The unbearable lightness of climate populism

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on what I refer to as Climate Populism and how this structures not only many radical climate movements but also the liberal climate consensus. I argue that the architecture of most mainstream as well as more radical climate discourses, practices, and policies is strictly parallel to that of populist discourses and should be understood as an integral part of a pervasive and deepening process of post-politicization. Mobilising a process that psychoanalysts call ‘fetishistic disavowal’, the climate discourse produces a particular form of populism that obscures the power relations responsible for the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. I shall mobilise a broadly Lacanian-Marxist theoretical perspective that permits accounting for this apparently paradoxical condition of both acknowledging and denying the truth of the climate situation, and the discourses/practices that sustain this.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate Populism
• Lacanian analysis
• political theory
• environmental discourse
• critical environmental theory

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. www.vice.com/en/article/jgey8k/a-debate-over-racism-has-split-one-of-the-worlds-most-famous-climate-groups (accessed 10 July 2020)

2. This is in analogy to Marx’s concept of fetishization. For example, we all know that money an sich is a worthless piece of paper or a number in an account. Nonetheless, we bestow it with all manner of real value and power and act accordingly despite the fact that we all really know that this inscribed value is structured through social relations of appropriation, production, and reproduction.