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How do we understand political polarization within the U.S. climate change debate? This paper unpacks the different components of the debate to determine the source of the political divide that is so noted in the mainstream media and academic literatures. Through analysis of the content of Congressional Hearings on the issue of climate change, we are able to explain political polarization of the issue more fully. In particular, our results show that, contrary to representations in the mainstream media, there is increasing consensus over the science of the issue. Discussions of the type of policy instrument and the economic implications of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, however, continue to polarize opinion. This paper concludes by exploring how these findings help us understand more recent political events around climate change.

Participants at the Women’s March were motivated by issues that cross identity and issue-based themes in systematic ways.

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The theory of ecological modernization has received growing attention over the past decade, but in the process, it has been interpreted in con icting and sometimes contradictory ways. In this article, we attempt to bring greater clarity to the discussion. Reviewing the works both by the theory's best-known proponents and by its most outspoken critics, we note that dif culties are created not just by the combining of theoretical predictions and policy prescriptions-a point that has already been noted in the literature-but also by the stark and highly signi cant differences in expectations between ecological modernization and most prevailing theories of society-environment relationships. Perhaps in part because of these differences, disagreements have often been expressed in stark, black-and-white terms. If the problems are to be resolved, there will be a need for greater theoretical precision, developed in conjunction with empirical research that is more focused, more nely differentiated, and more rigorous.Roughly 10 years ago, Society and Natural Resources published the rst article on the theory of ecological modernization in the English language (Spaargaren and Mol 1992). Since then, the arguments of ecological modernization have received growing attention, both within the subdiscipline of environmental sociology and in broader debates over major social theories (see, e.g.