Elite cues,media coverage,and public concern: an integrated path analysis of public opinion on climate change, 2001–2013

To analyze the factors affecting US public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2013, data from 74 separate surveys are used to construct quarterly measures of public concern over global climate change. Five factors should account for changes in levels of concern: extreme weather events, public access to accurate scientific information, media coverage, elite cues, and movement/countermovement advocacy. Structural equation modeling indicates that elite cues, movement advocacy efforts, weather, and structural economic factors influence the level of public concern about climate change. While media coverage exerts an important influence, it is itself largely a function of elite cues and economic factors. Promulgation to the public of scientific information on climate change has no effect. Information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern.     

Mobilizing environmental sentiment through the media

ABSTRACT

Recent research into the best ways to mobilize people to act on climate change suggests that careful, and relatively positive, emotional framing is critical. However, environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) need to not only mobilize publics, but also attract media coverage. If the media prefers negativity or is skeptical of ENGOs’ emotive appeals, are ENGOs’ emotional frames damaging their ability to gain media attention? Quantitative sentiment analysis is used to identify emotional framing in a targeted case study of 350.org’s public press releases and their subsequent media coverage. The results suggest that appropriate emotional frames for mobilization are not necessarily detrimental to gaining media attention, and that ENGO press releases influence media coverage, when they are used. Several concrete suggestions emerge for how ENGOs might use press releases more effectively, if they seek to influence the media’s emotional tone on climate change.     

(De)legitimating extractivism: the shifting politics of social licence

ABSTRACT

Most scholarly accounts of social licence define it as a public relations strategy to legitimate resource development. In Canadian pipeline politics, however, it has had the opposite effect, crystallizing widespread concerns about industry capture of regulatory processes and affirming the democratic rights of local communities. This assessment of the concept’s critical, counter-hegemonic potential to challenge the policies, practices and logic of state-sponsored extractivist development situates social licence as a key discursive battleground in the struggle between politicization (which accents agonistic confrontation between competing alternative futures) and de-politicization (which defuses conflict and builds consensus around the perception of common interests). Frame analysis of news media and advocacy group texts is used to investigate how opponents of a pipeline project bridged the idea of social licence with movement frames concerning identity, injustice and democratic agency to transform the concept from a public relations term meant to enable corporate activity into a critical trope used to constrain it.     

The discovery of ash dieback in the UK: the making of a focusing event

Why did the identification of ash dieback (Chalara Fraxinea) in 2012 in the UK catch the national media, public, and political zeitgeist, and lead to policy changes, in a way that no other contemporary tree pest or pathogen outbreak has? The identification of ash dieback in the UK is conceptualised as a successful ‘focusing event’, and the ways in which it was socially constructed by the media, stakeholders, and the government are analysed. National newspaper coverage contributed to the way that the disease was understood and was significant in driving the political response. Ash dieback’s focal power derived from the perceived scale and nature of its impact, the initial attribution of blame on government, the war-like response from the government, and Ash’s status as a threatened native tree. The ash dieback focusing event has increased the salience of plant health issues amongst policymakers, the public, and conservation organisations in the UK.     

Divestment discourse: war,justice, morality and money

The fossil fuel divestment movement has been a vibrant novel development in climate change politics in recent years, particularly in North America. Here, the character of the discourse used to promote divestment as a strategy is explored. The divestment discourse is shown to rest on four overlapping narratives, those of war and enemies, morality, economics and justice. All four are clearly discernible in statements from movement activists, in coverage of divestment campaigns by major news sources and in the movement’s aims, objectives and strategies covered in alternative media. The war narrative, with the formulation of fossil fuel companies as enemies to be overcome to ensure survival, is the dominant narrative. By polarising climate action and identifying an antagonist against which to mobilise, divestment discourse has articulated climate change as an explicitly political phenomenon, in contrast to the primarily consensus and collaboration-based approaches that have predominated in climate politics.     

A pipeline of tweets: environmental movements’ use of Twitter in response to the Keystone XL pipeline

Social movements often amalgamate otherwise diffuse public political interests. In recent years, social media use has allowed both groups and individuals to engage with political issues both online and offline. How do organizations use Twitter to mobilize networked publics? To what extent do groups promote both ‘connective action’ online and traditional activism offline? How do their strategies differ according to whether they seek to promote or combat the status quo? And how do they balance encouraging and reinforcing individualized expression through group messaging? The ways pro-Keystone XL pipeline and anti-Keystone XL groups differed in their Keystone-related action on Twitter from January 2010 until October 2014 are analyzed. Boolean searching and Natural Language processing are used to analyze more than three million tweets. The results demonstrate that the frames within Twitter conversations have significant implications for how communities understand, develop, and mobilize around environmental issues.     

