish.

Because the emails show the language of intimates. In one, Valeria writes they have been ‘missing’ Epstein1. In another, from a redacted sender, Valeria is asked whether Chomsky and Epstein have planned any lunches or dinners together, and Valeria replies ‘I don’t believe the boys have worked out anything’.

Epstein and Chomsky. The boys.

In another, the Chomskys are thanked for contributing to Epstein’s birthday book2. There’s a message too where Valeria is asking whether the greatest known sex offender has recovered from a cold, advising ‘hot tea and honey and rest’.

There are emails from Chomsky to Steven Bannon - e.g. one in May 2018, which shows it is Chomsky who reaches out to Bannon to arrange a meeting. ’Jeffrey gave me your address’, he writes. ‘Lots to talk about’.

There are extensive email exchanges about financial matters between Chomsky and his children where Chomsky refers to Epstein’s longtime accountant as his (i.e. Chomsky’s) ‘extremely trustworthy and competent financial advisor’. Chomsky’s children push back.

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In another, Valeria Chomsky asks Epstein if a new research institute on Linguistics and Cognitive Science could be established in Phoenix with Mrs Chomsky as the director.

We have all seen the glowing recommendation by Chomsky of Epstein: where Chomsky advises whomsoever it may concern that Epstein ‘constantly raises searching questions and puts forth provocative ideas, which have repeatedly led me to rethink crucial issues’. Valeria Chomsky’s apology confirms the recommendation letter was written by her husband.

Chomsky’s reference for Epstein will surprise linguists like Daniel Everett, once a devoted accolyte to Chomsky’s linguistics. Everett’s research, based on 25 years of field work with a community deep in the Amazon, challenged the central tenet of Chomsky’s theory. But unlike the sex offender’s ‘provocative ideas’, Everett’s deep empirical research never provoked Chomsky to reconsider his ideas. Instead, Chomsky and his supporters ridiculed and vilified the researcher. Chomsky did not offer counter-evidence, because he never worked in the field. It was against his views on the nature of language to work empirically with natural language.

Did Chomsky know what Epstein had done?

While it appears that the first meeting between Chomsky and Epstein was in 2015, the initial attempt at a meeting goes back to March 2012, in an email to Chomsky from physicist Lawrence Krauss, the subject of multiple accusations of sexual harrassment, some confirmed after investigation by his university.

I could not find the initial invitation email sent by Krauss, but there is a reminder email to Chomsky about his invitation to meet Epstein. In this message, Epstein is referred to only as ‘Epstein’ - he is clearly a man who needs no introduction.

Krauss writes to Chomsky ‘I can understand if you can’t or don’t want to’ [meet Epstein]. Krauss not only knew why someone wouldn’t want to meet with Epstein, but also believed that Chomsky would also know why. It did not need spelling out.

Chomsky’s first reply is ambiguous, and Krauss writes again:

If you are willing, is there anyone I can have him contact to set up an appointment? I will owe you. He is an interesting fellow in any case.

Krauss urges Chomksy to do him a favour and meet Epstein - how else can we interpret ‘I will owe you’. This appears as Krauss trying to overcome some potential reluctance. And why the words ‘in any case’? It can only be to mitigate any potential objections to meeting Epstein.

Chomsky writes back: ‘Just suggest to him to write to me’.

In the public apology, Valeria Chomsky claims people did not really know what Epstein had done until after the Miami Herald exposé was first published November 28, 2018.

So, did the Chomskys drop Epstein after that? Here’s a Happy New Year! email sent by Valeria to Epstein December 31st, 2018, cc’ed to Chomsky, hoping Epstein’s new year brings ‘good projects’.

And towards the end of February, 2019, Epstein reaches out to Chomsky for media advice in the fallout of the Miami Herald investigation. ‘Awful situation’, replies Chomsky - not about the abused minors, but the media coverage - and he feels so bad for ‘Lawrence’ (probably Krauss, as mentioned, the subject of multiple claims of sexual harrassment). Not just Lawrence, but for ‘other cases I know about’. The ‘vultures dearly want a public response’ writes Chomsky. They assume guilt ‘whatever the facts’.

Take the time to read about Julie K Brown, the dogged Miami Herald journalist who finally brought the Epstein case into the glare of full sunlight. Brown pursued the facts. Chomsky empathizes with Epstein: ‘I’ve had plenty of experience, though of course not on this scale’.

Chomsky’s linguistics

There’s more to see in these files about the personal dealings between the Chomskys and Epstein. But I want to put them in the context of Chomsky’s view of language and his linguistic theory. It helps us understand why linguistics has not stepped up to one of the greatest challenges of our era.

What is so ironic is that to the wider world, the Epstein files are bristling with meanings - meanings about power and the wholesale abuse of women and girls, about a world of entitled men whose behaviour is above the law, and it seems, beyond reproach.

These texts show how the men in this world use language to navigate the logistics of their financial and sexual dealings. They use language to show their solidarity with each other, to construct their membership of an insider cabal. And they routinely use language in the ongoing maintenance of utter female objectification, and of male entitlement to sexual services, whether within or outside of the law.

Now know this: you cannot analyse one single example of the Epstein files using Chomsky’s linguistic theory.

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This is because for Chomsky, grammar is innate3. The result of his many decades in linguistics is his claim that the unique and biological feature of all human languages is a principle called ‘recursion’ - the capacity to construct a sentence like ‘Mary said that John had left’. The amazing diversity of human language and languages was reduced to simply this. Open any of his linguistic tomes and you’ll find trival examples like this one pored over, as if they are a portal into the deep mysteries of language.

His scholarly method was not to study and compare different languages. He eschewed the analysis of real people using language in our everyday lives. Chomsky argued, instead, that linguistics should assume an ‘ideal speaker', in a ‘completely homogenous speech community’. Linguistic science is about ‘a mental reality underlying actual behaviour’. The ‘observed use of language’ may be evidence of the ‘mental reality’, but ‘surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics’4. Linguistics cannot actually seriously study people using language.

Moreover, whatever human babies and infants learn about language through socialization is excluded from his linguistic project. His famous dismissal of the daily processes of little humans’ immersion in their natural linguistic and cultural environments is ‘the poverty of the stimulus’. How could children possibly learn language from (merely) what goes on around them?

To be a ‘Chomskyan’, you have to enter his little black box model and close the curtains so you don’t get any sunlight or hear the sounds of children playing outside. Chomsky’s linguistic theory is a brittle paradigm that you have to wholly occupy to accept. How many human hours of study and research, and how many dollars in precious research funding, were spent over 5 or so decades in the pursuit of his arcane, unappliable ideas?

As he prosecuted his case, constructing himself as a linguistic revolutionary along the way, Chomsky argued that using language to actually communicate was ‘a tiny fraction’ of what language is all about. Ignoring the buzz and hum of public and private discourse surrounding him, he argued ‘it doesn’t make much sense to say that the function of language is communication’5.

Chomsky was never interested in the human experience of language, how it is used to construct intimacy, to flatter, to inquire, to denigrate, to oppress; how it mediates our day-to-day lives, while simultanously constructing and maintaining a culture’s ideological currents.

His much celebrated foray into media discourse, Manufacturing Consent – a book analysing media discourse on Central America, the Russian invasion of Afganistan and the American invasion of Vietnam – did not use a single tool from linguistics.

This well-known concept - like so many in academia, a renaming of an old idea already lying around (see Gramsci on ‘hegemony’) - is now an object of ridicule. Marina Hyde writes ‘Never mind Manufacturing Consent – have a read of Not Giving A Shit About Consent’.

In a 1988 book of his interviews, titled Language and Politics, Chomsky expressly rejected any connection between language and politics: the relationship between them was ‘tenuous’ as far as he was concerned6.

Chomsky actively rejected thinking about language in its manifest glory, as both the source of humanity’s greatest achievements in art, science and diplomacy, and the generator of our deepest ideologies. Like those, for example, that continue to protect and obscure patriarchal power, the ideologies that create and sustain a culture of male entitlement to female labour: household, emotional and sexual.

Chomsky was simply never, ever interested in the empiric power of language.

In her apology on their behalf, Valeria Chomsky insists that her husband ‘always supported gender equity and women’s rights’. I’ll let someone else do the research to test this claim. What we do know is that when asked by Epstein, Chomsky chose his relationship with Epstein over the defence of unfathomably brave women who had been trying for years to alert us all to Epstein’s empire of paedophilia and sexual violence. He did this fully knowing the extent of the accusations against Epstein - he acknowleges the scale of these accusations in the email with his media advice.

In that moment, Chomsky threw all of these brave women under the bus. To even question these charges, Chomsky wrote in his act of solidarity with Epstein, ‘is a crime worse than murder’. The Noösphere, linked below, explicates what Chomsky’s act of referring to the ‘hysteria that has developed around the abuse of women’ did to all of us.

The Noösphere

Men Are Not More Rational. They Are Just More Powerful.

The Noösphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, …

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6 months ago · 309 likes · 32 comments · Katie Jagielnicka

If only Chomsky knew something about how language works - how it is deeply entwined with meaning, culture and ideology.

Epstein and the ‘Chomsky Challenge’

There is some correspondence in the files unlikely to be covered by anyone else writing about Chomsky and Epstein. It shows just how deeply bereft and irrelevant Chomskyan linguistics has always been.

In September 2015, Epstein emails Chomsky with his idea for ‘The Chomsky Challenge’. It follows up what has clearly been a face-to-face discussion about this idea and Epstein is now putting in writing the ‘first draft’ of the challenge.

Epstein lists various options - all banal, but more interesting that what Chomsky goes on to suggest - and then ends his message having a dig at Chomsky’s political affiliations: ‘top prize 1000 protesters of your choice for three demonstrations’.

Chomsky was clearly OK with his pal making fun of the people aligned politically to these causes he mentions - their friendship lasted another four years after this email.

Chomsky’s immediate response to the first draft was that it needed more thought. As part of his musing, Chomsky counsels Epstein that:

it is important to avoid the fashionable (and moronic) approach of google-style statistical analysis of Big Data. Thus one could perhaps get a better prediction of leaves blowing in the wind by that approach than by invoking the laws of motion and interfering factors, but the better prediction would be scientifically worthless, whatever utility it might have.

All of the big data analysis of climate discourse - media, right wing think tanks, fossil fuel company communications - well, according to the world’s leading living intellectual, it might tell you something useful but it’s scientifically worthless. Years and years of researchers, most outside of linguistics, trying to understand the mechanisms of climate denial and obstruction - it’s all ‘moronic’.

Like this paper from 2017 by two scientists Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, followed up by this extension of this research in 2021 - this work that shows that ExxonMobil deliberately misled the public about what it knew about climate science and the impact of burning fossil fuels. Supran presented these LINGUISTIC! findings at the U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget Hearing on Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.

Where were the linguists?

Sure, this research might tell you something but in the end it is ‘moronic’ and ‘scientifically worthless’. And throw in here all of the other linguistic studies, in and outside of linguistics, on so many important topics in public discourse.

Chomsky replies to Epstein with a ‘very significant question’: ‘how to incorporate head-movement, with its pecularities, within a Merge-based system’.

Doesn’t quite grab you? Even Chomsky admits it is ‘theory internal’ and ‘can barely be understood outside of the theoretical context’.

His question, clouded in the mystique of his particular theoretical language, is not particular to his linguistics. It is about how to relate linguistic structure to some proposed theoretical architecture. Linguists in all schools ask a form of this question.

In the paradigm that I work in, the test of our answers to these kinds of questions is whether they help us understand how language works, whether they help us analyse language in a way that is useful and meaningful to people outside our discipline.

But Chomsky is so far down his rabbit hole, that he has little chance of being able to show anyone outside of his own theory why this matters. It is, as he admits in a further email ‘too theory internal’, for ‘the general significance to be easily perceived’. In other words, it has no application to the real world.

A year later, Epstein is still prompting Chomsky to come up with ideas for the Challenge. Chomsky’s still got nothing, but instead - as we watch Epstein’s empire of sex trafficking and sexual violence start to fray - these two great intellectuals have a brief exchange over a ‘nice definition of power’ that Chomsky has recently come across.

Two extremely privileged white males, musing over an abstract notion of power. Men over whom power never acts, until of course, it acted over Epstein - but only because it had to, dragged kicking and screaming.

I have not been able to discover whether the Chomsky Challenge ever materialized - it appears not. Even with Epstein offering to throw money at this opportunity, Chomsky can’t come up with a single, suitable idea for a grand challenge in linguistics.

An email exchange in February 2017 from Richard Kahn shows a sum of $20K to be paid to Chomsky as a consultant on the Advisory Board of Gratitude America, Epstein’s non-profit ‘charity’, to ‘formulate and administer the linguistic challenges’.

Richard Kahn then writes to Chomsky about how to send him this money.

Another entitled male

Unremarkably, Chomsky writes back to Kahn to say ‘ask Valeria’ - he is too important to deal with details of money matters. He has a wife to do these things for him. He needs his wife to write back to Kahn to ask that a cheque be sent to their home address.

In another of the attempts to cut Chomsky some slack - Chomsky was ‘not a straightforward guy’, and he was ‘vulnerable’ to Epstein’s advances - we are told that Chomsky’s work ethic was so strong ‘he had to be reminded to eat’.

As I read this, I thought of the books which assemble ‘great thinkers in linguistics’. This one comes up with a list of 50 - how many women? Just one.

If Chomsky had to be reminded to eat, it is because he wasn’t responsible for feeding anyone else. He did not have to organize this career around the caring of others. His work day was not punctuated by the quotidian demands of managing a household.

I don’t know. Perhaps he did the vacuuming. But this comment suggests his stellar career in linguistics was, like that of so many entitled academic males, simply built on female servitude.

If a woman of colour proposed the ideas that have made Chomsky famous, would they have been so enthusiastically embraced? Would she have been treated as a god, and a revolutionary in the field?

An obituary for Chomsky

Chomsky’s name has been synonymous with 20th century linguistics. So much so, that in 2024, when rumours were circulating of Chomsky’s apparently impending death after a stroke, a journalist reached out and asked me would I write an obituary in advance.

Apologising for making this ‘sad but important request’, the journalist assumed that because I’m a linguist, I must be one of Chomsky’s disciples. I declined this invitation.

And Chomsky didn’t die. He has lived on to have his intimate association with and unfailing support for Epstein revealed.

Despite Chomsky’s best efforts to ignore the power of language, his own words, in black and white in the Epstein files, now show better than any of his decontextualized, made-up sentences how language works. Chomsky tried to make language fit his own mould, but in the Chomsky-versus-language grand challenge, language has won.

Hands up any linguists who will volunteer to write Chomsky’s obituary? Who will continue to defend the Chomskyan linguistic project - not just tarnished by his willingness to associate with and defend Epstein, but everyday more and more irrelevant to the big challenges of our time, including climate obstruction and delay.

Ordinary life keeps on going. It is hard to keep up with scale of the switch: from emptying the dishwasher, to keeping company, virtually, with people suffering US and Israeli racism and imperialism. If you want to see how this kind of juggling feels for Palestinians in Australia with family in Gaza, read Randa Abdel Fattah’s novel Discipline - yes, the one she should have been able to freely discuss at Australia’s beloved Adelaide Writer’s Festival until it was brought undone by pro-genocide lobbyists.

Long-time stalwart of climate journalist, Emily Atkin, wrote a post this week reflecting on how to keep going, how to keep holding Big Oil to account when ‘the government is executing people in broad daylight?’.

HEATED

I don't know how to do this

Very often, I don’t know how I’m supposed to move forward…

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7 months ago · 906 likes · 66 comments · Emily Atkin

Emily is one of my ‘heroes’ - sorry for this gendered term, but ‘heroine’ carries its own connotations that are not suitable here. In her piece on juggling climate reporting and state violence, Emily asks:

‘If you’ve got your own ways of staying upright, I’d genuinely love to hear them’.

Emily: this review of Gayle Dallaston’s Gardening on the Verge is for you. A small book with the goal to change the way we see what’s in front of our eyes and our homes. It asks us to consider making a small change, with potentially enormous benefits, both to prepare for increasing heat in our lives, and for developing deeper community connections. It is a joyful book, with both climate and civic benefits.

Gardening respite to keep you going and change the world

When I walk out of my gate, I see only concrete. The townhouse complex I live in has no garden verge. As the number of hot days heats up, I am more and more sensitive to these wide expanses of heat-trapping urban ungreen.

