Polar Bears and Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs: Strategies to Bring Climate Change Home

Abstract

Global climate change is the focus of climate politics organized across scales by a range of organizations. These organizations represent climate change in ways they hope will make the problem relevant to people and thereby inspire political action. The strategies require a choice of objects to bring climate change home to constituents. Some objects are ‘more local’ to certain constituencies—that is, they are more meaningful. Greenpeace Canada represents the impact of climate change via the object of the hungry polar bear. The Cities for Climate Protection campaign makes climate change relevant, in part, by its focus on the cost-saving benefits of energy efficiency. The process of localizing climate change constitutes society. I use feminist science studies as a theoretical basis to support my argument that organizations localizing climate change might choose objects that are more accountable to their constitutive effects on societies. I point out potential pitfalls in the choice of the polar bear and energy efficiency, and suggest some possibility in these objects.

‘On the outside’: constructing cycling citizenship

“…There seemed to be a gap between people's ability to describe their local environment and talk about it as an "environment", and their ability to do the same at a larger scale. This reflects the difficulty that many people have in localising major environmental issues (Slocum 2004a) and the fact that most interviewees had not taken up cycling primarily because of a "green" mindset. Thus discussion of "environmental issues" forms only a small proportion of the overall dataset.…”

Changement climatique, authenticité et marketing des régions nordiques

“…Le père Noël (aussi appelé saint Nicolas et Santa Claus) a été décrit comme la plus grande marque au monde (Arruda, 2003 ;voir aussi Aaltonen, 2004, pour (Slocum, 2004) et le renne (Hukkinen et al, 2006), le père Noël est un symbole évocateur de la région arctique et du pôle Nord dans la plupart des parties du monde . La présence du père Noël dans les centres commerciaux, les magasins de détail et les maisons à la grandeur presque des pays développés, d'octobre à décembre, fournit par ailleurs un fort renforcement visuel à la marque et son association avec la fête de Noël encourage manifestement la consommation, l'échange de cadeaux, les dépenses et la connectivité émotionnelle avec la marque, comme partie intégrante de ce qui est appelé l'« esprit de Noël » (Clarke, 2006 ; Pourtant, bien qu'il y ait une documentation abondante sur le père Noël en tant que marque (Otnes et al, 1994 ;O'Cass et Clarke, 2002 ;Pine et Nash, 2002 ;Snellman, 2006a ;Pine et al, 2007 ;Coca-Stefaniak et al, 2008), il y a peu de débats scientifiques concernant la contribution du père Noël sur le plan de la compétitivité des destinations de latitude Nord et sur les façons dont les différentes destinations ont cherché à s'approprier ce personnage .…”

Concerned consumption. Global warming changing household domestication of energy

“…This suggests a lack of significant relations between total energy consumption and consumers´ value patterns, motives and problem perceptions, implying that climate change concerns will have little significance (Abrahamse et al, 2005;Slocum, 2004;Thollander et al, 2010;Throne-Holst et al, 2007). However, this lack of influence may depend on the way households' consumption of energy is regarded by the surrounding community.…”