Reinventing the bicycle: how calculative practices shape urban environmental governance

The concept of sustainability transitions has become increasingly prominent in academic and policy discourses during recent decades, but the importance of the link between knowledge-producing epistemic practices and urban governance has been underappreciated in this discourse. Based on a case study of cycling in Copenhagen between 1900 and 2015, and drawing upon a governmentality-inspired analytical framework, this research demonstrates that transformative governance may be initiated by epistemic practices that render urban systems visible in other ways. Urban cycling has been reconstructed over time in Copenhagen as a traffic safety ‘problem’, a component of the experiential and liveable city, and a health-producing (and hence economically valuable) regional transport mode. The research findings emphasise that epistemic practices can provide a powerful stimulus for creating changes in urban governance. The results also provide support for initiatives to broaden the terms of academic debate on sustainability transitions.     

When do climate change,sustainability, and economic development considerations overlap in cities?

Overlaps between economic development, sustainability and climate change objectives have both political and practical implications for the development of policies addressing climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, little empirical research has systematically investigated factors underlying these overlaps. Here, survey responses from 287 cities in the US are used to explore associations between the presence of such overlaps and these cities’ policy actions and contextual conditions. Patterns in the presence of these overlaps are described, which help shed light on the political economy underlying policymakers’ considerations about overlapping climate change mitigation and adaptation considerations with economic development or sustainability. Policymakers’ considerations about the possible political co-benefits and political trade-offs of these objective overlaps will play a critical role in shaping interconnected policy responses to complex challenges like climate change in the years ahead.     

Moving targets: Carbon pricing,energy markets,and social movements in Australia

Reporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of movement activity has been negotiations over climate policy. More recently, activists and communities are engaged in a struggle over the expansion of fossil fuels. A third contest has been waged over the present and future position of renewable energy technologies in Australia’s electricity market. In the wake of climate policy failure, energy campaigns have been deepened, and it seems that a broader energy justice agenda is being forged. New strategic dilemmas are visible in the field.     

Does climate denialism still matter? The prevalence of alternative frames in opposition to climate policy

Issue frames portraying climate science as uncertain are cited as a key impediment to new climate change and energy policies. However, some have recently argued that the debate over policy impacts, especially policy impacts on consumers, has become more politically salient than the debate over science. This study applies qualitative content analysis to 340 documents from the conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, to test whether certain policy frames have become more common among leading opponents of climate policy in the United States. The results indicate a continued reliance on science framing, with more directed attacks on climate scientists and fewer frames stressing the uncertainty of climate science. An increase in the use of policy frames related to effects on consumers also suggests that opposition to climate policy is taking new forms as the political debate evolves, with ramifications for climate change policy opposition on an international scale.     

New subjects in the politics of energy transition? Reactivating the northern German oil and gas infrastructure

The global circulation of the word ‘fracking’ seems to testify to a setback for energy transitions, a nexus that has not yet received much scholarly attention. In light of this, the controversy over fracking is understood as furthering infrastructural changes that are central to energy transitions. Infrastructure should not be understood as materiality per se but instead as sedimented but ultimately discursive elements that can be reactivated and rearticulated. Examining ‘infrastructure’ from the point of view of discourse theory places the focus on infrastructural change. Prior to 2011, the oil and gas infrastructure in northern Germany was largely invisible to the public. The subsequent reassembling of production with fracking facilitated the politicization not just of that term but also of the whole infrastructure. Instead of routinely reproducing the infrastructure, subjects that had formerly dominated the field were confronted with new and heterogeneous voices that challenged their agency.     

The politics of curtailment: multi-level governance and solar photovoltaic power generation in China

The rise of China’s photovoltaic (PV) industry, and the concomitant curtailment problem, provides an opportunity to reconsider China’s industrial governance. It is argued here that the curtailment is intertwined with the multi-level character of China’s energy governance. Borrowing the insights of multi-level governance (MLG), we identify the relevant stakeholders situated at different levels and clarify their positions and considerations concerning the solar PV industry. MLG analysis reveals that curtailment in China’s solar PV industry was primarily the result of uncoordinated development at different levels – sub-provincial, provincial, national, and international. China’s response to the curtailment problem is then examined, considering whether such policy adjustments will contribute to greater societal participation, changes in development ideas, an improved coordination mechanism, or alternative institutional arrangements.     

Vetoing the future: political constraints and renewable energy

Despite the increased importance of and attention to renewable energy, its share in the overall energy mix has varied significantly across countries and over time. There are many determinants of clean energy transitions; this study focuses on political constraints. Here it is argued that political systems that have fewer political constraints have fewer access points through which powerful status quo veto players can slow the progress of clean energy reforms. To test the theory, a hierarchical model is applied on a dataset of 125 countries over four decades. The results provide significant support for the theory. Furthermore, the effects for political constraints hold even when we distinguish between hydro and non-hydro renewable sources and control for regime type. This study builds on research that recognizes the importance of politics in understanding the challenges and opportunities of clean energy reform.     