I know this Substack is about language not gardening. But every part of our worldly experience is shaped by meaning, with language our key meaning-making tool. Who knew it was time to redefine the meaning of the garden verge?

The Shady Lanes Project

Book: "Garden on the Verge: A New Approach"

I set out to write a book about how we can use verge gardens to transform our cities while building the skills and networks to tackle much more…

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10 months ago · 4 likes · 5 comments · Gayle Dallaston

Gayle Dallaston’s book Garden on the Verge is about new ways of thinking/meaning about micro-urban spaces. Rethinking always means rewording: Gayle’s book introduced me to some new words I’d not come across before, which I want to share with you.

How about some numbers to get you thinking? Gayle’s verge garden - previously an expanse of grass that required regular dirty and noisy mowing - appears below. She has created 58 square metres of biodiverse habitat with more than 20 local native plants - while following all council policies and regulations.

Used with permission of Gayle Dallaston

Seeing something old anew

The angle of this picture taken of Gayle’s verge is part of trying to reorient our minds to these micro-green spaces. Instead of taking a photo to show this garden as an extension of her private property, the photo shows us ‘her’ verge garden as part of the public commons.

In this photo, her house is now what she calls a ‘bystander’ to the main action. The verge garden is part of something much bigger. Using the analogy of the stock route, Gayle asks us to think about our interconnecting verges as a ‘modern-day, urban long paddock’. To see them as pollinator and wildlife corridors, as part of the commons which ‘connects everybody and everything’.

Gayle is Brisbane based, and calculates that if 2 out 3 residents in the Brisbane City Council area planted verge gardens, it would create more than 1000 hectares of biodiverse habitat and transform the city, just using these small parcels of interconnected land, making the city cooler and more resilient.

And cooler is no joke right.

Used with permission of Gayle Dallaston

The past three years have been the hottest on record. Gayle has measured the temperature on a really hot day: standing on the tarred road she recorded a temperature of 54 degrees (Celsius). The temperature on the unshaded grass verge was just over 15 degrees cooler, at 38.7. The temperature on the shaded grass verge jumped down a further 10 degrees, to 28.7.

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What if this is scaled up across our cities? In Melbourne, road verges make up one third of all greenspaces, as I discovered when I started to investigate the idea of ‘citizen gardeners’, a term I came across in Gayle’s book. This peer reviewed, open access study of a council area on Melbourne indicates that ‘citizen gardening’ on the verge is a counterbalance to the loss of biodiversity that urbanisation has brought. This and other recent studies in Melbourne reported by these researchers show a signficant increase in beetle, bee and butterfly populations through strategic citizen gardening efforts.

Developing civic ecosystems

And rethinking the verge is not just good for beetles, bees and butterflies. In a moment I’m going to show you how verge gardens and gardening intersects with research on how to make democracies more resilient and reduce political polarization.

In the process of creating and maintaining this small urban forest, Gayle extended her social connections. As she started, slowly, to unpick the grass and plant a native garden - this is called ‘incremental gardening’ - she discovered she was ‘giving permission’ to passers-by to stop and talk.

She met more people in those first few months of making her verge garden than in the many years of living in her home behind her garden fence.

By gardening on the verge, Gayle spent more time in her immediately accessible public space. Turns out there’s a term to describe this kind of place: it’s a ‘bumping place’ - which I also read about for the first time in Gayle’s book. The term is new - it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Macquarie Dictionary, and the very very large corpus of news reports that I regularly consult (over 24 billion words of news, from 1/1/2010 to yesterday) shows only a small handful of usages.

A bumping place is where locals or strangers can bump into each other and have incidental meetings which grow and deepen their social connections. A place which ‘encourages lingering and interaction’. Where you can meet real people, in the flesh, whom you can see and know non-algorithmically, whether or not they share 100% all your political ideologies.

The concept of a ‘bumping place’ turns up in social science research on how to develop ‘social infrastructure’. It is discussed here by a researcher in public policy at the University of Cambridge.

And check out this public lecture hosted by Flinders University, about the role of social infrastructure in making democracies more resilient, by a distinguished academic in American Political Science, Professor Daniel Aldrich.

In his lecture Aldrich argues that social capital, built through local or ‘horizontal’ connections, as well as social links developed as ‘vertical connections’ to decision makers, have material impacts on our behaviours, including the potential to resist disinformation campaigns. Prosocial behaviours, for example staying home and wearing masks in the COVID pandemic, were more widely adopted in communities where trust was built along and through these social connections and links. These links help make people resistant to disinformation.

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While slowly transforming her verge, Gayle understood this was not an isolated individual act of a private individual. Working on the commons and doing something as simple as planting a native garden, she was acting in a space that is - for good reason - regulated by council. Passers-by would ask her: ‘Are you allowed to do that?’. She made sure to always stay within the regulations which apply to everyone.

Just as important, she thought about all the people who are ‘stakeholders’ of this space: neighbours, parents with prams, cyclists, the postie, and the various utility workers who also work in this space.

The ‘residents versus the Council’ is a common media outrage story, which social media platforms love to amplify. It is an example of what the great Argentinian scientist of populism Ernesto Laclau called ‘the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating “the people” from power’.

Gayle’s unassuming book deconstructs this frontier. Gayle’s book, full of specific gardening tips and advice, is a manifesto for building community. To create a verge garden that is open to the world means understanding all of the people who are impacted or touched by changing your verge from grass to native garden.

Your garden should be built slowly, mindful of all of the people who make up the community of which the verge in front of your home is one small, significant part.

It’s not you against the world, a psyche which social and Murdoch media is built on. It’s putting your little verge into a wider frame, where you open yourself to diverse perspectives and expertise. There you will see the potential for growing shared green streets and even ‘urban forests’, through ‘residents and councils working together to nurture social and natural ecosystems’.

This act of rethinking the verge ‘de-individuates’ you: it takes you out of your private castle, and puts you inside your ‘civic ecosystem’. As Gayle describes it:

‘In the process, we create the opportunity to nurture civic ecosystems of councils, community organisations, research organisations, businesses and individuals, all sharing and working together towards a future where nature and people thrive’.

Redefining the ‘verge’?

‘Verge’ has been a very hard working word over many centuries. In the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 18 quite diverse meanings - from a term for the male organ, to a type of candle, to a stick or wand, and more. Some of these 18 entries have further subdivisions of meanings of this term.

In its meaning as used by Gayle - 16(b) in the OED - it is defined specifcally in relation to grass. A verge is a ‘narrow grass edging separating a flower border etc from a gravel walk’. The term has a deep, naturalised association with grass. In this meaning of verge, the word is attested to the early 18th century - that’s a 300 year history of verge and grass going hand-in-hand.

In this first quarter of the 21st century, Gayle is redefining ‘verge’: no longer as ‘grass edging’, but as a local, citizen-tended, biodiverse, socially and civic-ly connected space.

You can watch the episode of Gardening Australia which interviews Gayle here. And the link is here to buy her book.

This time last year I wrote a post to award my very own, very first, Climate Word of the Year. My motivation was seeing the major dictionaries come out with their own words of the year that were largely an exercise in marketing. They put a selection of fun and apparently zeitgeisty words up for public discussion, choosing things that were for the most part trivializing.

‘Information environment’

2025 appears to be a small improvement. Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year, for example, is ‘AI slop’, which recognises the enormous change to our what we can call the ‘information environment’ with the arrival of these Big Tech automatic meaning-making machines.

I put ‘information environment’ in square quotes because this term has not yet arrived into the dictionary (I checked the Oxford, Macquarie and Merriam-Webster dictionaries). But it is quietly bubbling along, as the graph from the Google Ngram Viewer below shows, as well as the evidence from the News on the Web Corpus - see some concordance lines below.

So we have a new term, ‘information environment’, but our dictionaries haven’t yet caught up with this concept - it hasn’t yet captured enough lexicographic interest. But it will. It is in good company, with some other new terms on the rise, showing a growing understanding of the important role of meaning in shaping our minds and our everyday lives, and how precious this other kind of environment is.

This ‘information environment’ concept is big enough that in 2023, the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) was established. This is how the panel describes itself:

Algorithmic manipulation, bias, hate speech, misleading information, deep fakes and other acts have created a global information environment crisis and an existential threat to humanity. The cost is billions of dollars, millions of lives and an erosion of trust in science, our institutions and each other.
Led by top scientists of different disciplines from around the world, the IPIE is a global response. Together, IPIE scientists provide independent assessments on the condition of the information environment –– allowing policymakers to take meaningful action before it’s too late.

A healthy information environment, as the IPIE note in their latest report, needs reliable information and diverse voices. It should be so simple right?

‘Information integrity’

Alongside ‘information environment’ we have evolved the term ‘information integrity’. This one is also not yet in the dictionaries, but it is well enough understood that the Australian government has appointed a Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate and Energy.

The committee’s brief is big: to establish the prevalence and impacts of misinformation and disinformation in the information environment around climate and energy. A whole Select Committee on this not-yet-even-in-the-dictionary topic.

The job would be hard enough if the panel only need to review serious, disinterested submissions. I opened a couple and they were from fully paid up fossil-fuel shills - man-baby victim cosplayers ranting about the climate hoax, the whole reason we need this inquiry in the first place.

They are so good at what they do. The fossil fuel lobby has been busy over at COP30 in Brazil, where the final statement by the gathering - can you believe this - left out the F-word. Not ‘f$%#’, but ‘fossil fuels’ - so much hot air exchanged, and the big players in this game can only commit to a statement that does not name fossil fuels.

‘Coal’ and ‘oil’ also not mentioned. ‘Gas’ turns up - but does it refer to the dirty fossil gas polluting our planet? No, it mentions gas to refer only to ‘greenhouse gases’. The effect of burning fossil fuels, but not its cause, is mentioned.

You can see the same pattern in the government’s recent National Climate Risk Assessment which I wrote about a couple of months ago.

Fossil fuels have become ‘it that must not be named’ - the Dark Lord of modernity.

And the winner is …?

As I moved around these new lexical waters, the term that really grabbed me is this one: ‘information pollution’. I heard it first on Amy Westerfeld’s amazing climate podcast called Drilled. The latest series is focussed on ‘climate obstruction’. A new big book has come out, based on a new international study involving nearly 100 academics working on understanding who is blocking progress on climate change.

The first episode in this new series of Drilled interviewed the editors of this book, and one of them - Jennifer Jacquet - explains the role of polluting PR firms (she name checks Edelman). Their pollution is not material but semiotic. These kinds of firms have ‘very little to do with climate emissions’, but ‘a lot to do with information pollution’.

It is so important to be able to name a phenomenon - we were overdue to have someone come up with the concept of ‘information pollution. The term is creeping into the news, as these examples below from the News on the Web corpus indicate.

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It is still very low in frequency this concept. Last year for example, in 1 billion words of news collected for this corpus there were only 12 instances. In fact, the concept is not even in the > 400 pages of this new Climate Obstruction book. This concept explain hows the information environments that we live in are being degraded and dirtied up by fossil fuel firms and their spin doctors. Check out Comms Declare, an organization which names and shames the PR firms happy to help fossil fuels fuck our kids future.

By linking dirty PR practices to the term ‘pollution’, the name stigmatizes these practices. It is a super neat shorthand way to undermine the work these companies do - we need to keep saying it, and spread it as far as we can.

So my CWOTY: ‘information pollution’. I hope to hear it much much more in the new year.

At the start of this year, I published my climate new year’s resolutions here.

One of them was to:

• Think about whether I am ready to get myself arrested in a climate protest in support of the many young people putting themselves on the line

I’m proud to say that I was one of the 141 people arrested at this year’s People’s Blockade in Newcastle. Our government continues to approve new coal and gas - like the North West Shelf project which will pollute 90 million tonnes of CO2 every year. We have to take back our children’s and grandchildren’s future. I’m off to Newcastle court on January 13th.

Thanks to everyone and anyone who read my Substack in 2025. I’ll back in 2026, with the first post on the first Monday of each month, with a break for January. See you then.

At the beginning of his best-selling, 700-page tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, Professor at the Paris School of Economics, defers to the power of literature to portray the human dimensions of social inequality, well beyond what disciplines such as economics, sociology, history or philosophy can offer. The novels of writers like Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, he argues, explore the problems of inequality with ‘a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match’.1

This is why literature matters. One of my great linguistic mentors, Professor Ruqaiya Hasan, describes literature as ‘sociotherapeutic’. Literature, she once wrote, is language in its artistic function, able to explore humanity’s deepest concerns, to explore

how in the time that is ours for living, we humans act, react, relate to others, living for a brief moment without perhaps raising the tiniest of ripples in a timeless world, and how we must depart alone with or without pomp and glory, often leaving the world seemingly unimpressed.

As a truly brilliant linguist, her writings on the language of literature are glorious to read. Here’s another piece, which I had the privilege of quoting in my eulogy at her funeral in 2015:

To explore these universal themes of human existence bracketed between being and not being, to articulate artistically the sense of such a vast universe of feeling, longing, action and emotion as a coherent metaphor, verbal art relies most on these two indispensable matrices as its sources of energy – the powerful semiotic system of language and the intricately woven fabric of the semiotically shaped culture.

This is the some of the background I brought to reading Bri Lee’s new novel Seed - some understanding of the almost unfathomable intricacies of language, and my own deep feelings and struggles around the current climate zeitgeist. I quickly understood what this novel was offering me: an insight into how it feels to be a small human living through this crisis of planetary dimensions, how it feels when your open your heart and mind - really open them up - to what humans have done and are doing to the planet and the climate. And then, to think about what this means in your day-to-day life, and in your most intimate and significant relationships.

Everyday I feel the schism of living in a present where still so many people, many who know more or less what climate science has been telling us for years, choose to see this problem as something on their distant horizon. Recently at a friend’s birthday I was asked why I have given up flying internationally, both for work and pleasure. As I started to explain (flying is polluting, and carbon credits are complete bullshit ), one of the dinner guests put her hands over her ears, and asked me not to say anymore. This stuff is hard.

Our cosmic debt

I recalled this event as I read Mitch, the protagonist and narrator of Seed thinking to himself: ‘All any man hoped was that he’d be dead when the bill came due, and that his son would miraculously be able to pay for it’. Mitch understands the burdens that his parents’ generation have put on the shoulders of his. He doesn’t want to blindly and blithely hand them down. Instead, he wants to try to repay ‘the cosmic debt of my privileged life’.

Mitch strives to live ethically knowing that the planet is heating, that sea levels are rising, and that to live a life that leaves the smallest debt to the future means to forego having children. He has become an avowed anti-natalist, and has to navigate this problem after falling deeply in love with someone who wants to ‘save the planet for people’ while he wants to ‘save it from them’.

I didn’t plan to write this review. But as I read the reviews that turned up in my google search, I felt that they mostly missed the point. One complained about the ‘meaningless sex’; another that the ruminations of the protagonist and narrator sometimes ‘weigh down the plot’ or that the plot was ‘nonexistent’; that Mitch is just another man with a fragile ego like so many men they knew personally, another that his arrogance and pretentious leak off the pages.

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I haven’t provide the links - these reviews were all written in good faith. As I read them, I grieved for the time when I used to teach a postgraduate course in stylistics, where our students had to spend time with their chosen piece or extract of literature, to analyse its language, and build a case about what the writing was doing, how it was crafted, and how its language patterns created its artistic contribution. This unit was long ago chopped from my Department’s curriculum. Why teach students to read literature deeply?

In a brief digression on my own love life, I met and fell in love with a linguist who specialized in this field.

I don’t need to recapitulate the outline of the plot of Seed, as a standard review would do. You can go read the other reviews for this. What I want to explore is two of the key creative forces that make this novel so brilliant and timely.

Writing time

Let’s start with the decions about time. The novel’s narration is situated in a past tense perspective. I mention this first up because of the modern love affair with present tense narration. Here’s Phillip Pullman writing 15 years ago about the limited expressive power of the present tense. Its roll is to slow down time, and as a consequence, to generate a sense of gravitas for the events being narrated. But when you overdo the narrative present, you lose its power.

Lee obviously knows this. The past tense gives her the temporal freedom she needs to explore the experience and mind of her narrator. It allows her to create time - and of course space - on various levels, which are essential to everything she does in this novel.

