Climate skepticism: from anti-environmentalism to #climatecult
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation presents an analysis of the roles of scientific and religious discourse in the polarization of the American public sphere around environmentalism and anthropogenic climate change. Commentators frequently attribute division over climate issues to elite corporate and political actors who influence the public perception of science, either through actively promoting skepticism towards climate science, or through linking climate science with a pro-ecological spirituality. I supplement this broader framing with analysis of the affective dynamics that motivate the acceptance of climate skepticism. In this dissertation, I argue that climate skepticism can be understood in terms of its underlying cosmological frameworks, which have powerful affective dimensions. Drawing together religious studies perspectives with computational social science methods, I map the discursive networks of climate skepticism in both popular and elite contexts. First, I draw on historical scholarship and reading of popular texts to construct a genealogy of conservative anti-environmentalism, which coalesced around a defense of anthropocentric and pro-carbon free-market neoliberalism. I contend that anti-environmentalism frequently deployed religious tropes by framing environmental science as a covert propagation of an illegitimate nature religion. This set the stage for a polarization of climate change in the subsequent decades. By adopting a conspiratorial framework, however, anti-environmentalists launched an escalating process of suspicion towards scientific authority. This culminated in the furor over the so-called “Climategate” scandal in 2009, which I contextualize with scholarship on the affective and cognitive dynamics in the adoption of conspiratorial beliefs.
I then utilize word-embedding models to analyze a textual corpus compiled from key agents in the climate skeptical public: conservative think tanks online publications, cable news media transcripts, and climate skeptical blog posts and comment sections. I find that climate skeptical blogs represent a discursive shift in climate skepticism away from conventional anti-environmentalist ideology into a more general conspiratorial worldview. I then utilize network analysis to demonstrate the propagation of climate skepticism by users on the social media platform Twitter from 2008-2020. This dataset indicates that expressing climate skepticism on social media can be understood as a ritualized form of performative belief that mobilizes a conspiratorial counter-public in response to climate events.
Description
2024
License
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International