The News You Choose: news media preferences amplify views on climate change

How do choices among information sources reinforce political differences on topics such as climate change? Environmental sociologists have observed large-scale and long-term impacts from news media and think-tank reports, while experimental science-communication studies detect more immediate effects from variations in supplied information. Applying generalized structural equation modeling to recent survey data, previous work is extended to show that political ideology, education and their interaction predict news media information choices in much the same way they predict opinions about climate change itself. Consequently, media information sources serve as intervening variables that can reinforce and, through their own independent effects, amplify existing beliefs about climate change. Results provide empirical support for selective exposure and biased assimilation as mechanisms widening political divisions on climate change in the United States. The findings fit with the reinforcing spirals framework suggesting partisan media strengthens climate change beliefs which then influences subsequent use of media.     

Pathways to policy: Partisanship and bipartisanship in renewable energy legislation

The effort to transition energy sources away from dependence on fossil fuels has become highly divided along partisan lines in some countries, but the social-science literature has not yet caught up with this important problem. Policy-adoption studies do not address the specific problem of polarization and gridlock, and the literature on gridlock does not examine conditions for breaking gridlock for renewable energy and energy efficiency (REEE) policy. Qualitative research can help to fill the void by identifying strategies that legislators use for achieving support for REEE policy where there is gridlock, polarization, and/or strong opposition. Interview data from a stratified sample of US states reveals three strategies that state-government legislators use to enhance REEE policy development under these conditions: bring to the process countervailing industrial interests to align REEE with business; transfer decision making to public service commissions; and use extra-legislative consultation processes to develop stakeholder consensus.     

Negotiating energy democracy in practice: governance processes in community energy projects

There is a growing ‘energy democracy’ (ED) movement which regards the transition to renewable energy as an opportunity for socio-economic transformation, as well as technological innovation. The literature on ED tends to associate greater democratic control of energy systems with increased community control over the means of energy generation and distribution. Nonetheless, this literature often assumes rather than demonstrates that the forms of governance it promotes are more democratic than the status quo. This analysis contributes to the emerging field of ED by assessing the complex and varied ways in which communities in Scotland practise energy governance. By focusing on three key governance processes (decision-making, accountability and dispute resolution), the importance of local contexts for the establishment and negotiation of democratic practices is demonstrated. This local specificity, however, also raises further questions regarding the universal applicability of the ED concept.     

The Czech Republic’s approach to the EU 2030 climate and energy framework

ABSTRACT

The East-West divide within the EU over climate policy has been frequently discussed. There is a tendency in the literature to focus on Poland and ignore the other countries in the central and eastern European region. Here it is argued that the institutionalised cooperation between the four countries in the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) provides a crucial component for an understanding of how the participating countries approach EU climate negotiations. Here it is suggested that the group is important as a bargaining coalition but also as a reference point for the development of shared ‘Visegrad’ norms in the field. This is based on a case study of the Czech Republic’s approach to the 2014 negotiations on the 2030 climate and energy framework and the country’s cooperation with the other Visegrad countries on the issue.     

The environmental state at sea

Seas and oceans are confronted with a plethora of environmental problems, caused by land-based activities (agriculture, industries, and ports) and by maritime activities (such as shipping, fishing, oil and gas drilling, tourism, and navigational dredging). Environmental problems at sea challenge the efficacy of state sovereignty. Who is responsible, accountable, and regulates environmental and spatial problems at the level of regional seas, and what is the role of states in these processes of governance? In the regional seas and on the high seas, the environmental state is challenged by two developments: states become players at different levels, and states are confronted with the activities of big market players where they have no or little jurisdiction. The different forms of the environmental state in Europe’s regional seas and in the Arctic Ocean are examined.     

Explaining support for renewable energy: commitments to self-sufficiency and communion

ABSTRACT

Across the political spectrum, people favour renewable energy. For political liberals, this support has been attributed to concern for the environment; in contrast, the bases of conservatives’ support are less clear. Derived from interviews with a diverse sample of households in Washington State, USA, and a vignette experiment with a representative sample of American households, results show that Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) have different moral intuitions, with Democrats emphasizing communion and both Democrats and Republicans valuing self-sufficiency. These findings explain how politically polarized environmental attitudes can exist alongside a shared support for renewable energy. The study therefore contributes to the literature on environmental concern and behaviour, and has implications for policies aimed at increasing adoption of renewable energy as well as pro-environmental behaviour more broadly.