The novel is set in a future that is alien to her readers. Even those who have visited Antarctica have not experienced the version she creates in this novel. But an important dramatic counterpoint is established at the start: for the characters, Mitch and Frances, this place is very familiar. Returning to the Antarctos project is like coming home. The novel sets up the familiar day-to-day routine in this remote and harsh environment, that, yes, includes almost daily sex between two people not in a romantic loving relationship.

Far from being meaningless, the sex is a narrative device to build our sense of the characters, and to track the initial small ups and downs of their emotional lives as they live and work. It is also a token to show us that these people are living in unusual circumstances, which, though they treat as ordinary, are far from it. Some remarkable reflections take place through this space, developing the metaphor of ‘seed’ in the novel (‘a seed of shame and guilt - no amount of adult intellect could till it out’).

This combination of something alien to readers but unremarkable to the characters is essential to the novel’s dramatic tension. It is not that the plot is ‘nonexistent’. It is that day by day, only small things happen. Lee is holding you in an immersive time and space, giving you an intimate window on small events that are indexes of this weirdly familiar yet alien human community, through which we can recognise aspects of our own contemporary experience.

In a well crafted novel, these small perturbations will gradually rise to a dramatic crescendo - and in retrospect, the reader will come to see each of these small interactions as pieces of the novel’s thematic puzzle. Seemingly ordinary interactions in hindsight will be clues to withheld information and emotions. And of course they are.

Writing the narrator

Along this time/space trajectory, the narrator takes us on a journey into his past. We are privy to his deepest thoughts and emotions. We are fed the fragments of his reflections piece by piece within the rhythm of the daily events of the here and now of the novel. With Frances, some of Mitch’s reflections are about their shared time together with others who have been part of building this amazing human experiment attempting to protect biodiversity for future generations.

You are entitled to dislike this character if he says and does things that go against your values. But to do this is to completely miss the verbal artistry of this book. If I may be so bold, you get a lot more out of reading a book if you hold your judgement, and try to understand why the writer has made their particular stylistic choices.

So, observe that in addition to all of the expertly interwoven experiences of time I have just outlined, Lee creates a character with a deep consciousness about the moment he is living in, where it has come from, and where it appears to be heading. This is why Mitch is the narrator. He has to be, for the novel to do what it is doing. Lee is inviting us to see the world through Mitch’s consciousness. Rather than his ruminations weighing too heavily on the plot, the whole point is to experience the plot through the consciousness of this character/narrator. To see what it feels like to have to grapple with knowledge and emotions that are just so big.

The narrative point of view in a novel is its foundation, and this is why point of view has been so well studied in disciplines like literary studies and narratology. The early theoretical work goes back to the Russian Formalists - linguists in the early part of the 20th century who were deeply interested in the language of literature as verbal art. It has been one of great privileges of my professional career to have access to this work, and to have been able to read it with some amazing linguistic mentors.

In this tradition, one of my favourites is the book by Boris Uspensky called A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Uspensky writes about the ‘ideological’ nature of point of view, because it offers the reader ‘a general system of viewing the world conceptually’. Thinking about Mitch, this point is not about his explicit political commitments as an antinatalist. Yes, his views come through in the novel, but happen as doctrinal statements. Much more important is that the narrator is a version of male, is a scientist and a hobby philosopher, and brings quite a bit of family baggage to this brief moment of his life. Through this ideological lens, Lee is inviting us to experience one person’s personal take on the climate crisis.

I want to show you some real pyrotechnics in this writing. In a single paragraph, Lee can take you from the ‘here-and-now’ time of the story’s unfolding, to the deepest emotional recesses of the narrator’s mind, to then stand out and see the scale of the planetary crisis we face. Here’s a small extract to illustrate how the writer’s decisions about time and the narratorial perspectives intersect:

‘She’s walking around with it all out on show, shoving it in our faces’ I said.

‘Where is she supposed to put it?’.

I walked past Frances. Out of the kitchen to the mudroom and straight out the door of the airlock, into the cold, and I kept walking. I walked along the blizz line and I scanned my pass at the vault and I went up the corridor and I scanned my pass again at the door to the actual seed library. The silence inside told me my own heart was racing. A drum with the fury and the freeze. Lights blinked on and the rows of shelves opened up before me like a horizon in time. The smell of cleaning agents and metal and cardboard got stronger as I moved down the space. Neatly spaced crates rose up all around me and in feeling small among them I started to calm down. We still did not understand the basic atomic building blocks of the universe. Stars I could see at night were already dead. There were gigantic creatures of unimaginable forms in truly deep ocean waters. I reached out to my left. It was Tonga – one of my first, most urgent tasks. There was my handwriting: Polyalthia amicorum. Motello. Endemic to lowland forest areas, almost extinct after thousands of years of human farming, then completely gone, underwater. That had been the year I caved: Said we could try.

Let me give you a brief analysis of the intricate temporal texture of this extract. It starts in a dialogue in the here-and-now of the novel, and then turns to narrated action as Mitch moves to another location, while trying to repress his emotions. But they are undeniable, and he recognizes them. In his new setting, we experience how it looks and smells, and how its physical organization makes him feel at this emotional moment. Then Lee moves us into his profound reflections on us as a species in this universe. Then we are abruptly brought back into the narrator’s ‘here-and-now’ time, before a small simple action takes him back in time, and then to join what he sees in his current moment as working scientist with the impact of human civilisation and climate change on the natural world. And then we move into his relationship timeline, and to his decisions about children.

This interweaving of time and perspective all created through the writer’s language (‘lexicogrammatical’) choices.

I didn’t chose this extract because it was special - there are lots of passages in the novel like this. Because this is the point of what Lee is doing in this novel, to explore a modern experience of the climate crisis, though one person’s living of it. To experience Mitch’s attempts to reconciling his emotions and desires, with understanding what humans are doing to the planet, and what the likely future scenarios will be. As Mitch himself reflects ‘The human being just wasn’t built to comprehend the scale at which our species was growing and consuming’.

We are taken on a ride through the unfolding of plot while we are held in the consciousness of this complex narrator. We finally arrive at the novel’s dramatic conclusion. I didn’t at all foresee this - but what a brilliant ending point.

Far from arrogant, Mitch is a character who refuses to live with cognitive dissonance, despite how hard it is to look into the climate future. It is, as he says, ‘so tiring, to refuse to look away’. Having children is ‘to birth and raise a creature damned to carry the load we couldn’t’. The novel expertly builds its thematic concerns - Lee does not seem to me to drop a single stitch along the way. To quote Hasan, the book brings together ‘a vast universe of feeling, longing, action and emotion as a coherent metaphor’. This novel deserves to be read not just widely, but deeply.

National Climate Risk Assessment word cloud.

Gramsci, the Italian neo-Marxist intellectual, understood that what each of us holds in our brains is ‘fragmentary’ and ’incoherent’. It is a ‘chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions’ - and ‘one can find there anything that one likes’.

Keep that in your mind on those days when the political gaslighting is off the charts. I sometimes wonder how my firing neurons are processing this batshit-fossil-fuelled-crazy stuff. And my example below is not even from the fully paid up professional climate-denying wingnuts.

Recently Australia’s Federal government released our first ever ‘National Climate Risk Asssessment’. Not quite on the same day - the gap between them was a whole 72 hours - Australia’s Environment (sic) Minister, Murray Watt gave final approval to the Woodside north west shelf gas project, with operations planned to extend up to 2070.

Watt told us that Albanese government was protecting (sic) First Nations cultural heritage, and protecting (sic) the environment, as well as protecting (sic) jobs all at the same time.

I must be reading too much of The Fucking News, by Jonathan Larsen (go on, subscribe, it is the sweary news). I’ve picked up his (sic) tic. Let me leave that to the proper professional. Here’s what our Minister Watt told us: “It does not have to be one or the other”, he says.

In ALP-land, you can protect the environment by pouring into the atmosphere we all have to live within - the atmosphere we will hand on to upcoming generations - another 4 billion tonnes of climate pollution.

I wrote last year about how fossil fuelled political donations affect the numeracy of our politicians. It makes them say that have approved ZERO new coal mines, based on the new mines being part of an existing company. Not ‘new’ mines, just huge, dirty extensions of ones already there. Our current Labor government is finding more new stories to tell themselves how their ongoing choregraphy with the dirty fossil fuel cartel is legal, or part of the ‘journey’ to transition.

This is not less dangerous, rhetorically, than Trump’s bald-faced support for fossil fuels, most recently at the UN.

c.125, 000 words, but no room for climate accountability

The National Climate Risk Assessment is a hefty 284 pages, and just under 125, 000 words. Some expert reviews have pulled out the headline points, for example The Climate Council, and The Conversation. Extreme heat, lots of extra deaths, flooding and sea level rises, lots and lots of money down the drain. If you’re paying attention you’ll know what’s coming.

While there’s still some room to negotiate the future, the existing and still rising levels of climate pollution in the atmosphere will have their say. Keep your eyes on the data records at the Global Monitoring Lab - this graph shows annual increase of CO2, year on year, since 1960.

Source: https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.png

This is the context for Labor’s approval of this new project. Their rubbish narratives about it are a newer kind of climate denial. The ALP are literally denying the climate impacts of their decisions.

Among the risk assessments set out in this report, do you think the ongoing burning of fossil fuels is considered a ‘risk’? And with the many many climate ‘hazards’ that are detailed across the 284 page report, are oil, coal and gas projects registered as hazardous and dangerous to current and future?

Over the many pages and tens of thousands of words in this report, there was space for only one single mention of fossil fuels. And it is hidden away in parentheses.

Coal and gas get one single mention in this national climate risk review. I would find it funny if I didn’t lie awake at night wondering what my kids, grandkid, and all the other beautiful young and coming people in my life are going to face because of corporate and political greed. Here’s the joke: coal and gas-fired plants are mentioned to explain that they too are vulnerable to extreme heat. Oil apparently not relevant at all.

It’s always about grammar

Look I haven’t read the whole report. It is 284 pages. So if I’m being unfair to anyone, just let me know in the comments below. And I have to say I’m personally not that worried about the drain on the Australian Defence Force being called to mop up climate disasters. It may be the one positive about extreme weather that nation state militaries are so caught up at home, they are no longer involved in the very high polluting activities of organized violence.

But here is the first sentence of this crucial report from the Key Findings section:

Australia’s climate is changing and will continue to change into the future. The country is likely to experience more intense and extreme climate hazards, and in some cases in areas where people and places haven’t experienced these hazards before.

This kind of wording is what made Greenpeace Director say, on reading this report that:

The grammar of this critical opening sentence is letting the climate wreckers off the hook. It is precisely the grammar you use when you don’t want to attribute responsibility. The climate is simply ‘changing’, all on its own.

And I know we have to talk about ‘adapting’ to planetary heating. ‘Adaptation’ is doing a lot of work in this report, and comes in at number 8 on word frequency list - I’ve popped the top 20 below.

‘

The climate is changing so we have to adapt’. Two verbs used in ‘middle’ voice. This is a key message from the report - but it could be a talking point from a dirty fossil fuel corporation.

No accountability here. No political courage. No recognition of the fuckers who are continuing to spread climate denial and disinformation. This report, called Decades of Deceit was released in May this year by the Union of Concerned Scientists. I’ll be coming back to this report in upcoming posts.

As I browsed around the National Climate Risk Assessment, the following statement caught my eye:

Australians will be impacted by loss of important ecosystems and species by the middle of the century, without implementing direct intervention and adaptation actions.

I thought, OK, this might be a coded message from the honest and hardworking scientists and bureaucrats who worked on this document. Maybe they snuck in some intimations that in the face of the current and coming climate impacts, we should do some interventions to stop these impacts getting even worse.

We already know that whatever interventions are proposed, they don’t rely on the use of the word ‘fossil fuels’. But I thought it was worth a look. I decided I would review every instance of the word ‘intervention/s’ to see whether there was any kind of call to action, however obscure. My faithful readers are worth this linguistic labour.

Using the beautiful corpus linguistics tool called #Lancsbox X (thanks Lancaster U linguists!), I called up every use of the term ‘intervention’, including any plural forms of the word. My task was easy - ‘intervention’ only takes up 12 of the 124, 778 words in this text. There’s really not much to see here.

Two of the 12 examples are in relation to ‘human intervention’, which ‘may faciliate adjustment to the expected climate and its effects’ … Great. Thanks.

Why the word ‘risk’ is risky in climate communications

The word list above, and indeed the word cloud, make clear that the report is very wedded to the words ‘risk’ and ‘risks’. Who could be surprised by this. But I have written before that words are complex things - as my colleague Prof Lise Fontaine has said, they are like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside. I am still jealous that she thought of this first.

So ‘risk’ and ‘risks’ come with a network of meanings. Most importantly for discussion of ‘climate risk’ is that ‘risks’ are not real, in the sense that they don’t currently exist, and may not ever exist. If do they become real, it will be in some unspecified future time.

This meaning of ‘risk’ is so handy, it has been weaponized by the fossil fuel cartel. If you haven’t already, read about it my post about it here, or even better, check out the original research by Professors Jeffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, published in 2021, and based on their study of ExxonMobil communications.

We need to adapt not because of ‘risks’ but because of what the decades of deceit and political betrayal has already baked into our future. If something is still a ‘risk’, it can be changed. In the face of risks, we should not be adapting, we should be taking action, and urgently cutting out fossil fuels as much as we can.

Everyone word in the climate space matters. Choose them carefully and wisely.

Taking action makes you feel better

If you need a place to channel your climate anxiety, and you live not too far from Newcastle, register now for the 2025 Rising Tide Blockade and Protestival. Check the socials for information sessions, and how to get involved.

the state or quality of there being one or more points or elements in common to each set

In the late 1980s, the term made its debut in the humanities in a paper by Colombia law professor, Kimberlé Crenshaw in a paper titled ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’, and subtitled ‘A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’.

Kimberlé Crenshaw. Source: By Mohamed Badarne - CC BY-SA 4.0

It’s a monumental paper, linking established orthodoxies to the lived experience of real people. Like the case known as DeGraffenreid v General Motors, a 1976 US court case where five Black women tried to sue General Motors on the basis of discriminatory hiring practices. The company did not hire Black women prior to 1964, so this meant General Motors’ ‘last on first off’ policy during a recession unfairly impacted the people hired last, ie Black women. The Court rejected their claim, because the plaintiffs ‘failed to cite any decisions which have stated that Black women are a special case to be protected from discrimination’. Their claim could be heard if it was one of race discrimination or sex discrimination, but, according to the Court, ‘not a combination of both’.

Crenshaw’s paper not only deconstructs the problem of this false siloing of human experience - you can be Black, or female, but don’t try to be both - her paper shows that if you keep categories apart conceptually, you will fail to fully grasp the nature of human realities. You will end up seeing things in atomistic and simplistic terms. ‘Dominant conceptions of discrimination’, she argues ‘condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorial axis’. This has produced a focus on discrimination only affecting those otherwise privileged members of the group: class- or gender-privileged Black people in race discrimination, race- and class-privileged women in sex discrimination cases. The point was made beautifully in an early anthology of essays in Black feminism, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, first published in 1982.

‘Intersectionality’ tries to undo this atomistic thinking. Admittedly, it is not an everyday term. With seven syllables and five morphemes - inter-sect-ion-al-ity - the word begins in two Latin morphemes, ‘inter’ meaning ‘between’, and ‘sect’ which means ‘to cut’. The conjunction of these two morphemes created the inital verb form ‘intersect’. To get to ‘intersectionality’, the verb morphs first into a noun (‘intersection’), then into an adjective (‘intersectional’) before recreating itself as an abstract noun (‘intersectionality’).

The word bristles with the accent of a niche academic field, which comes either empowered by, or burdened with (depending on your POV) the cultural capital of the intellectual class. It’s easy to make fun of it - as in this video from The Onion: a white male from a small steel town in Pennsylvania discusses his revelations after reading ‘the foundational texts of intersectional theory’. If only he’d known he would never have chanted ‘lock her up’, he would never have voted for Trump.

I get the joke: it’s in the apparent distance between academic abstractions and the ‘real world’ - white men making steel - as if such a weighty idea could have no bearing on real life. And I concede that the veneer of ‘intersectionality’ is a bit alienating. But if you sit with it and listen to it, you will hear its gift. Intersections are about things coming together, finding the point where they can no longer be separated - finding the commonalities between things that are kept apart, often consciously and deliberately for nefarious reasons. Like Palestine and the climate struggle.

