“Life and death are under the power of language” – Helene Cixous.

Dear Climate Healers,

2025 is expected to be the second hottest year behind 2024 in the global temperature record, despite it being a La Niña year.

“The three-year average for 2023-2025 is on track to exceed 1.5 degrees C for the first time,” said Dr. Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). She added, “These milestones are not abstract—they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change and the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Language matters. The fact is that the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, not just reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

There is a difference.

The global temperature will continue to rise even if we are emitting less greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as long as the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise. That is, as long as our greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere are net positive, we are going to experience continued worsening of the Earth’s climate.

This is blindingly obvious and yet, our mainstream climate spokespeople are reluctant to say it. Their language on climate mitigation is deceptive as it makes us focus on fossil fuel combustion and not animal agriculture. If Dr. Burgess had said, “the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,” then the public would likely focus on animal agriculture. The elimination of animal agriculture frees up land on which we can restore forests and sequester carbon. That would cause reductions in the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

By wording it as “the only way to mitigate future rising temperatures is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions (into the atmosphere),” Dr, Burgess is turning the public’s focus away from animal agriculture and towards fossil fuel combustion. Climate spokespeople like former Vice President Al Gore and Bill McKibben have successfully hammered into the public’s minds that fossil fuel combustion is the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, these climate spokespeople don’t talk about the Faustian bargain of fossil fuel combustion that if we wave a magic wand and eliminate fossil fuel use overnight, we can expect the global warming on our planet to increase by 50-90% in a matter of weeks as their co-emitted cooling aerosols disappear from the atmosphere.

Misleading language has tragic consequences.

Last week, a Vegan activist reported that Google is substituting Vegetarian for Vegan in its translations. Yesterday, I tried to post a review for the Vegan restaurant, Crossroads Kitchen in Las Vegas on Google and discovered that Google only has “Vegetarian” and no “Vegan” option for food type selection,

By blurring Vegan and Vegetarian in its language, Google glosses over the enormous ecological impact of dairy consumption and obscures the fact that dairy is the first domino that urgently needs to fall in our path to ecological sustainability.

On Planet B, compassionate spokespeople would not use such language subterfuges to mislead the public.

With much love,