The Plot Against Climate

Part 1: Naming villains and setting stakes

With apologies for assuming you care about small creative distinctions, I want to start by talking about why we shouldn’t call ourselves climate storytellers anymore.

“Storyteller” has become so hopelessly overused in marcom that it’s been stripped of all the campfire-bard connotation it once carried. Now it means “I am a precocious child” or “I work in marketing” or both, I suppose, if there was ever a Doogie Howser meets Mad Men situation (which is a show I’d definitely watch).

So storyteller is out. Fine. What I’m here to suggest is that we don’t want to be storytellers.

We want to be plotters

In his slim and seminal book Aspects of a Novel, E.M. Forster defines a story:

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story.
“The king died; and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.

The magic of his differentiation is that it comes to two small words: of grief. Those are all that’s needed to grant us psychological insight to the queen: she loved him; she loved him so much it killed her. How tragic! Forster’s definition of plot, then, can be described as a story wherein actions are motivated by intentions that carry emotional stakes. Stories are a timeline of the decline of Rome; plots are the assassination of Julius Caesar by the coward Brutus and his gang of senators.

What drives a good climate plot?

Climate messaging writ large leaves the bad guys out of the story as a rule. So often, it’s chiefly about the damage already done, the urgency to act, and the science that underpins both. But what if we framed things differently?

What if instead of only telling the hard-to-keep-up-with story—record highs, melting glaciers, overheating oceans, vanishing albedo, tragic natural disasters—we gave some real estate to the plot? What if we turned our collective focus to the presently unfolding assassination of life as we know it by greedy Big Oil and the cowardly Republican party beholden to it? That carries some real emotional weight. And if you want people invested—if you want to build a movement—you need emotion. It’s one of the most potent currencies we’ve got.

Which brings us to anger

Anger can be useful. Properly channeled, anger is an asset. And the list of things to be mad at Big Oil about is inexhaustibly long and includes:

Huge deceptions. Like the $1 billion in climate subsidies Big Oil lobbied for—to expand their profits—while simultaneously working to gut the very emissions rules that were supposed to enforce transparency and environmental safeguards.

Small frauds. Like when Dr. Lindsey Gulden, an Exxon scientist, blew the whistle in 2019 on over $10 billion worth of fraud after discovering Permian Basin projections had been deliberately overvalued.

I blew the whistle in 2019 on over 10 billion dollars worth of fraud at ExxonMobil…

Or as she later asked during the Labor Department dispute:

If they can defraud investors … how can they be trusted with anything as important as confronting climate change?

Here’s a thing I’m angry about daily: that it’s not possible to comprehensively message about climate without naming the villains—and yet it’s so rarely done, and even more rarely are the bad guys actually properly blamed. And for as much as I like to focus on Big Oil, how long has it been since climate became explicitly political? Decades. Decades in which Big Oil has harnessed the power of one of our two political parties to disguise broad effects, distract public attention, and divert public resources. And yet, particularly in journalism, climate coverage still bends over backwards to seem “nonpartisan.”

Dave Roberts, host of the Volts pod (which I can’t recommend highly enough, btw), put it bluntly in a recent thread dissecting the New York Times’ contortions to appease the right:

“If you do good journalism & report accurately, you convey a worldview that is broadly congenial to liberals & infuriating to the right (not in every case, but generally). Journalism has to choose. And it is choosing, over and over again, to betray itself.”

“Again: there is not some other approach whereby the NYT could represent the right more & still do high-quality, multiply-sourced, factchecked journalism. It's a null set. That's not journalism's fault, it's the right's fault.”

That’s the bind. Journalism—at least the legacy, elite kind—has convinced itself that neutrality is nobler than clarity. But clarity would force it to admit something that breaks the polite rules of both-sides discourse:

Big Oil is the big villain

Not just metaphorically. Structurally. Strategically. The industry has known for decades that its products are destabilizing the planet. It chose—again and again—to protect profits over people. It buried internal research, funded disinformation campaigns, invented the notion of a carbon footprint as a means of shifting blame, and sold the public on delay disguised as compromise. And yet the dominant story we tell about climate still tiptoes around the fact that there’s a coordinated, well-funded villain actively undermining our chances of survival. That’s not storytelling. That’s negligence.

Now let’s talk about plot

If climate messaging were structured like a proper plot—with emotional stakes, escalating tension, and clearly defined protagonists and antagonists—Big Oil would already be cast. No audience would miss it. No reader would mistake the hero for the saboteur.

And yet here we are.

Still narrating around the point. Still avoiding the obvious. Still treating emissions like weather patterns—happening to us, not because of us. Still acting like this is some tragic accident, instead of what it actually is: a goddamn crime.

They’re not even hiding it. In April 2024, Trump met with top oil execs at Mar-a-Lago, asked them for $1 billion in campaign cash, and in return promised to do their bidding. They gave him about half that: $445 million in the 2024 cycle. Now they’re calling in favors, and he’s already delivering. That’s what we’re up against. Not just corporate malfeasance. We’re up against an industry that has captured a political party and is using it as an instrument of obstruction.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it makes for a helluva gripping plot. And that’s where we’ll pick up in Part 2.