Language and organized violence

While I write about language and climate at this Substack, my day job has for over two decades included researching and writing about the language of organized violence - a term first coined by sociologist Siniša Malešević, who knows personally the displacement caused by ‘war’. My research is about how language helps us to keep the violence that we approve of in a different discursive universe from the violence that we disapprove of.

Legitimized organized violence is typically called ‘war’. We see it through the lens of rational, bureaucratic terminology, and through the mediating technology that stops us getting our hands too dirty - too bloody. Israel’s violence in and on Gaza, going on for so long but now reaching some kind of unhinged apogee, is described as ‘an operation’, a ‘ground campaign’ or ‘an aerial offensive’. News reports tell us ‘Israeli strikes and fire killed at least 76 people throughout Gaza in the previous 24 hours’, the killing attributed to ‘strikes and fire’, not its human perpetrators. Israeli tanks ‘roll into Gaza’, and ‘shell neighbourhoods’ - as if this technology can act on its own.

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When we have ‘war’, we naturally have ‘collateral damage’. That’s in the nature of ‘war’ - only an idiot would think you can have ‘war’ without the killing of civilians. And because ‘war’ is rational, these ‘unfortunate’ deaths will be shrouded in the higher purported purpose of this violence. Israel is allowed this legitimizing language for its violence because it is a nation state with Western allies.

When we accept an unleashing of violence as ‘war’, we have surrendered to it. This is because of the nature of language - words and wordings cluster in patterns whose explanations are historical and sociological. These patterns create a semiotic edifice that keeps you seeing favoured violence as simply how things have to be. A word like ‘war’ is what has been called in linguistics a ‘strong lexical node’1, attracting a host of particular meanings, while at the same time keeping others at arms length.

‘Terrorism’ is another strong lexical node. Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ organization. So all and any of its use of violence - even when completely dwarfed by Israeli violence in scale and impact - is illegitimate. The label ‘terrorism’ ensures Hamas’ violence will be worded to construct it as irrational, unpredictable, inhuman. It will get no context, no history and no reason. We are routinely told that Hamas’ attack on Israel ‘sparked’ the ‘war’: as if nothing sparked Hamas’ attack.

Climate and Palestine

Intersectionality blew up my brain recently, when I attended a panel discussion titled ‘Palestine, Ecocide and the Progressive Left’, organized by the Palestine Justice Movement Sydney. An amazing panel of presenters discussed the way the ongoing occupation of Palestine should not be imagined as in any way separate from the climate crisis.

I had already thought about the rising global pollution from more war. But here and now, at this point in the global climate crisis, the bombing, shooting and starving of Palestinians cannot, if it ever could before, be thought of as an isolated issue not relevant to everyone across the globe. A team of researchers have crunched some numbers and, while conceding their analysis can in no way reflect the scale of human suffering perpetrated by Israel, the climate cost of the genocide is staggering. Israel’s entitlement to violence - its ‘right to defend itself’ as Australia’s Foreign Minister has stated over and over - comes with a shocking pollution entitlement as well.

Like the connection between a weighty academic concept - intersectionality - and real, whole, humans living their lives, this paper brings the rigour and insights of a scholarly, thoughtful, transparent method (what timeline is relevant? what types of emissions should be include? what is being left out of existing methodologies?) together with confronting actualities of organized violence. For example, what will be the climate cost of simply removing the rubble to which Israel has reduced human communities in Gaza, and the reconstruction of homes, schools, hospitals, water and power infrastructure, even, as the researchers note, ‘to Gaza’s previously precarious state’?

But organized violence and climate have been kept apart. Echoing the title of their paper ‘War on the Climate’ - the researchers note:

This analysis is meant to be used as an entry point for a more comprehensive picture of the effects of militaries’ long war on the climate – an issue rarely examined by climate researchers.

Their calculation of the planet cost of Israel’s violent occupation, covering ‘pre-conflict’, ‘conflict-related’ (over a 15 month period) and ‘post-conflict’ is estimated at 32,275,089 tCO2e, where ‘t’ = tonnes (1000kgs), and CO2e = all greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, etc) converted to the equivalent amount of C02 in terms of its impact on global warming.

In the first 15 months of its violence, Israel’s climate pollution equalled that of the annual climate pollution of 36 individual countries and territories. Israel’s ‘right’ to violence comes at a higher climate cost than 102 individual countries’ annual climate pollution.

It is not only climate researchers who have kept war off their workbench. The panel discussed the ways some climate and environment organisations have contributed to the ongoing erasure of Palestine, which has included an ecocide, as discussed at this event by Dr Mazim Qumsiyeh, founder of the Palestine Museum of Natural History located in the occupied West Bank.

At this panel, various NGOs were called out for their lack of courage on Palestine, and the systemic issues which determine which institutions decide to use their voice was discussed. You can find some of this background here in an article from 2023, ‘Where is the Australian climate movements solidarity with Palestine’. The ‘NGO Industrial Complex’, as one speaker argued, is set up to keep things apart. As Arundati Roy wrote back in 2014,

In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework, more or less shorn of a political or historical context.

Connections - intersections - are clearly dangerous. On the international scene, in June this year the United Nations Climate Change secretariat (the UNFCCC) was publically outed by the Climate Action Network (International) for its ‘ongoing and arbitrary censorship of expressions of solidarity with Palestine’. The battle with the UNFCCC has gone on for the duration of Israel’s current round of violence: through COP28 in Dubai in November 2023, to COP29 in Azerbaijan, and now to a recent attempt by the climate network to initiate a peaceful protest within the auspices of the UNFCCC. The UNFCCC would not approve the use of the phrase ‘end the siege’. And due to ‘the sensitivities involved’, CAN was directed not to name the countries relevant to this protest.

Language is never neutral

The failure of international law in the case of Palestine might make us rethink the power of words. But the debacle of the Bendigo Writers Festival, where La Trobe university used its bureaucratic tools to silence my colleague Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, reminds us of the power of language.

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Pro-Israel group lobbied La Trobe and Bendigo Writers Festival over Palestinian academic's inclusion

A pro-Israel academic group lobbied La Trobe University and the Bendigo Writers Festival to "implement immediate measures" concerning the inclusion of Randa Abdel-Fattah in the Festival lineup…

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a year ago · 133 likes · 5 comments · Antoun Issa and Alex McKinnon

La Trobe University’s strategy to silence people who name Israel’s genocide is to pretend that language can be neutral. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised - even some very famous linguists believe that language is essentially inert, just a bundle of atomistic structures free from history and ideology. La Trobe’s use of its bureaucratic tools confirms a point made by the linguist Ruqaiya Hasan: ‘decontextualized language is the voice par excellence of offical ideology’2.

The lexico-grammatical systems of languages - the words and wordings you have to choose from when you use a language - come from and create cultures. Every word is a point of intersecting meanings, with its own history and biases. Language is the repository of our ideologies - anyone claiming they are trying not to take sides already has.

From: https://substack.com/@anoopreet

When language is being beautiful and inspiring, when it is being intelligent and insightful, it is enormously pleasurable to be able to hear how a particular linguistic symphony is orchestrated. When language is being used to divide and conquer, it hurts my brain. I hear the power contest - I hear just how powerful language can be in the wrong hands. I’d like a rest from language sometimes, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We live our lives in a lot of mass produced discourse - advertising, news, social media, bureaucratic language, political campaigning, authoritarian diatribes, wellness memes, AI generated text. All of these types of language are homogenizing and de-individualizing. Same old same old. As the audience for this discourse, you are not you, you are just a category.

But out of this boring hum hum hum, every now and again new meanings get a label that helps our brains see something in a completely different way. By opening up new conceptual spaces, these new wordings make our brains bigger, which they need to be to encompass the intersecting crises of global heating, war and genocide, species extinction, and all the many forms of entitlement and social inequality.

To see the problematic intersection of gender and climate politics, look no further than the gender of the world ‘leaders’ assembled at COP 29. Turns out Beyoncé was wrong: girls don’t run the world. But what we see on the world stage at a COP is the symptom, not the cause.

World leaders (sic) at COP29. Source: https://cop29.az/en/media-hub/media-gallery

Enter Petromasculinity. What a powerful idea! While as a deeply feminist person I see everything in gender terms, this concept really brought home to me not simply that fossil fuels are textured into our daily lives, they also penetrate into the deepest recesses of our minds.

Petromasculinity, and other ‘petro-’ compounds

‘Petro-masculinity’ is not yet in the dictionary - at least as far as I have checked. I looked up the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Merriam-Webster, and Macquarie Dictionaries, but didn’t find it there, which is not surprising. The word will need more of us dropping it into conversation to build its profile and frequency so that it comes to the attention of the lexicographers who make decisions about what is in and out of the dictionary.

We do have ‘petropolitics’ and ‘petro-power’, as well as ‘petro-resources’ and ‘petro-wealth’, ‘petrobillions’ and ‘petropounds’ as the screenshot below from the OED shows. Why are some hyphenated and others not? Most likely it will be about how old these new words are. As hyphenated terms get up some steam, they start to be seen as a singular unity (so the hyphen is dropped), rather than as a compound of two other words.

The word ‘petro-masculinity’ was invented during Trump’s first term as president. One of the many things I have learnt in my time in my home discipline of linguistics is that language is the ‘nervous system’ of a community. This metaphor for language comes from J.R.Firth, first professor of General Linguistics in the UK, in his book titled The Tongues of Men Humans. Some of Firth’s brilliant ideas in linguistics explain the potential of Language Large Models behind generative AI to generate text from well written prompts - this from a guy who died in 1960.

Here’s the full quote from Firth:

Speech [i.e. language] is the telephone network, the nervous system of our society much more than the vehicle for the lyrical outbursts of the individual soul. It is a network of bonds and obligations.

While words so often seem discrete to us, they are always part of moving paths of meaning which cross over our skin. So, when a new word pops up, there will be something already bubbling along that provides the wellspring in which it has taken shape. I know this means that if I follow a new word on its highways and byways, it will take me new horizons, which are likely to be mind blowing.

Petro-masculinity is no exception. The beautiful thinker who came up with this term is Cara Daggett, Associate Professor in Political Science at Virginia Tech. The birth notice of this word is titled ‘Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire’, published in the Journal of International Studies. Daggett argues that our modern climate politics are a disastrous intersection of masculinity, fossil fuel burning, and authoritariansim. We need to take petro-masculinity seriously, she argues, by ‘paying attention to the thwarted desires of privileged patriarchies as they lose their fossil fantasies’.

Fossil fuels are not just about how we fuel our homes and overseas holidays. And they are not just about the billions earned by petro-billionaires. Their reach over our cultures, our politics, our collective consciousness, is even wider and even deeper. They fuel our modern subjectivities.

‘Carbon democracy’ and ‘fossil rule’

Daggett’s work belongs to a field referred to as the ‘energy humanities’, which studies fossil fuels not simply in technical terms but as something that permeates every part modern human experience. Daggett argues that over recent centuries, these dirty fuels have become ‘the metaphorical, material and sociotechnical basis of Western petrocultures that extend across the planet’. Petrocultures. Just so many new and important concepts here.

Dirty fossil fuels not only degrade the environment. They have also determined the limits of our political systems. Daggett refers to Western democracies as ‘carbon democracies’ (a concept from Timothy Mitchell’s work1). Our democratic structures and freedoms have depended on everything entailed in access to cheap dirty energy, including proximity to and support for, authoritarian petro-states. In Daggett’s words:

authoritarian politics have historically been part and parcel of the project of securing Western (fossil) rule. By fossil rule, I mean a logic of governing that is dependent upon intensive fossil fuel consumption in both material and … psycho-political ways. Fossil rule is mobilised through ‘fossil capital’, Andreas Malm’s term to describe how modern capitalism was erected around a belief in ‘self-sustaining growth … welded to the combustion of fossil fuels’. Fossil capital requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of other people and things, and this necessitates authoritarian tactics in certain sites and moments

The fundamental freedoms we associate with Western democracies - the ones that put fire in the belly of so many Americans on No Kings day on June 14th - are ‘energy intensive’. As such, they have required said democracies to build relationships with, and defend, rapacious companies and dubious governments.

Trump and ‘petro-nostalgia’

The election of Trump in 2016, Daggett argues, was a case of ‘petro-nostalgia’. The MAGA slogan brought with it a harking back to ‘the mid-20th century patriarchal ideal’ which was ‘predicated upon an ongoing supply of cheap fossil fuels’:

Cars, suburbs, and the nuclear family, oriented around white male workers, formed a triumvirate that yoked the desires of Americans not only to wage labour, but to the continued supply of cheap energy that made the dream possible.

In this MAGA project we see an inseparable alliance between big dirty technology, fuelling and fuelled by a nostalgic hypermasculinity. Which is why Daggestt argues that in its recent form, the reactionary defence of fossil fuels, against the science AND EVEN the economics of renewable energy, has a kind of Freudian, ‘psycho-affective dimension’. The continued burning of fossil fuels isn’t just about money: it bolsters ‘privileged subjectivities’, which have always been ‘oil-soaked’ and ‘coal-dusted’ - and let’s add in ‘gas-fired’, with a nod to Australia’s Labor government, and their recent treacherous approval of a huge, multi-decade dirty gas project.

Daggett describes various manifestations of petro-masculinity, including the practice known as ‘coal rolling’, where a diesel vehicle is modified so that it produces dirty black smoke pollution - deliberately.

Petro … transphobia?

Petro-transphobia - you heard it first here. I put this new word together after reading the always excellent journalism of Emily Atkin at Heated. I’m sure many of you understand already that transpeople are the latest whipping person for politicians and their fossil sponsors wanting to distract us from the real actual climate crises. In a collab with Atmos, this piece investigates the dirty fossil cash being paid to organizations promoting transphobia.

HEATED

Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement

This story is a collaboration between HEATED and Atmos, a nonprofit media organization exploring climate and culture. Subscribe here…

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a year ago · 112 likes · 22 comments · Yessenia Funes

The article reports that of 45 anti-trans organizations investigated, 80% have received funding from fossil fuel companies. For example, Shell USA has funded an organization whose lawyers have written bills to force transpeople to use bathrooms associated with their assigned sex at birth. Dirty oil even dirtier than I had imagined.

Feminist energy systems

Daggett’s concept of petromasculinity leads, logically, to a feminist - and intersectional - perspective on energy systems. I didn’t see this coming, but as I wended my way through her tapestry of ideas, I arrived at her explanation that what we need is not simply alternative fuels, but ‘new ways of thinking about, valuing, and inhabiting energy systems’. From her book called The Birth of Energy, she urges us to look for alternative ways of ‘knowing energy’.

A feminist approach to energy involves a reimagining of life, including a shorter working week, and for privileged communities to ‘power down’. It provides a vista in which ‘high-growth modernism’ is traded for communality. It argues for a higher value to be accorded to

so-called pink labor jobs: caring, service, and regenerative labor, including everything from child and elder care to teaching, community art and events, and environmental rehabilitation, which could include caring for brownfields and other polluted ecosystems, especially those where vulnerable populations live.

I will end with these thoughts. I’m on leave for July, and intend to spend at least some of this time reading more of Daggett’s work. Expect your next column from me on September 1st. Thanks, as ever, for reading.

As I write, Australia’s ‘progressive’ government has just approved an extension to one of the world’s biggest dirty gas projects - for 40 years. Until 2070.

This, as the headline posted above from Australia’s Climate Council, is opening the floodgates on climate chaos. For background, here are some details from the Climate Council on what this climate vandalism means for the future - a.k.a the lives of our children and grandchildren:

The North West Shelf extension is a climate bomb that would unleash 4.4 billion tonnes of climate pollution, making it Australia’s second worst polluting fossil fuel facility. That’s 10 years’ worth of Australia’s emissions, and twice as polluting as the Coalition’s nuclear scheme would have been.

The scale of this pollution is visualised for us in this handy graph I borrowed from the Climate Council:

Federal Labor has committed to 4.4. billion tonnes of climate pollution for dirty gas that will largely be exported, with virtually no financial benefit to Australians. Tell that to your kids.

Excuse me?

As I’ve written here before, language is big and malleable. So the hands driving this climate-smashing lorry into our future have no end of rhetorical options to put up their excuses for this decision. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous, how untrue, how disingenous, how contradictory. Language will never save us from ourselves - it gives us the tools, and then stands back to see what we will do with them.

