Far-right narratives of climate change acceptance and their role in addressing climate skepticism

Abstract

As research on far-right climate change communication focuses on climate skepticisms, little is known about how the far-right justifies climate acceptance—and what this might mean for environmental education and counter-communication. To initiate a discussion of communicative strategies through which far-right actors might become more accepting of climate mitigation, we, first, reconstruct the narrative structure underlying far-right climate acceptance. Drawing on insights this reconstruction provides and assuming that such acceptance contains lessons for persuasive communication with far-right skeptics, we, second, discuss a number of axioms for counter-communication to be used in environmental education and teaching practice.

Keywords:

• far right
• climate change communication
• narrative
• skepticism
• counter-communication

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this piece, we operationalize “far right” as the political ideology comprising, at its core, ethnonationalism (ethnicity is the key criteria of belonging to the nation) and authoritarianism (strong, order-like state and centralized leadership epitomized in a strongman).

2 In line with contemporary conventions, we use narrative and story interchangeable (Riessman, 2008, p. 7).