This paper conducts a comparative study of how the idea of hypocrisy was invoked in media coverage of climate change in twelve newspapers from four countries (Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, United States) between 2005 and 2015. It develops the concepts, and explores the characteristics, of three distinct types of climate hypocrisy: personalized (which attacks the moral character of individuals based upon inconsistencies between their stated beliefs and behaviour); institutional-analytic (which identifies contradictions between institutional rhetoric and ongoing policies and practices); and reflexive (which develops sympathetic accounts of the 2 struggles individuals face in reconciling the tension between values and actions). It explores how these types are used to undermine the credibility of climate advocates as well as to argue for more aggressive climate action, and maps out key features of climate hypocrisy discourse including ideological attributes, targeted actors and behaviours, affective intensity and regional variations. It outlines a number of surprising key findings, including (i) that hypocrisy discourses are more frequently invoked by 'progressives' supporting climate change action than by 'conservatives' resisting climate change action, and (ii) that while both groups use hypocrisy discourse, they tend to use very different types of hypocrisy discourses which each likely have very different impacts on climate change discourse..
Canada’s fossil fuel industry and its supporters have developed robust, aggressive, and affectively powerful forms of petro-nationalism to promote extractivism as a public good and demonize critics as anti-Canadian. This article investigates how industry critics and pipeline opponents have responded to this appropriation and instrumentalization of Canadian national identity. It conducts a multi-modal survey of the Facebook communication strategies of a broad spectrum of progressive English-Canadian civil society groups (political parties, environmental groups, Indigenous organizations, think tanks, labour groups, and alternative media) with a focus upon how Canada is represented. While some groups develop alternative accounts of the nation, they tend to be technocratic and depoliticized. Conversely, more politicized organizations that cultivate left-populist mobilization against extractivism and its state and corporate elites generally avoid framing their communication around ideas of the nation and signifiers of national identity. The article concludes by speculating upon the value and prospects of scaling up left-populist narratives around energy and climate in mounting a stronger challenge to petro-nationalism.
This paper interrogates how the notion of hypocrisy is invoked in relation to climate change and offers two key findings. First, it demonstrates that invocations of hypocrisy are not only deployed by conservative opponents of climate action, but also by progressive proponents of such action. Second, this article shows that while hypocrisy discourse is used to support both anti-and pro-climate change perspectives, its nature and function fundamentally differs depending on who is using it. The article identifies four discrete types of climate hypocrisy discourse. Conservatives who reject climate change action tend to use two "modes" of hypocrisy discourse. The first is an "individual lifestyle outrage" mode that cultivates outrage about the hypocritical behavior and lifestyle choices of climate activists to undermine the urgency and moral need for climate change action. The second, an "institutional cynicism" mode, encourages a cynical fatalism about any proposed governmental action regarding climate change by suggesting that governments are necessarily climate hypocrites because of the economic and political impossibility of serious emissions reductions. In contrast, progressives use hypocrisy discourse in two different modes. The first involve an "institutional call to action" mode that uses charges of hypocrisy to attack government inaction on climate change and demand that effective action be taken in line with their public commitment to climate action. Secondly, they also employ a "reflexive" mode in which explorations of the ubiquity of climate change hypocrisy illuminate the dilemmas that virtually all responses to climate change necessarily grapple with in our current context. Overall, the article seeks to contribute to our understanding of climate change communications by (i) showing that hypocrisy discourse is not simply a sensationalist PR strategy of conservatives but is rather a broad, significant and multi-faceted form of climate change discourse; and (ii) suggesting that certain modes of hypocrisy discourse might not only represent genuine attempts to make sense of some of the fundamental tensions of climate change politics but also help us understand the challenge that the "entanglement" of personal agency/choice within broader political structures presents, and thus heighten positive affective commitments to climate change action.
Under the guise of national and international capital flows, Vancouverites are reconstituted in the image of real estate speculation. This emerging subjectivity is a lens through which homelessness is criminalized, poverty is rationalized, and disruption is fetishized. This photo-essay steps into this gaze, offering a critical perspective on the transformation of housing from a discourse of rights to the language of finance.
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