And let’s face it, we have for generations said and believed all kinds of ridiculous things, like the idea people go to war because they are fighting for peace. Yeah, fighting for peace, that so makes sense. From here, it’s hardly a great rhetorical leap for Labor Prime Minister Albanese to argue this enormous new dirty energy project is somehow just one more step along the road to the ‘transition’.

When we look at the overall issue, if you take a step back, we are already more than halfway to delivering on our commitment of 82 per cent renewables by 2030, we're up to 46 per cent as we're speaking here now … In order to get that investment in renewables you do need firming capacity, whether it be batteries, hydro or gas, and that is what will encourage that investment and the transition to occur. In Western Australia they are closing their last coal-fired power station at Collie in 2027. They are moving to renewables backed by gas, and that will be a really important part of the transition that will occur.

I mean, if you can fight for peace, you keep on heating the planet along the way to saving it, surely? Albanese language has the sound of someone defending money. Notably, the number Albanese is reaching for to defend this decision has nothing to do with how much pollution this project will add to our already overburdened atmosphere. Instead, he is arguing there is ‘nothing to see here’ because of how much renewable energy we are now producing. It’s like trying to argue with your cholesterol level: ‘I know I had bacon, chops and cheese for breakfast, but I had an apple for morning tea’. Cholesterol doesn’t care how much good stuff you eat - it’s all about how much bad stuff you put down your gullet.

Here’s another number Albanese could have pointed to: we are at 425.88 ppm of CO2 as of late May, and you can check the rising methane levels here. And don’t let anyone tell you we will just be able to pull this dangerous gas out of the air.

Check this website here (Global Monitoring Lab) for the critical figures on polluting greenhouse gases

Sure, we are building more and more renewable energy, but if we keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it won’t matter much how many of us are driving EVs, or drawing electricity from solar. Even our current levels of climate pollution are causing more extreme weather, leaving behind a very long trail of un-natural disaster survivors, with more and more traumatised survivors being created every few months. Hear their voices in this video below: it’s the sound of climate trauma.

The new environment minister, like our previous one, just has the best excuse ever for keeping on with this latest planet-wrecking approval. Because Australia’s key environmental legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC), despite its name, and despite opportunities over years for governments, including the current Albanese government, to change it, doesn’t actually require the government to protect Australians from climate disasters.

I put together the word cloud below created from this central piece of environmental legislation. Can you see the word ‘climate’ here? The text has over 150, 000 words in it and only one of those is ‘climate’. That’s 0.0006% representation of climate in the central piece of legislating deciding if it’s OK for a dirty energy company to make the planet even hotter. To add insult to this injury, the law’s only usage of the word is to refer to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (well over a quarter of a century ago); and even this is simply to state that regulations ‘may be made for and in relation to giving effect to any of the following agreements’, a list which includes the 1992 Framework.

‘May be made’ … we are still waiting. Here’s a summary of what this law is designed to protect, from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water:

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) is Australia's main environmental law. It gives us a legal framework to protect and manage unique plants, animals, habitats and places. These include heritage sites, marine areas and some wetlands. The Act also protects listed threatened and migratory species.

This isn’t nothing - but now it’s 2025, and there is evidence that we are well on our way to smashing through 1.5 degree of warming. Pardon the pun, but Australia’s key environmental law - subject to extensive review in 2020 - now looks like a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.

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Or I should say, choosing not to see the wood for the trees. The government knows what the science is telling us, and yet they have the chutpah to say, when announcing an approval like this, that they have taken this decision ‘following the consideration of rigorous scientific and other advice’ - that’s a quote from the Minister who approved it. He goes on to law-wash his decision by stating what he was ‘required to consider’:

In making my proposed decision I was required to consider:

• the potential impacts of extending the life of the plant on the national heritage values of nearby ancient rock art, and

• economic and social matters concerning the proposed development.

Minister Watt gets to use a highly restricted piece of legislation to back up this terrifying decision, just like the previous environment minister did when approving new coal mines. The meaning of these short sharp dot points in his media release is ‘mate, I’ve done my job’ - he even ends his response by saying he will make no further comment. Meanwhile, anonymous Labor MPs who spoke to the Guardian, as well as Australia’s Energy Minister Chris Bowen, offered the same defense, saying that the enviroment minister was constrained to work within the current environmental laws. ‘His hands are tied’, they tell us, as if they haven’t just had three years of government to fix this law. Will we start to see this as a kind of Nuremberg defense - the ‘I was just following orders’ excuse?

Instead, the minimal changes they made during their previous term has left this law even weaker than when they came to power. Reflecting on this piece of legislation back in 2022, Dr Laura Schuïjers of the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law wrote

Australia doesn’t have a climate law to protect its children.

Can you pause and read that again?

Time to talk dirty

This latest decision is so galling that the Climate Council released a video on social media with the caption ‘we really wish we were f***king joking’.

I’m all for the f-word and other expletives to help process the pain and anxiety that this announcement has brought with it. Fuck Albanese and fuck Watt. But here’s a more important, strategic response to this decision: we have to reclaim ‘energy’ from the dirty fossil fuel mongers. In a recent post at his Subtack The Crucial Years, Bill McKibben wrote about the launch of ‘SunDay’, a US campaign working towards a day of action to promote renewable energies. The campaign, which is organized around building a momentum around sun and wind and batteries, is ‘seizing the opportunity to change both local laws and the national zeitgeist’. And if it works, he wrote, ‘when we’re done no one will ever talk about ‘alternative energy’ again. Everyone will know this is the normal, obvious, beautiful way forward’.

To make this change, we need to use words differently. All forms of change, big and small, are powered by shifts in how we use language. If we want to reclaim energy, so in its standalone form it refers to clean energy, then we have to build a movement of tongues deriding and stigmatizing dirty energy. We can’t just promote ‘clean’ energy, we have to demote dirty energy. That means getting tens of thousands and more people consistently referring to fossil fuelled energy as ‘dirty energy’. Over and over again, time in time out, over days, weeks, months and years.

Right now, ‘clean; energy is the special case: like the ‘Women’s World Cup’, it’s not the real thing, but a marginal DEI version. While dirty energy suppliers can just talk about ‘energy’, renewables are still, despite their roaring popularity, worded as if they are the marked case.

I’ve pulled my evidence from a very big corpus of news data (you can go here to try this yourself: https://www.english-corpora.org/now/). This data set is more than 21 billion words of news data, across 20 countries, collected from the start of January 2010, up until now. To find out the dominant ways we classify ‘energy’, I asked this system to give me the top 100 L1 collocates of ‘energy’. That is, I asked the software to list for me the top 100 two-word phrases [ngrams], where the second word is ‘energy’. I’ve graphed below all the examples that specify a source (or type of source) of energy. The top ngrams are all ways of referring to clean energy. The only dirty energy that gets a mention in the top 100 is ‘nuclear energy’/’atomic energy’.

What I want to show you is that we very rarely hear the term ‘dirty energy’ or ‘fossil energy’. And this is what we have to bring out from the shadows. Planet-heating energy companies get this beautiful positive word ‘energy’ for free. We have to snatch it away from them, so that their energy becomes known as dirty and polluting - so theirs becomes the marked option. Right now, terms like ‘fossil energy’ and ‘dirty energy’ are so infrequent they are long way off the top 100. This enormous data set can put a figure on how often you will hear ‘clean energy’ versus ‘dirty energy’: it’s a ratio of over 100 to 1. And this chart shows the term ‘dirty energy’, from an already low base - in 2010, it was recorded at 1/10th of a word in every million - has gotten even less frequent in recent years.

It is not easy to effect this kind of change. But words change minds. The more we all say ‘dirty energy’, the more it will catch on and spread. It’s even more important to say it if you are someone will lots of reach on your forms of media. This is how we change the zeitgeist. It’s time to talk dirty.

Image via https://www.flickr.com/photos/captaintangent/

There’s an old saying that ‘money talks’. With money comes power, and not just the power to make other people do your bidding. It is also the power to buy up meaning and meaning-makers. To control the spaces from which meanings can be spread across communities and nations. To determine the dominant words and wordings that ordinary citizens will run into in their daily lives.

To say ‘money talks’ is of course a metaphor. But when you stop and give it some thought, it is not so metaphorical. Or maybe the metaphor is so profound that it starts to feel very real. Ok, I know I’m getting myself into a serious epistemological tangle. My point is that the ‘talking’ side of this metaphor cannot be overstated. On climate, for instance, through our press and our social media, through advertising and sponsorships, the fossil fuel cartel has ‘spoken’, over many decades, through all and every means, and with their very simple, and lethal, goals in mind. The scale of their dirty deeds and words is hard to fathom. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology - a beast of many serpent heads which only multiplied when cut off - the fossil fuel cartels keep on adapting their pro-fossil-energy message to the changing zeitgeist.

And they have been seriously, and consistently, underestimated. Here’s The Snap Forward’s Alex Steffen, who has been writing on climate for decades, recently confessing to having made this mistake:

The big thing I got wrong in my career was trusting that those denying the need for real change would eventually come around, when presented with sufficient evidence. My firm belief was that sooner or later, whether folks were ready or not, actual reality would force them to see the crisis clearly, and embrace action. That the snap forward — the sudden recognition of the immensity of our crisis, and the implications of that immensity — would happen early enough to enlist them as belated allies in forestalling the worst.

But the collective awakening still hasn’t happened. In fact, as Steffen writes, those in it for the money have barely blinked an eye. Instead, they

… stole the future, sold it in the present, then praised each other for their business savvy and went right on stealing.

The brilliant cli-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson has wondered (check out this interview with him by Sam Matey at The Weekly Anthropocene and subscribe while you are there) if these climate-wrecking gods, the people ‘who know very well that they are contributing to the destruction of the Earth’, are suffering from ‘Götterdämmerung syndrome’:

… that if I have to change, if my way of life is going down, I'm taking the world with me. The Götterdämmerung is at the end of Wagner, the twilight of the gods. The Götterdämmerung is the auto-da-fé1, the destruction of the world, because you can't stand the idea that your own power is going away.

If you’ve never watched Wager’s 16 hour Ring Cycle of four operas, you’ve missed some truly glorious music, but escaped a story line that is petty, trivial and incoherent. Sure, I’m asking for a pasting from trad opera fans for saying this out load, so let me rush onwards to note that the final scene of Götterdämmerung is the same old redemption through fire, with a woman - of course - having to do all of the cleaning up after fragile, power-hungry egotistical males. Check out the video above with the great Welsh soprano playing Brünnhilde, and start at 5.50 to see the start of the flaming pyre. Why aren’t there Brünnhilde action figures?

Lotsa money and power not enough?

Meanwhile, over at This is Precious, Sarah Wilson, is asking why it is these men of power don’t think climate collapse will impact on them:

why would you simultaneously be working to preserve your life (cryogenics; ice baths) and continue your gene pool (pronatalism) while concertedly destroy the human experience and your home?

These bros have so much, but are still not happy. Wilson writes that:

when you are that rich and powerful, more money and power won’t make a dint on anything anyway. So what’s left to chase, to own, to conquer? Being right.

In other words, these billionaires want not just wealth, and not just power. They want legitimacy, a key source of power that was studied and theorised by one the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, Max Weber. Weber set out a typology of the ways in which power can accrue legitimacy, including drawing on tradition, on legal authority or on individual charisma. Weber understood that all forms of human behaviour are interpretable and interpreted - we are constantly giving meaning to behaviour, which is why legitimacy is such an important concept for understanding how power works. And why the facts of climate science on their own, sadly, were never going to be enough to change minds.

The planet-wreckers not only want to be able to wreck the planet, they want our approval too. They want us to believe in them. While the tech bros and fossil fuel barons have enormous wealth and power power, including so much power over the public climate of meanings, we all have our own little corner of reality where we have the power to deny them legitimacy. This is our job everyday: to use language in a way that delegitimizes dirty fossil fuels and dirty energy, and the billionaires raking in their dirty dollars.

Why are we not there yet?

Despite the clarity of climate science, and the clarion call from climate scientists, why are we still having to battle to rescue the future for coming generations, aka ours and others children and grandchildren? There are many reasons. We need to remember that we live in cacophonic times AND that human minds have no trouble at all holding contradictory points of view. Human minds are not fundamentally ‘rational’, as some philosophers, and linguists like Chomsky, would have you believe. This inheritance of Descartes has been perpetuated by thinkers with too much time on their hands and not enough opportunity to appreciate, and so to research and theorise, the messiness of human experience. Our beliefs and ideologies are not neatly packaged in storage cartons in our minds.

The Italian Marxist who wrote his best work while in prison, Antonio Gramsci, and who bequeathed to the social sciences the idea of ‘hegemony’ - the silent public consent to the dominant ideas of the day - argued that what we take to be ‘common sense’ is the largely uncritical and unconscious ways of understanding the world that are commonplace in an epoch. Our selves, he argued, are ‘strangely composite’. We carry around baggage from previous stages of human history: we can be a bit Stone Age one minute, and all scientific the next. And this is thanks to language, the history of which runs very very deep. The grammars we use today have their origins in very different times. Like a layering of fossils in the earth, our languages are a pot-pourri of the modes of meaning lived through by our predecessors being nomadic, agricultural/pastoral, industrialized and now digital and electronic. In the words of the great anglo(-aussie) linguist, Michael Halliday:

For those of us whose forebears followed this route, our meaning potential has a history of the exchange of meanings in forest, in farm and in factory; and in the course of this progression the outward face of language has also evolved. It has gone from speech to writing, and from writing to printing: from text as process addressed by speaker to listener, to text as entity manoeuvred from writer to reader, then text as self-replicating entity, with multiple copies out there for access by a ‘readership’, a set of receivers unknown by, and unknown to, the originator of the text. And again, of course, all of this history is with us in the present: most adolescents and adults in our culture engage with all of these modes of discourse every day of their lives.

The idea that language is ordered, that grammar is a ‘set of rules’, that its structures can be understood separate from their meanings, that language can be free of ideology - these are all harmful ideas from linguistics that have stopped us from seeing the messiness and complexity of minds and meaning.

Scientists report their research findings as if feelings and relationships don’t matter. Science has to be ‘disinterested’ to do its job properly - more on this in a moment. But the rest of our communication does not work in this way. It is richly contextualised, and deeply interpersonal. It is noisy, and contradictory. The communicative context in which we are trying to intervene with pro-climate messaging is ‘a chaos of meaning-making practices, within and among which there is incoherence, disjunction and conflict’ (to quote Halliday again). Any pro-planet PR campaign has to take this reality as a its starting point.

Fossil knowledge and frackademia

As the science of climate has become more compelling, climate predators - I know this language is strong, but I also know that language is never, ever neutral - have found more and more ways to insinuate their messages into public discourse. A new paper published last year in the journal Climate Change has reviewed the studies on how fossil fuel companies have used funding for universities and academic research to further their agendas. This link has not had much research, the authors conclude. Their paper suggests a research agenda to help bring to light the ways in which universities are engaging in climate obstructionism.

The paper sets out the many ways in which fossil fuel interests tie themselves to universities: from having fossil fuel execs sitting on university boards or having academics on their boards, to sponsoring academic research centres and endowing academic posts (Shell Oil donated $2million for an endowed chair in Restoration Ecology at Colorado State University, just one example from this paper) to naming buildings after fossil fuel companies, to funding scholarships and field trips. And more. It seems that universities who are taking funding from big oil, coal and gas typically do not disclose such funding sources, which suggests that while they are taking this money, they understand that such connections lack ‘legitimacy’. Ironically, while the universities lose legitimacy in this kind of ‘money talks’ research, what they lose they are bestowing instead on fossil fuels and the companies that make their money from them. In the modern idiom, we call this ‘social license’.

The paper also takes a look at the work on what has been called ‘frackademia’: the sponsorship of ‘fallacious, pro-fracking academic studies’ and even university-owned land leased for fracking operations. Academic research has underplayed the environmental harms of fracking thanks to sponsorship from the ‘natural’ gas industry, and has helped develop the meme that dirty methane gas is somehow a ‘transition’ source, a ‘bridge to a low carbon future’.

The paper cites some very interesting work by an American anthropologist from Washington University in St Louis, Bret Gustafson, observing the influence of fossil fuel execs directly into university life as members of the Board of his university. Writing in 2012, the university’s board according to Gustafson included two CEOs from two of the then world’s largest coal companies. Gustafon’s recalls an event at which one of these CEOs was invited to speak on ‘America’s Energy Security’ to a university audience of several hundred people. The talk was full of contractions, a mish-mash of ‘science and anti-science, fossil power and democratic retreat, free-market ideology bolstered by generous goverment subsidies’. This kind of influence, Gustafson argues, is part of a regime for the production of ‘fossil knowledge’, which he describes as ‘representations of truth, sentiment and experience produced by, or in relation to, the oil, gas and coal industries.’ The fossil industry, he argues is both ‘knowledge and experience producer’. Just stop and give that some thought. I’m going to come back to Gustafson’s paper in another post - it is so rich with insights.

