Rekindling and Reframing
Just over three years ago I found myself on a train up to Glasgow to for the twenty sixth Conference of the Parties on climate change. Driven by some vague journalistic aspirations I started a blog, and called it ‘The Week of Our Lives’. I was pleased with the title – short, eye-catching, multiple potential meanings. Funnily enough it did end up becoming one of the most formative weeks of my life, but to assume the same would be true for the climate was, in hindsight, a pretty bold call.
Coming into an event like COP26, the way you frame the problem can be a delicate tightrope to walk. Sufficient urgency is needed to reflect the situation and encourage action, but it must be tempered to avoid inducing desperation and despair. The more time I spend studying and working on climate-related issues, the more important I realise such framing is. The idea of the ‘carbon footprint’ was in fact created by the oil industry to foreground individual responsibility, Donald Trump and his political equivalents perpetually trigger ideas that decarbonisation hinders economic growth, and framing climate as a corporate opportunity inevitably leads to action that is dominated by market-based solutions. Stepping back to undertake a Master’s has given me the space to think about the frames that I and those around me have been operating in.
Rekindling this blog has been a long-term ambition, and a long-time coming. Finally, the excuses have run out, and I feel well-equipped to try my hand at re-thinking some of the key contemporary debates in climate action. I want to focus on issues where I see limited attention and huge potential, particularly those that I think could benefit, as per the fresh new blog title, from a reframing. The core theme running through this blog will be the need to re-conceptualise climate change from a simple market failure or problem of technology transfer, to a multi-dimensional breakdown rooted in a very specific mix of historic social, cultural and – in particular- political conditions. Thinking in this way opens up a realm of practical possibilities for the genuine transformative change that is needed. There is a huge amount more that could and should be added here, and I hope that such facile co-options of language like ‘transformative’ do not sound too hollow/XR/’overthrow the system’ type vibes. What I am looking to demonstrate are practical, achievable alternative pathways rooted in everyday experience, alternatives that start with reframing the problem.
Framing, which I take here to mean the way issues are understood, is operationalised through language and communication. In this first post, I want to briefly look at what I see as some key misuses of language which feed the damaging frames dominating current climate discourse, and therefore (in)action. Some of these may seem minor, and they are a pretty incongruous bunch, but they have each arrived on this page through the uniting characteristics of prevalence, negative influence, and ability to continually pop up annoyingly in my brain over a number of years. Hopefully setting them out will give a good sense of what this blog is all about. Quickly, and to illustrate in very brief terms how frames operate in the context of climate change, I have put together a brief schematic based on George Marshall’s fantastic book ‘Don’t Even Think About It: Why our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change’, and the work of his NGO Climate Outreach. Note, this is very much a sociology/psychology approach to the issue, and underplays the influence of politics and culture, which come aggressively into play under frames ‘we know and understand’ … ’influenced by belief systems and social groups’.
“The planet”
‘We need to act now to save the planet’. How often have do we hear such an assertion? While its sentiment is clearly well-founded, it can trigger dangerous framings. Psychologists working on climate identified long ago the idea of ‘psychological distance’. Climate change has traditionally been seen as a future issue for far-away populations, and this distance has unsurprisingly been found to decrease engagement, as issues perceived as more immediate fill up the consciousness. In order to tackle this phenomenon, psychologists called for less polar bears, less melting ice caps, and less images of poverty and disaster from communities in far away places. This led to a shift in communication, and the more regular highlighting of flooding, heatwaves, and other issues which will most directly and most imminently afflict the Global North. Omitted from this cogent overhaul was the oft-cited victim of environmental degradation, ‘the planet’. The image such terminology conjures in our minds is perhaps less tangible and more ‘distant’ than even polar bears and ice caps. We all have an image of a blue orb in our minds, but it is very difficult to draw direct relation between it and our everyday lives, however bizarre that might at first sound. Instead, we should focus on the direct consequences of climate change, not only physical impacts but the social disruption they will cause, from conflict to mass migration and the breakdown of supply chains.
“What about China?”
My second piece of analysis is a proper axe grinder. More than just a bit of frame-triggering language, this sort of phrasing is an entire frame in itself, and one that we have all heard (and perhaps even used). I don’t resent this because it’s necessarily xenophobic (although I’m sure there’s a hefty overlap), indeed in many ways it can seem pragmatic and logical. I think there are X key issues with such language, and therefore thinking:
1. Historical responsibility:
There is nothing revolutionary about what I am going to say here (which implies a slightly misleading assertion there was about anything else I’ve said). There are multiple ways to cut emissions. Based on current annual emissions China is the big baddie, but the emissions in the atmosphere are the result of decades of pollution. Emissions are tightly bound to GDP per capita, and it is thus inarguable that we have all directly benefitted from their production. There is no woke apologism here, it is simple logic, and thus simple morals that we bare more responsibility than others.
2. Population size
A similarly classic rebuttal. The atmosphere does not see national boundaries. If we hadn’t decided to frame climate governance as a global problem for a set of united(?) nations to solve, we could just as easily attribute responsibility to individuals, communities or companies. From such perspectives, like per capita emissions, we once again become a far greater villain than China.
3. Emissions offshoring
The standard way to attribute emissions is, as noted, by country. Specifically, it is the emissions produced within the borders of that country, or in technical terms, ‘territorial’ emissions. This is standard practice, and shapes the way we view the climate problem and our ‘common but differentiated’ (UN speak) responsibility to solve it. In reality, this is very much a partial view, for such an analysis of where emissions are produced hides why they are produced. In 2024, the UK had a trade deficit of £28 billion according to the House of Commons Library, meaning it imports more than it exports in monetary terms. If such figure were was to be given in terms of material resources, or emissions intensity of those resources, the deficit would likely be significantly larger, and a lot of it would come from China. Yes, China has a lot of coal fired power plants, but in many cases they are making things for us. The way we do emissions accounting allows us to hide this otherwise obvious fact.
4. Low-carbon leadership:
As noted, China does indeed have a lot of coal fired power plants. It also, increasingly, has a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, and its vast investments in developing and scaling these technologies have driven rapid price reduction and enabled their uptake around the world. The CCP are far from angelic operators, but they fear internal discontent and are highly practiced at seizing opportunities to capture market share on the global stage. Reaching net zero by 2060, a target which no one expected them to set, will combat fractious internal issues of air pollution and environmental degradation, while establishing their hegemonic position for the 21st century through the dominance of low carbon supply chains. With Trump in place and his impersonators looming over European politics, the path China has set itself on means it could easily become the driver of global environmental action over the coming decades.
“Eco”-Anything
Climate action is saturated in terminology. ‘Sustainable’, ‘Green’, and ‘ESG’ have all been important signifiers and drivers of engagement at different points in the past three decades. Their success and ubiquity has perhaps undermined their meaning, and they have on occasion been conduits of greenwash. Each term can still, however, be justified in its cautious use. The fourth horseman of the genre by contrast, needs to go. ‘Eco-friendly’ products were once the domain of the detergent aisle in Tesco, broadening to garden fertilisers and the occasional bathroom luxury. The term was then cleverly co-opted against environmentalists who were branded eco-warriors, and it has remained synonymous with those with an ‘interest’ in climate and nature. It is prevalent in far right discourse (see eco-evangelism etc) but sometimes slips into mainstream discourse too. This final crusade is far less scientifically rooted than others, but one that I hope finds instinctive agreement.
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