We discuss The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight it.

Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School, where she sits on the board of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Dr. Guenther advises NGOs, corporations, and policymakers on fossil-fuel disinformation and climate communication, and she serves as Expert Reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Her research has appeared in both scholarly journals and media outlets such as Scientific American, The New Republic, and MSNBC, and she has been invited to speak about climate and language to audiences at Duke, Columbia, and Harvard, among other universities.

Genevieve's website: https://genevieveguenther.com/

Get The Language of Climate Politics here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-language-of-climate-politics-9780197642238?cc=nl&lang=en&

Genevieve's op-ed in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/24/cop30-wrecked-fossil-fuels-russia-saudi-arabia-brazil

This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/

You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book).

Arthur Oldeman is a climate change researcher, communicator, consultant, and activist. After his engineering studies, he recently finished his PhD research on climate variability and atmospheric dynamics in warm past climates. He writes about everything climate on weblog Klimaatveranda.nl and puts his climate expertise to use in politics with GroenLinks and activism with Scientist Rebellion. Currently, he works as a climate adaptation and meteorology consultant at Weather Impact.

Sources:

Arthur’s PhD thesis: https://research-portal.uu.nl/en/publications/climate-variability-in-a-warm-past-the-mid-pliocene-as-an-analogu

Great blog by Aja Watkins on the more philosophical question if we can really know whether current climate change is unprecedented (related to the lack of knowledge of our geological history) https://www.extinctblog.org/extinct/2023/3/24/is-contemporary-climate-change-really-unprecedented

Great publication on past abrupt changes and their impacts https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00790-5

Climate action tracker - projecting temperature at the end of the century based on current policies, actions, pledges, etc: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-thermometer/

Interesting paper from a philosopher of science on the concept of analogy in paleoclimate (Wilson, 2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04202-6

More on the concept of uniformitarianism: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/uniformitarianism/

Weatherimpact: https://www.weatherimpact.com/

This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/

You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book)

The episode image is a photo of part of the cover of Arthur's PhD thesis and was designed by Mark van Hasselt: https://www.instagram.com/markvanhasselt/

This is the second part of our conversation about Mieke Bal's Moments of Meaning-Making: On Anachonism, Becoming, and Conceptualizing, published by Valiz.

Mieke Bal (1946) is a Dutch theorist, video artist, and a well-known writer and feminist. She has been a Professor in Literary Theory (University of Amsterdam). In 1994 she was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Bal has been teaching at many institutes and universities in Europe, US, and beyond. She is known for her specific ways of ‘deep-reading’ artworks (e.g. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Nalini Malani), and intertwining her research with various disciplines, such as contemporary and nineteenth-century literature, psycho-analysis, gender studies, philosophy, bible studies. Bal also works as a video artist, which she approaches as a specific form of cultural analysis.

Now that Mieke Bal is getting older —being very active and involved in many art and research projects—she has been ruminating on how to reflect on a full life with different roles and experiences. She did not want to write a navel-staring autobiography and came up with an ABC of Memories, and the concepts these have generated: key terms that have a specific value to her, that interlink as a mesh of meaning, weaving together daily experiences and teaching, her know-how to art making, to the core concepts of her analytical work.

This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/

You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book)

My previous interview with Mieke Bal is Episode 21: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nJr0OdC11WiZVcvAcVCOR?si=LSKWhfz5Sq-fuBLtK_KfDw