Last year, during the ‘world’s largest climate conference’, climate scientist Professor Peter Kalmus asked in an article for Newsweek, titled Climate Science and Big Oil Need to go their Separate Ways, how his colleagues from the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the ‘largest professional society of climate scientists in the world’, could continue to take fossil fuel money. He wrote:

The AGU's cowardly compliance with the wealthy industry that's knowingly destroying our planet is representative of most institutions and individuals around the world, and it's a key reason why humanity is failing so badly to stop climate change.

At the 2022 AGU conference, Kalmus and fellow climate scientist Rose Abramoff risked their jobs - Abramoff lost hers - to protest this body of professional scientists (it has 60K members worldwide, and 23 peer reviewed journals) taking dirty fossil fuel money. As a fellow academic, I can say it is no small thing to risk an academic job, something we spend many years investing ourselves in.

Money talks

Money - dirty fossil fuelled money - will not shut the F up. Now we know this. It doesn’t matter how much extreme weather we suffer, or what the grim prospects look like. It doesn’t matter what the cost or what the scale of the evidence is. Their dirty words and narratives have to be shouted down, by clear, simple, highly repetitive messaging. The planet needs a chief-of-staff to run this critical campaign. Who would you nominate for the job?

I’ve been in the linguistics game long enough to know that the words that seem the most banal are often really dangerous. They seem so harmless, that no-one bothers to pick them up and give them a shake and a sniff. I’ve had one of these words on my ‘to-do’ list for a while. It’s not planetary insolvency - that one jumps right out at you like birkinstocks paired with a Gucci suit. It wears its heart on its sleeve. It is demanding attention and we really need to listen.

It is a very new idea, born only last year to actuarial parents. I’ll get to all that, and along the way argue why it it is time to give up on our mother Earth metaphor. But I want to start with a word that is hundreds of years old, and which seems completely inert. As if it is simply telling us like it is. The word is resource. And before we get to its modern meaning, we need to know where it has come from.

The Latin root of resource is surgere, which means ‘to rise’, which it shares with words like resurgence and resurrection. Surgere became resourdre in Old French, with the meaning ‘to rise again, recover’. English adopts the word resource in the 1600s as ‘a means to supply a deficiency or need’ or in plural form, ‘stocks or reserves of money, materials, people, or some other asset, which can be drawn on when necessary’.

The following century, the notion of natural resources is derived to refer to ‘those materials or substances of a place which can be used to sustain life or for economic exploitation’. The OED first attests this term to 1776 - two years before the British arrived in Sydney Harbour - in a work by the economist Adam Smith, whose discussion of how wealth was being generated in various European colonies up to his time would foreshadow the approach to the colonization of Australia.

Source: Oxford Languages: https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

The concept of resource sees the world from the point of view of whether something can be beneficial to humans. It is not a resource if humans haven’t identified it as something we need. Things that we depend on, invisibly - like a stable climate - haven’t been understood as natural resource. The word’s hidden meaning is of something that is rising again - as if we can ‘re-source’ resources. But we are learning the hard way that only some of things we call ‘resources’ are very much finite - and we have yet to appreciate the many invisible ‘resources’ on which we very much depend.

Time to leave behind our metaphor of Mother Earth?

The idea of natural resources puts nature at our mercy. Nature is there for our taking and plundering. This way of seeing our word is called extractivism - I wrote about it recently, and in fact it was my very own, very first, Climate Word of the Year. Extractivism sees the Earth as something that can keep on giving, without us worrying about its limits. There’s something else that we treat as always self-sacrificing, and so it is no wonder that we use the metaphor of 'mother’ to understand our relationship with our planet and its ‘natural resources’.

The idea of ‘mother Earth’ or ‘mother nature’ is a very old meme which exists in many of the world’s cultures. The Greeks revered Gaia, the goddess of the Earth who creates herself and all other gods, and on which earth itself was believed to rest. The ideas of ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘Earth Mother’ have linked nature to motherhood, fertility and endless creation. Not only a metaphor for many environmentalists, the Greek goddess Gaia was borrowed by scientists in the late 1960s to see the Earth ‘as a single organism that actively maintains the conditions necessary for its survival’. Scientist James Lovelock coined the ‘Gaia principle’ to explain the unique living quality of our planet, in stark contrast to the planets around ours which are dead. When invited by NASA to be part of the team analysing the moon’s surface, Lovelock understood for the first time that the atmospheric conditions on Earth - both reactive and stable over time - were essentially regulated by life. To grasp this interconnectedness, he too reached for a feminine, maternal metaphor.

Mother is a very old word in English, and exists both as a noun and a verb. As the dictionary tells us, to mother someone does not require a biological relationship. The definition of mother in the Oxford English Dictionary echoes the meaning of resource: it means to ‘be the source or originator of, give rise to, produce’. To this we can add the following meanings:

to bring up, take care of, or protect as a mother; to look after in a (sometimes excessively) kindly and protective way’.

Mothers get ‘mother guilt’ - for which there is no male equivalent. The ‘good mother’ always prioritizes others’ needs and wants. She gives without expecting anything in return.

Maybe its time to stop thinking of, and treating, our planet as if it is our mother - as the one we can simply take-for-granted and from whom we can expect unconditional love? Maybe the ‘mother Earth’ idea has run its course?

What if the Earth is a bank not a mother?

What if we imagine Earth as a bank we have been borrowing from to run the human civilisation business. A bank, or maybe several banks, from which we keep on borrowing. Banks with which we hold several different credit cards, which keep on maxing out, with growing debts, and interest payments we have no hope of paying, much less of reducing the principal sum.

Enter the new metaphor of ‘planetary insolvency’ from some very alarmed actuaries - specifically, from the UK’s Faculty and Institute of Actuaries. Actuaries are the specialists who calculate and cost risk. These people hold up the insurance and superannuation industries. The techniques of risk assessment developed by this profession manage the global pension market which has $55 trillion of assets, and they provide risk analysis to the global insurance market, collecting $8 trillion of premiums annually.

While pollies and billionaires can ignore and demean climate scientists, maybe they will have to listen to the people who bring this kind of very high level, very important, financial expertise to the table. The UK’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries are so alarmed by our growing debt to Earth, and the rising risks of societal collapse that they have begun a collaboration with climate scientists at Exeter University. This year’s report is the 4th joint report with scientists based at Exeter, and it was in last year’s report that they coined the idea of ‘planetary insolvency’.

The report tells us the scale of our borrowings from the Bank of Earth, and what are rising debts have produced:

Since the Industrial Revolution there has been unprecedented resource extraction, powered by fossil energy, population growth and technological innovation. This has driven significant Earth system disruption, alongside inequality and health crises. Greenhouse gas levels have soared, causing global warming. Deforestation and land use change have eroded biodiversity and disrupted ecosystems. Agricultural practices and industrial processes have overloaded natural cycles with pollutants such as nitrogen, phosphorus and plastics.

The report is scary to read, with the only light relief coming from the end of the world scenarios being described in the language of the British upper class, e.g. ‘catatrophic or extreme impacts’ being ‘eminently plausible’.

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When you take more than you give, you create what actuaries call a ‘demand-supply gap for natural resources’. When these gaps are compounded by global warming, shit gets real, as in the chance that by 2030, there will be a 40% shortfall in the global water supply (see p. 33 of their report).

Source: https://actuaries.org.uk/document-library/thought-leadership/thought-leadership-campaigns/climate-papers/planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature/

Scientists have developed ‘Earth System Boundaries’ for systems like climate, the biosphere, and water, and for limits on pollution. For the actuaries, these are the planets’ ‘solvency limits’. When we cross them we are headed towards insolvency:

An insolvent planet is one in a state where we have degraded the Earth system to such an extent that we can no longer receive enough of the critical services we rely on to support our society and economy. For example, shortages of food and fresh water, or uninhabitable climatic conditions.

These ‘ecosystem services’ are, in actuarial-speak often ‘non-substitutable’ - as in the immortal lyrics of Joni Mitchell, ‘don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone’. We may be well on our way to planetary bankrupcy. The actuaries’ new concept on planetary insolvency is intended to help with communicating just how bad our current state of living on this planet is, and the very grim trajectory ahead. It is a new metaphor on offer, and well worth exploring.

As ASIC will tell you, trading insolvent can get you into all kinds of trouble. But Earth has no company directors to be held accountable - just a bunch of rogue businessmen (sic), who don’t seem concerned about our growing debt to the Bank of Earth. As we wend our way to planetary insolvency, the planet is starting to show she - no other pronouns seem to work here - is a bit less Gaia and a bit more Kali as she calls in her debts.

And now I’ve finally discovered the concept that explains this feeling. It’s called being ‘native to now’. And that sense of time suddenly collapsing into itself - it also has a name. It’s called The Snap Forward, and like the expression ‘being native to now’ it’s author is Alex Steffen. Somehow I stumbled across a two year old newsletter post of Steffen’s, and I finally got a label for my feelings of being a stranger to these times, the feeling that time itself is a bit wibbly-wobbly and timey-wimey.

Steffen’s post is titled ‘Old Thinking Will Break Your Brain’.

The Snap Forward

Old thinking will break your brain.

Friends…

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4 years ago · Alex Steffen

Alex is a futurist. He has written books about the planetary crisis. The ‘old thinking’ he warns us about looks like this:

We grew up in societies built upon certain assumptions about how the world works, and how the planet around us should be seen. We now know those assumptions were wrong in profound ways, and in one human lifetime we have altered the climate and biosphere, squandered vast natural riches and destabilized a myriad of systems we depend on. We have made the circumstances of our lives discontinuous with everything that came before us. The societies we live in are now catastrophically unsuited for the planet we’ve made. Yet we still see the planet around us with worldviews formed inside of those societies.

Old thinking is going to run its course: sooner or later, the physics of climate, still ignorable now thanks to a highly sophisticated propaganda machine, will take charge.

The little life I live inside is full of old thinking and old thinkers. I can spend whole days where not a single person mentions climate. Many of my academic colleagues continue to plan their academic lives as if the old world is still here - travelling half-way around the world to attend face-to-face conferences where climate, if mentioned, will be allocated a minor space on a program full of business as usual. As if the need for a rapid transition doesn’t include the CO2 of the flights we take. The problem is in another time and place.

When you have snapped forward, and starting being native to now, you can see how much the present is stuck in the past because it thinks the old future is still with us.

We didn’t used to have the future

Our everyday conversations are powered by our modern grammatical habits. As speakers of modern English, these habits includes lots of grammatical and lexical options for constructing the future, for indulging concepts of uncertainty or probability, and for living in very vague or ungrounded spaces and times.

We didn’t use to have the future. Rewind to our foreparents who spoke Old English - a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon - when English had only two verb tense options: one form of the present, and one form of the past. As Millward notes in A Biography of the English Language, Old English did not have the rich and complex verb tense system we live through today - all the various options that allow us many ways to slice and dice our experience of time. This grammar of English (which I rely on for much of the work I do) describes 36 different options in the the modern English tense system.

An Old English speaker could not have said ‘I would have wanted to go’ or ‘I have been thinking about you’. And Old English speakers did not, could not yet say, ‘The heat will kill you first’, the title of Jeff Goodell’s 2023 book. Neither, in another version of projecting the future, could they have said ‘the heat is going to kill you first’. This form of the future, based on what we call the present continuous tense, was not yet ‘invented’.

Instead, Old English grammarians explain the ‘future-y’ stuff in Old English was managed by some combination of adverbs, and, like everything else in language (pace Chomsky), by context. It was at the end of what linguists generally consider this phase of the history of English, we can begin to see forms emerging that will become our ways of expressing future time: the rise of verbal auxiliary ‘will’, and of the ‘present continuous’ form, for example ‘I am going’.

Being able to live in the future was something that had to emerge over time. The English word for ‘future’ was not in the Anglo-Saxon’s vocabulary - the Oxford English Dictionary attests it to c.1374, just a few years before Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales in the version of English we call Middle English. It takes the turn of another century for the word ‘forecast’ to emerge (1413), while the now very pervasive concepts of ‘goal’ and ‘plan’ are creatures of the 16th and 17th centuries. As for ‘key performance indicator’, of course that is the child of the late 20th century, as is the concept of a ‘bucket-list’, that list of things you have to do before you die.

How the climate predators weaponized the future

Now we have supercharged ways of looking into the future, of imagining what it will look like. We spend a lot of time now planning ahead, churning out ‘goals’ and ‘kpi’s’, living in or for tomorrow, compiling our ‘bucket list’ of the things we want to do before we die. One of the top hits if you google ‘bucket list’ offers 220 bucket list ideas. Many of the top 20 on this list involve consuming high carbon polluting products: ‘Visit New York for Thanksgiving Day Parade or New Year’s Eve!’. ‘Eat shark in Iceland!’. ‘Visit the sand beaches of Hawaii, Galapagos, Indonesia or the Dead Sea!’. ‘Touch six out of the seven continents’. The list goes on.

This modern penchant for living in the future is just one more thing that the fossil fuel industry has used to stop people seeing that the climate crisis has already arrived. They have weaponized the future. And thanks to language, they have done this effortlessly. The evidence can be found in this brilliant paper, by Professors Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, about how one of the big oil companies, Mobil, then ExxonMobil, polluted public discourse through a 30 year strategy of deceptive marketing.

This strategy included the use of paid advertorials in The New York Times, that is, content that appeared as if it was an article, but which was paid for by the company, invisibly promoting their point of view - thanks NYT (:. The researchers analysed all advertorials paid for by this company which took some position on anthropogenic global warming between the years 1972 to 2009. The researchers conducted ‘frame analysis’1 - a common research approach in the study of media, where patterns of language in text can be seen to solidify around some overarching themes. This analysis resulted in identifying dominant frames or ‘topics’ in this data.

Graphical abstract for Supran and Oreskes paper

One of these topics involves relating climate change to the concept of ‘risk’. These researchers show that as we enter the 21st century, with the science of climate becoming clearer and more widely known, these advertorials build a narrative around climate ‘risk’. While ‘risk’ sounds like a negative thing to be raising in relation to climate, its covert power is to shift a problem out into the future. The researchers, Supran and Oreskes call this practice ‘discursive grooming’ - as far as I know it is a term they have invented. As the authors note, drawing on risk rhetoric is helpful for casting doubt on the effects of global warming, and for subjecting it to ‘temporal discounting heuristics’: in other words, for making us think that the problem is not here and now, but something that might happen in the future.

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Like sexual predators who groom potential victims, these climate predators have seeded public discourse with covert messages designed to groom us so that we are vulnerable to the ways they wants us to think about the climate, energy and fossil fuels.

Snapping Forward

What does ‘native to now’ look like? I can only tell you my version of it - I think about climate all the time, and I’m constantly calibrating the realities I hear around me against what I understand to be both already here, and coming towards us. Another term being used is to capture this idea is being ‘collapse aware’,

I try to imagine what everyday conversation would be like if everyone lived like we were in a climate crisis. One thing I imagine is that we would all know, all the time, the estimates of CO2 concentrations in our atmophere. Instead of talking about how many steps we have done this week or month, we would be discussing the newest numbers from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii - and we would follow these numbers in the ways that we all tracked rising COVID numbers as the pandemic unfolded.

We would all expectantly wait for the montly numbers - we would all know that figures for January 2025 are an almost 4ppm rise on the same time last year. Friends would greet each other with statements like ‘did you see the new numbers from Hawaii?’. I haven’t yet had a single conversation on this month’s planetary-defining number.

Source: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

And there would be no more conversations about ‘bucket lists’ - instead, I would be having conversations with at least some of my friends and family about where to live as climate impacts worsen. Some of us might even sign up for Alex Steffen’s ‘personal ruggedization’ crash course - the next one is starting shortly. We would be talking and thinking clearly about the ways our natural systems are shrinking and collapsing, and what that means for us and our families. We would be talking, constantly, about how to talk about the future with our children. If you are looking for help, check out this Climate Kids video from Melbourne University’s Climate Futures.

I can only recall one single occasion of talking with a small group of friends about what their kids understand about their future prospects as we keep on burning fossil fuels - the conversation was tentative and conducted in hushed tones. We all knew how confronting this territory is, and we all quickly changed the topic.

I also imagine we would all be talking more about ways to live more simply - taking ideas for instance from writers like Jodi Wilson, writing Practising Simplicity. While being more honest in our conversations about the climate crisis, we would also share the joy to be found in living a simpler, less polluting and extractive, life.

If I had to give you one word for how I feel as 2025 has opened for business, it is guilt. I’ve lived a privileged, fossil-fuel enhanced life, without too much to worry about.

But now I see so many young people who will live many more years of climate chaos than me shouldering this terrible burden and feeling fear and anger. If you haven’t yet made a new year’s resolution to be active about defending the climate and the future of next generations, check out this reel from one of the dynamic young leaders of Rising Tide in Australia, Alexa Stuart, on hearing the news that the Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement:

It’s heartbreaking, but she is also very inspiring. And hopefully Alexa has seen the recent commitment by Bloomberg Philanthropies to cover the funding for the UN’s Climate Budget that Trump has withdrawn.

If you need further encouragement to act, take a look at the bravery of these protestors, many of them young people, who risked arrest to stop a coal train heading to Newcastle, after the Australian government approved more new coal mines in September last year. The arrestees faced court about 10 days ago. The magistrate told them to go ‘hold a banner in a park’.

This is well-known new dialect of English called ‘boomer-ese’, a term I thought I’d just invented, but found it on a blog about leadership. As the blog indicates, you don’t have to be a boomer to talk like one. I don’t know how old this magistrate is, but telling young people how to protest about climate is patronising. They have so much more at stake. And they know, because they have to, that holding a banner in a park won’t change anything.

Instead of holding up a banner, you will see them in the post above doing something much braver: standing on top of a big dirty pile of dirty coal. It’s an attempt to get a very clear message through in a world dominated by noise. Not random noise though - noise designed to preserve old fossil fuel power and money, as research by Professors Jeffrey Supran and Naomi Orestes shows. This noise has been carefully crafted for decades, with slight variations on this cacophany of predatory climate messaging as time goes on, and as climate awareness grows.

From telegraph to social media

This very noisy world feels like it gets bigger and louder everyday. The expansion is partly due of course to the proliferation of communication technologies which have radically changed humans’ relationship to time and space. As revolutionary as it is to be able to post the art on your cappaccino to your followers and fans, even the telegraph - social media’s humble ancestor - shook up the world. In 1841, the news of the death of the US’ ninth president, President William Henry Harrison, took three months and 20 days to get from the east coast of the US to the west coast.

Just three years later, telegraph technology was able to relay a message via Morse Code almost instantaneously across a line installed between Washington and Annapolis Junction - not very far apart, but far enough to test this new technology. Mitchell Stephens very interesting book A History of News reports a telling comment from James Gordon Bennett, the then publisher of the New York Herald, who recognized the political implications of telegraph technology for news:

No better bond of union for a great confederacy of states could have been devised ... The whole nation is impressed with the same idea at the same moment. One feeling and one impulse are thus created and maintained from the centre of the language to its uttermost extremities.

‘What has happened to space'?’, Bennett’s newspaper would ask. It’s answer: it has been ‘annihilated’. By 1866, an underwater telegraph cable permanently connected American and England. Instead of weeks or months to send a message between London and New York, it could not only be received in minutes, the same message could be sent far and wide, enabling holders of this technology to homogenize human minds, well before Facebook and Twitter came on the scene.

The semiotic ‘Big Bang’

Expanding technology has been crucial to creating our modern noisy world. But it would not have happened except that language is also completely open and expansive. It wasn’t always this way. But humans pushed and pulled language, until we made it become something new. A very very long time after the original Big Bang, human conversation powered the ‘semiotic Big Bang’, where we turned language into something that can endlessly generate new meanings. In this process, language became something no longer bounded by physical time and space. It had a new substance inside it, that meant humans could go on making and remaking their little worlds endlessly.

You’ll never guess what that new substance was. Let me leave you in suspense and see if any of you can guess. The point is, our current endless parade of stories, narratives, memes, ideologies, mythologies, excuses, lies and half-truths about climate are thanks to the inner workings of language. The torrent of blah blah blah and the ongoing yadda yadda yadda, all to stop people from understanding the impact of the rising CO2 and other greenhouse gases on our planet, is all thanks to language.

Source: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

For example, when Rising Tide activists stopped the coal train, the relevant Member of Parliament, Mr Dan Repacholi, defended not the climate but his government’s ongoing support for coal by saying:

Coal mining produces the power, produces the steel, to make these renewable projects actually happen.

If you want the rebuttal for why we ‘have to’ burn coal for steelmaking, read this piece published in Crikey in 2023. Just for starters, it turns out the planet doesn’t care about why we burn coal. But how about telling these protestors we have to have coal-generated electricity to have renewable energy projects? Wow.

Or what about this bit of blah blah blah from the Federal Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, claiming that the current Labor government approved no new coal mines in 2024.

‘No new coal mines’. Sounds like a rock-hard fact, doesn’t it. A coal mine is a coal mine is a coal mine - right? What could be simpler? But last year her government approved 7 new coal mines. So what gives?

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A ‘new coal mine’ in the universe that our Environment Minister inhabits has to also have a new owner to be new. Othewise, it is just an ‘expansion’ of an existing coal mine.

Zack Schofield from Rising Tide responds to Environment Minister’s claim she had not approved any new coal mines in 2024

You’d think something as concrete and tangible as a coal mine would not be subject to the malleability of language. But you’d be wrong. And it’s because of that magic stuff we put inside language some thousands of years back. The yadda yadda yadda from the Environment Minister insisted not just that these were not ‘new mines’, but that her approval was conducted on case-by-case basis based on the law, as in, environmental law. According to her spokesperson:

The Albanese government has to make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law — that's what happens on every project, and that's what's happened here.

The ‘facts’ in this case appear not to include any scientific ones. The Greek sophists, from whom we take the word ‘sophistry’ would give Minister Plibersek 5 stars for this.

Disinformation on steroids

Disinformation isn’t new. It is only the old school philosphers and linguists who cling to some romantic idea that language is for expression of a true and universal ‘reality’. These old white males, as they mostly are, have done us all a dis-service by distracting us from the ways that meanings make our world.

The new tech has helped humans expand the space between some piece of calibratable experience - the rising rising CO2 in our atmosphere - and our construals of that experience. Sociologists - at least some anyway - will tell you whatever is happening here has been a long time in the making. We live in the modern age, and one of its features is a much greater capacity to create and circulate content. Hand in hand with the opening up of democratic processes in the period we now call ‘modernity’ comes high levels of literacy and the arrival of nation state languages, which reach all corners of a polity. Religion declined as a means of social cohesion, and in its place have come our secular religions - OK, still lots of space for religious doctrine too, which seems to be on the rise. These secular discourses are ‘competing for the allegiances of ever more politicized and ideologised populations’, as argued by the sociologist Professor Siniša Malešević.

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So, we are more politicized and ideologised than we have ever been. Our brains are constantly navigating the swirling discourses that have even more intimate penetration into our daily lives than has been possible before. This means there are more and more interests competiting for a slice of your attention and to insinuate themselves into your habits of mind. It’s hard to get a break from it.

Which is why holding a banner in a park is not an effective mechanism for trying to stop the planet burning. In fact in the face of the tsunami of climate disinformation, the most rational thing is to stop a coal train, and to try to stop coal ships.

My climate new year’s resolutions

• Try to get climate into more of my everyday conversations

• Think about whether I am ready to get myself arrested in a climate protest in support of the many young people putting themselves on the line

• Bring you the new words that might help shake off old thinking so you can become ‘natives of now’ - my favourite new phrase from Alex Steffan, writing at The Snap Forward - check out this post on how ‘old thinking will break your brain’

What are your climate resolutions for 2025? Let me know in the comments. If you need more motivation, check out this new video from Parents for Climate, with this great slogan ‘Protect What you Love - Act Now, Later is Too Late’.

Click here to donate to get this video circulating more widely.

Thanks for reading. For 2025 I will be publishing on a monthly schedule. I need more time to read, think and process what is happening and what is coming. I want to be able to bring you climate and language posts that are more considered and thoughtful.

This year’s committee nominated the word ‘enshittification’. The word is defined by this dictionary as:

noun Colloquial the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

The committee supplied their commendation:

A very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable. This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment.

In only the third time in the nearly 20 years of this award, the ‘people’ choose the same exact word as the Macquarie dictionary committee. I don’t what to spoil the Macquarie dictionary party, the American Dialect Society got there first, with its nomination of ‘enshittification’ as their 2023 word of the year.

‘Enshittification’ is cute - and like the committee I love its ‘morphology’, that is, its use of the ‘en-’ prefix, and the piling on of two further suffixes: ‘-ify’, as in ‘enshittify’ creating a new verb, before then adding the '-ation’ suffix to create an abstract noun. But it wouldn’t get my vote.

Other well known dictionaries did much the same thing: opt for pop culture terms, with, IMHO, not much consequence. The Oxford English Dictionary went with ‘brain rot’ - a nod to what social media and big tech companies are doing to us. Their metric was not about its newness, but its huge increase in frequency - between 2023 and 2024 the term jumped up 250%.

The Cambridge Dictionary chose ‘manifest’, because it was one of the most looked up terms in their dictionary over the year. This is another old word being made new, now meaning:

to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen

The increase in attention to this word, say the Cambridge Dictionary team, is coming from the growth of ‘manifest influencers’ - enough that the dictionary added this meaning to their book in 2023. The Collins dictionary chose (yawn) ‘brat’. The Miriam Webster dictionary also based their shortlist on ‘search volume’ (how many times the words were searched in their dictionary during the year). Their 2024 WOTY was a bit edgier: ‘polarization’. The increased frequency of look ups of this word, they wrote:

reflected the desire of Americans to better understand the complex state of affairs in our country and around the world.

Now that speaks to me. Here’s their shortlist, which includes a new word that I love. It’s ‘allision’, explained as follows:

Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March when the container ship Dali ran into it, causing the death of six construction workers, the destruction of a portion of Interstate 695, and a months-long halt to port operations. News sources referred to the event as a collision but maritime publications mostly used allision instead.

A ‘collision’ needs two moving objects. ‘Allision’ is when a moving thing crashes into a stationary thing. In maritime world, they make a crucial distinction between ‘collisions’ and ‘allisions’.

Annabelle’s Climate Word of the Year (CWOTY)

I was disappointed that climate did not turn up in any of the WOTY lists I looked at this year. Apart from ‘enshittification’, which was chosen strictly on new-ness and fun-ness grounds, not on frequency, the other words got their awards by being highly popular. With the ongoing epidemic of climate silence, it is hard to get climate words noticed - not enough people, including media, talking or writing about climate.

I am constantly listening to language. I am constantly analysing what people say and write around me to understand both what they are communicating, and what their words might mean for our language and our ideologies. The climate space is big and dynamic - and we need more words for explaining what is happening, what is coming, and what people are feeling.

So when I read this note from one of my favourite climate writers, Chloé Salmon, who writes Our New Climate, I heard something new: ‘extractivism’.

As I read this note, I was like: ‘hold on there … hmmm … interesting, very very interesting’. Of course, once I heard this word, in the following weeks, I kept running into it, and wondered how I’d missed it.

I love the whole vibe of Chloé’s note, which is a beautiful take on a crucial linguistic concept from one of my favourite dead white male linguists, Benjamin Lee Whorf. I don’t know if Chloé has read his collection of posthumously published essays, called Language Thought and Reality, but it feels like she has.

Whorf coined the concept of ‘crypotypes’ to talk about the meanings that language makes which are ‘submerged, subtle and elusive’. While Whorf focussed on cryptotyes in grammatical categories - for example, why we say ‘uncover, undress, unlock’ but not ‘unbreak, undry, unheat’ - the general point is that language makes covert meanings that you can elucidate only by careful analysis and attention.

Terms like ‘ecosystem services’, ‘carbon budget’, ‘natural capital’, rest on a whole lot of unsaid assumptions and humans’ relationships with nature. This is the point in Chloé’s note - that when you say any of these words, you are unconsciously affirming deep and problematic ideologies, including a host of meanings that can now be captured by the term ‘extractivism’. This is why a word can have a vague feeling (‘green’), but if you listen carefully you can hear it ‘scream’ something else (‘extractism’).

‘Extractivism’: a little history

While ‘extract’ and ‘-ism’ have been around for a while, their conjunction is new. The word is not yet listed in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Macquarie Dictionary. It has a Wikipedia entry, and through a quick look at the talk page I dated this to 2017. It turns up in the big news corpus I often look in, as the screenshot below shows. The numbers are small, so it’s profile is low.

The origins of the term, from what I have read, are in Latin America, specifically Brazil, and the context for its coinage is understanding why countries with a lot of ‘natural resources’ have a large majority of its people in poverty. And the short answer to that question is ‘colonialism’ - to these territories being a harvesting ground for empires who take unprocessed ‘natural resources’ for their own wealth creation.

Reading this article by Professor of Economic History and Institutions, Rafael Domínguez Martín published in 2021, the term’s coinage was helped along by the research of the American sociologist, Stephen E Bunker, and his work on extractivist capitalism and globalization, for example in this book published in 1988.

According to Martín’s article, the word ‘extractivism’ is coined by the Uruguayan biologist Eduardo Gudynas in 2009 to mean a particular type of extraction of natural resources in high volume or intensity where 50% or more is destined for export as primary materials without any form of processing. The term then intersects with Latin American eco-Marxism to take on a deeper connection to colonialist dispossession and appropriation. In fact Martín’ uses a plural version of this term - ‘extractivisms’ - to indicate some differences in usages. All forms of extractivisms, he argues, are predatory.

Gudynas also adds another neologism into this heady mix: the term ‘extrahección’, for which I could find no English translation. The word captures the idea of extractivism through violence and the violation of human rights.

Choé’s post urges us to do some deeper thinking about a number of apparently neutral and inoffensive terms because they hide their deeper, insidious assumptions. There’s more to say on all of this, but it’s nearly Christmas, and today (Saturday) as I’m writing is my birthday, and so I gotta go.

I’m so grateful to my subscribers and anyone else who has read my work at this Substrack since I launched in April this year. See you in 2025: I’m having a bit of break, and you will receive the next post from #Changing Language in the Climate Crisis at 9am (AEDT) on Monday February 3rd.

Rapping climate

Have you ever heard a climate rap? Us neither. Today’s ‘us’ is a collab between yours truly, and one of my undergraduate linguistics students, Georgia Blizzard, who recently completed completed a first year unit with me called Language, Culture and Communication1, which introduces students to some key ideas in linguistics - how language makes meaning, how to study natural linguistic data, and why language is so profoundly malleable, and therefore, so ideological.

We’ve done some research, and found a few minor rappers here and there who are interested in climate, i.e. the future of the planet. Here’s one of our own, Australian rapper Baker Boy, with a soulful, bilingual rap (combining English and Yolŋu Mathu) called ‘Somewhere Deep’.

The song starts like this:

The ocean is rising
Somewhere deep, she's heating up

And here’s the third verse, so you can see where it heads:

We could build a future where
We will not pollute the air
Slowly heal like every year
Mother nature's skin is clear
But they want minerals
Thoughts of future minimal
Stealing nature's medicine
Fingerprints of criminals

Baker Boy is making his mark: he has nearly 800K monthly listeners on Spotify, and this beautiful track has racked up 150K listens so far. Verse 2 is largely in language, and among the lyrical rap in this First Nations language, you can hear reference to ‘climate change’. We tried running this verse through google translate, but the results weren’t promising. Gotta learn a bit some Yolŋu Mathu if you really want to hear his message.

Mainstreaming misogyny

It’s fair to say that climate is not yet a big theme in rap music - it’s not part of the mainstream. Even if you aren’t a fan of rap, we are all impacted by what rap celebrities sing about, because rap music is a sizable cultural vehicle. Song lyrics are significant cultural artefact especially when the lyrics belong to high profile singers, with global reach. They get to project their rhythms and meanings into millions of ears, over days, months and years. Eminem, for instance, has over 75 million followers on Spotify, and tracks that have had over a billion plays. That’s enormous cultural influence. He is listed on Wikipedia as one of the top selling artists of all times.

Eminem’s track ‘Lose yourself’ has had well over 2 billion plays on Spotify. Here’s Obama rapping a few lines from this song after being introduced by Eminem at the Detroit rally for team Harris and Walz on October 23rd, in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential election.

The crowd recognises these famous lines and goes bananas. In his brief introduction before handing over to Obama, Eminem urges people to ‘use their voice’, and ‘get out and vote’, because ‘people shouldn’t be afraid to get out and express their opinions’. VP Harris, he tells the adoring crowd, ‘supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld’.

We all know what happened in that election

There’s been a lot of commentary about the election result, including the claim that the Democrats got too ‘woke’. You can find much more informed commentators than us to get your fill on why the Democrats lost, and what it means for climate. One of the immediate algorithmic evils in the wake of this election result was a spike in online misogyny. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue - a group of independent nonprofit organisations who work to safeguard human rights and ‘reverse the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation’ - released a ‘digital dispatch’ on November 8th, titled ‘“Your body, my choice”: Hate and Harrassment towards women spreads online’. Their analysis reports a significant increase in frequency of some key misogynist memes, like ‘your body my choice’, ‘repeal the 19th’, and ‘get back to the kitchen’. We have reproduced ISD’s graph below, with the data collected on three key slogans circulating in the lead up to and just after the election. For non-USA readers, the ‘repeal the 19th’ is reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.

The online spread of these memes, the ISD argues:

demonstrated the influence of an increasingly vindicative set of online actors, who appear to be using the election results as a permission structure to more overtly and aggressively espouse narratives about curbing women’s rights.

They go on to explain that:

ISD researchers tracked narratives targeting women and the discussion of those narratives between November 4 and 6, 2024 across X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Facebook and Reddit. The use of derogatory and misogynistic language was already rife among well-noted manosphere and extremist communities on these platforms, and this activity has only gained steam in the past three days since the election. ISD also observed reports of these narratives being used to harass women offline, particularly on high school and college campuses.

Their report recounts some of these narratives - we won’t spoil your day by rehashing them here.

Back to the Obama-Eminem brofest

While it is fitting to blame Trump and his campaign for this outpouring of misoygyny, and it is important to track the increasing online misogyny and its creators, the extremism of this content is hardly new. In fact, let’s get back to the bro-fest between Obama and Eminem in the lead up to the election, when Americans were being urged to vote for the party fighting for women’s rights, and in particular, for our health and reproductive rights, rather than a man convicted of rape, among other felonies.

When choosing the lines he would quote from the great and celebrated rap singer, Obama mentioned the ‘vomit on the sweater’ and ‘mom’s spaghetti’, but skipped the line about ‘These hoes is all on him’ as well as those a couple of lines later:

But hold your nose ‘cause here goes the cold water

These hoes don’t want him no mo, he’s cold product.

In this little part of the narrative in Eminem’s somewhat autobiographical song, the ‘hoes all on him’ signal that a man’s career is on the rise, and their rejection of him that it is now on a downward fall. And in this tiny linguistic choice, men are construed as entitled to sex while women are utterly objectified as a prize recognizing male success. Repeat those lines over 2.387 billion times - and that’s just on Spotify.

For those Emimen fans who might feel they can overlook this misogyny, Georgia’s research for her final essay in Annabelle’s first year linguistics unit is a bit of a wake up call. Because ‘hoes’, ‘whores’, ‘sluts’ and ‘bitches’ occupy the lyrics of Eminem’s work so routinely that these labels come to appear synonymous with ‘women’. These terms are used to sexually objectify in one breath, and degrade women who dare take ownership of their sexuality in another. If you listen to just two of Eminem’s highly successful and celebrated albums - the Grammy Award winning Marshall Mather LP (2000) and the Grammy Award winning Eminem Show (2002) - you will hear the word ‘bitch’ 111 times. When we combine the singular and plural forms of this word, it’s the seventh most frequently-used word across all 30 songs released on these two albums.

Tne most frequent words in lyrics of Marshall Mather and Eminem Show

When we look a bit deeper at how these derogatory terms are used in the lyrics, it becomes impossible to discuss Eminem’s depiction of women without including his references to sexual violence. ‘Kim’, the 16th track on The Marshall Mathers LP, opens with Eminem singing to his daughter - ‘daddy’s baby girl’ - before devolving into a graphic, rage-fuelled torture fantasy that ends with him murdering his ex-wife and putting her dead body in the boot of his car.

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Grotesque as this concept may be, it is certainly not isolated. When we search for common ‘collocates’ - words that are typically found with a word you are studying - with the word ‘bitch’, we find words like ‘bleed’, ‘hit’, and ‘kill’. Undeniably, violence against women provides a thematic undercurrent to Eminem’s work. Take Drips, where he angrily raps about catching sexually transmitted infections from some of the aforementioned ‘bitches’, eliciting the following response:

‘Now I don’t wanna hit no woman, but this chick’s got it comin’

Someone better get this bitch ‘fore she gets kicked in the stomach

And she’s pregnant, but she’s eggin’ me on, beggin’ me to throw her

Off the steps of this porch, my only weapon is force’

All song writing, but perhaps rap in particular, utilises double entendre and word play. Even so, in analysing words associated with violence in context across these two albums, such as ‘rape’, ‘choke’, and ‘kill’, we see just how explicit these themes are. The table below shows a selection of the words in their ‘concordance lines’, so you can see how they are being used in these lyrics.

For Georgia in particular, who has grown up with Eminem as the heralded voice of her generation, watching Obama rap those lyrics felt unsettlingly familiar. In a world where 1 woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by a member of her family, there are ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ leaders, and there are ‘it is absolutely men’s responsibility to fight sexism too’ leaders. While we would never equate the two, it’s hard not to feel helpless when even the latter still fawns over ‘bitch, I’mma kill you!’ men.

Monestising misogyny

Rap is celebrated for its supposedly lyrical grittly realism, as if these songs are the outpouring of the deep inner life of the artists who rap them. But sociologist Professor Ronald Weitzer and criminologist Professor Charis E Kubrin argue in a paper published in 2009 in the Men and Masculinities journal, that artists don’t exist in a vacuum. Rap lyrics are not the heartfelt musings of these celebrated artists, but a function of (at least) two key dynamics, the larger gender relations in society, and the machinations of the corporate music industry. The combination of these pressures is a lethal source of Big Misogyny. Situated in highly gendered societies, rap music is a crucial vehicle for the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity, where, as Weitzer and Kubrin argue:

to be a ‘man’ requires the acceptance of attitudes that objectify women, practices that subordinate them, and derogation of men who adopt an egalitarian orientation equally affirmative of men and women and all sexual orientations

Put in the hands of a voracious music industry, where there is pressure to maximize sales, the researchers also argue that:

record industry moguls encourage provocative, edgy lyrics. Producers not only encourage artists to become ‘hardcore’ but also reject or marginalize artists who go against the grain. As a result of such practices, a directly proportional relationship has developed between rap music’s explicitness and the sale of its records.

In this equation, women and girls are road kill. The authors report an interview with one aspiring rapper, who was asked why rap artists sing about violence and misogyny. In response, the rapper freestyled a verse about whether he could have been a doctor, a father or a policy officer, and then says ‘That’s nice, but nobody wanna hear that right now. They don’t accept that shit’. When asked ‘Who is ‘they’?’ the rapper answers, ‘The industry. They usually don’t give us deals when we speak righteously.’

In their own study of rap lyrics from highly successful songs, these researchers report that Eminem shows ‘unbridled hostility toward all women, including relatives’, to a degree that is ‘somewhat extreme but not unique in this music genre’. And there’s Obama and the Democrats celebrating a man who has made millions out of degrading and denigrating women. Would the Democrats have brought him on stage if his lyrics were racist? Unlikely.

Rap and climate

This brings us back to the issue of rap and climate - but more broadly, to the matter that messages are ‘delivered’ in some form, and these forms are crucial to their success. As Marshall McLuhan famously said ‘the medium is this message’ - or with a minor tweak, the form is an essential part of what is being communicated in any exchange. There’s plenty of discussion around the problem of how to communicate climate breakdown, and the urgency around it. It would help if some of the celebs with huge reach would do their bit. Imagine a new album by Jay Z where he dissed the fossil fuel cartel?

But while we are waiting for that to happen, how about putting in some eyeball time and likes with Baker Boy mentioned at the start, and Hila the Earth. Here’s her anti-Black Friday rap, posted just a few days back.

Or check out her ‘Dirty Talk’ rap:

Let us know in the comments of any other climate rappers you recommend.

People’s Blockade 2024: photo sourced from Rising Tide Facebook feed

An antidote to climate anxiety

People I admire tell me that action is the antidote to anxiety, so this year I signed up to join the Rising Tide ‘protestival’, centred on the world’s largest coal exporting port, just a couple of hours north of Sydney, at Newcastle.

I started by attending a screening of the film about last year’s blockade, The First Wave, when over 100 people got arrested including a 97-year-old Uniting Church Minister, the Reverend Alan Stuart. You can watch Alan’s arrest to cheers from his supporters here. It brought tears to my eyes to see a pretty fragile old man being assisted out of a boat and escorted away by a police officer.

In an opinion piece written after his arrest the Reverend explained his decision:

I did this for my grandchildren. I did this because I was inspired by my two granddaughters, Jasmine and Alexa, who are working so hard to address the climate crisis we face. I have been so proud watching both girls try so hard to get their voices heard for so many years. They’ve signed petitions, written letters, organised rallies, visited politicians, and educated the community … They have tried asking nicely, and their voices have continued to be ignored by our government. And then, in the past year, I have watched both my granddaughters get arrested for climate protests. It was hard to watch. I was scared for their safety and I wished they didn’t have to do it.

The Rising Tide doco on the 2023 protestival is below - you just need to find 20 minutes to get a feeling for what a ‘People’s Blockade’ is all about.

When I attended a screening of The First Wave, I asked if Rising Tide had invented the word ‘protestival’. I hadn’t come across it before, although of course I can hear what is going on in this new word. When you use a festival as a mechanism for a protest, well that’s a ’protestival’.

The word is not popular enough to have found its way into any major dictionary - not the Oxford English Dictionary, or the Macquarie Dictionary. The word was submitted to the Collins Dictionary in 2013, and the dictionary team say they are monitoring this word for ‘evidence of usage’. The Urban Dictionary of course has an entry.

On the question of whether Rising Tide had coined the word ‘protestival’, Nigel on behalf of Rising Tide answered my question with an air of faux authority: ‘Can you write “According to Nigel, we invented this new word”’. According to Nigel, Rising Tide invented this word.

From the Rising Tide Facebook feed, 24/11/24

But I’ve been doing my research, and while this is not quite true, Rising Tide could add to their current list of aims - 1. no new fossil fuel extraction projects, 2. tax fossil fuel exports at 78% to fund the energy transition and pay for climate loss and damage, and 3. end all coal exports from Newcastle by 2030 - one more: 4. make the word ‘protestival’ so popular it has to enter into our dictionaries.

Protestival in the news

With such a low frequency word, there’s not much data around. What the very large corpus of news data shows is that the term was around in the early 2010s being applied to the Seattle ‘hempfest’, then the world’s largest gathering of ‘marijuana lovers’. The hempfest’s executive director - an organization devoted to celebrating and legalizing marijuana has an executive director? - has written a history of the hempfest, using Protestival as its title.

The word puddled along for a few years inside cannibus culture, before breaking out into the climate protest space in 2021. Here’s an article from the Illawarra Mercury - a newspaper aimed at residents in the Wollongong area south of Sydney - on a climate gathering organized by Extinction Rebellion. In 2022, The Argus, a local Brighton newspaper, used ‘protestival’ to report on the annual Brighton Naked Bike Ride. I couldn’t find any copyrightable photos of this event, but you can google it and find them yourselves. According to The Argus, the naked bike ride is designed to:

empower participants in a celebration of car-free, human-powered travel, while also protesting against climate change and highlighting the vulnerability of cyclists and their strength and safety in numbers.

More people having fun while protesting.

Finally, in 2024 we start to see ‘protestival’ turning up in the news reporting on the People’s Blockade in Newcastle - I expect to see a bit more data rolling into this space over the next couple of weeks, and hopefully beyond.

Protestivaling in recent history

There are a couple of academic papers on the concept, which see the idea as part of a longer tradition than North American dope smoking gatherings. For instance, there’s an article published in 2008 titled ‘Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present’ by cultural anthropologist specializing in transformational events and movements, Dr Graham St John. St John argues that the combining of elements of festival with direct action protest go back at least to the late 1950s. In his history, St John traces this combination back to early anti-nuclear demonstrations, such as those by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches to Britain’s nuclear weapons research facility at Aldermaston in the lat 1950s, to the Greenham Common peace camp in Berkshire as well as the peace camp in Seneca in New York State. These camps were places where

women made spectacular vigil upon the military industrial apparatus, their often uncovered bodies forming an abject contrast to the phallic nuclear missiles harboured behind the wire. 

The protestival, St John argues is a ‘polyvalent tactic’ -  one that delivers many effects. Quoting work from Stam, published in Postmodernism and its Discontents in 1988, St John argues the current of festival-ness interwoven with direct action is very powerful:

while constituting ‘a demystifiying instrument for everything in the social formation that renders collectivity impossible: class hierarchy, sexual repression, patriarchy, dogmatism and paranoia’, carnival is simultaneously ‘ecstatic collectivity, the joyful affirmation of social change, a dress rehearsal for utopia’.

Friday night music at the 2024 People’s Blockade and Protestival

In summary, a protestival is a mode of organising with lots of strings to its bow, bringing joy and celebration together with aesthetic forms of protest designed to catch media and social media attention, so vital to changing our fossil fueled dominant narrative.

St John goes on to claim that the originator of the term was a Sydney activist named John Jacobs whose history is in anarchistic and artistic projects in Sydney, such as the Vibe Tribe. St John’s source is ‘personal communication’, meaning that it was Jacobs himself who told St John he’d made up this word. That’s as far as I have been able to uncover the origins of this term.

Ordinary people called by extraordinary times

So, with apologies to Nigel, Rising Tide didn’t invent the word ‘protestival’. But with over 100 people again arrested at this year’s blockade, including an 84 year old great grandmother, chances are that Rising Tide will be the catalyst that brings the term out into common parlance. One of the things in its favour is that Rising Tide is a cross-generational group - alongside the great grandma, a 16 year old was also arrested. And here’s a 12 year speaking out prior to the protestival when the NSW government tried to stop it going ahead by declaring an ‘exclusion zone’ for four days around the shipping channel, a decision soon after overturned by the NSW Supreme Court.

This young climate defender describes the government she is 6 years too young to have voted for as ‘throwing a tantrum’. It would be such a relief if more politicians could be the adults in the climate crisis. It is so hard watching so many young people having to step up to defend their futures.

Rising Tide describes itself in very simple terms:

We are the rising tide of ordinary people, called by extraordinary times. We are a diverse movement demanding Australia honours our commitment to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. We are prepared to take whatever peaceful actions are within our power to defend the climate.

That’s what I saw when I was there - so many ordinary people, as diverse as the fans at a Taylor Swift concert, responding to the call of these times. And I can barely explain how it felt to be on that beach, watching the colourful kayaks bobbing around on a choppy ocean, while a frighteningly enormous ship full of dirty and planet destroying coal motored its way from Australia’s shores.

As one coal ship steamed past the many climate defenders out on the water, I suddenly noticed a clan in red in a gesture towards this deathly cargo that seemed to me to embody both anger and grief. It was my first encounter with the red rebels from Extinction Rebellion.

I didn’t feel game enough to paddle out, so I signed up to be part of the crew washing up for the crew cooking and feeding the many activists and volunteers - in their hundreds and hundreds. Below is the line of breakfast bowls for Saturday morning’s brekky, which was delicious. I have cooked for large groups before, but nothing over about 30. I stood in awe of the cooks on duty, who had planned meals, shopped, organized huge pots and pans and tubs, manifold chopping boards and graters, long paddles for stirring hot pots cooking away. It felt so great to be washing up for these kitchen geniuses. As I popped in my notes feed a couple of days ago, it was the most therapeutic thing I’ve done since Trump was re-elected.

If you want to be ‘at the coalface’ of the climate fight, book your calendar for next year’s protestival. Please join and support Rising Tide. Currently their mech is ALL SOLD OUT - but you can still click on the donate button.