The fossil fuel industry has a long history of spreading doubt about climate change science, and during the last decade several of these arguments have been picked up by large parts of the nationalistic far-right in Europe. Kjell Vowles’ doctoral thesis shows how this happened in five Swedish far-right digital media during the years 2018–2019, a period when the climate issue was hotly debated. The thesis also explores the ideological explanations for far-right climate obstruction.
What challenges do you focus on in your research?
“Time is running out if we are to transition to a low-carbon society to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. But at the same time, in Sweden, the issue is becoming increasingly polarized. Where there previously has been a consensus in Swedish politics that the issue is important and that Sweden has a big responsibility to lead the transition, the issue has now become divided between right and left. The roughly 10 per cent of Sweden’s population who deny that anthropogenic emissions are the main cause of climate change, is primarily found among sympathisers to the far-right Sweden Democrats. This is a cause of concern, if the society is to achieve the necessary transition away from fossil fuels.”
How do you address the problem with your research?
“Digital far-right media has supported the Sweden Democrats since before the party entered parliament in 2010. Most previous research on these media sites has focused on their discourses concerning immigration. By analysing their reporting on climate, my research contributes to the understanding about what drives opposition to climate policies within far-right nationalism.”
What are the main findings?
“The thesis has three important contributions. The first is that is shows how difficult it can be to detect disinformation. The digital video channel SwebbTV was the media site in the study which discussed the science of climate change the most, and which spread doubt about the science using tools such as cherry-picked graphs. The graphs could for example show the measured sea level rise at one individual station, and then be used as an argument that the IPCC is wrong in its conclusion that global sea level rise has accelerated. The claims in SwebbTV were often relatively easy to investigate and similar to ones previously promoted by actors close to the fossil fuel industry in the USA. But in several of the other media sites in the study, such as Fria tider and Samnytt, the science was hardly discussed. Instead, there was a short reference to, for instance, SwebbTV, and then ironic quotation marks, or scare quotes, were used around words such as climate change to mark the words as nonsense. The scare-quoting creates an agreement between the sites and its readers that the words do not mean what they normally mean. It also makes it more difficult to detect the disinformation for an outsider, you need to read a number of articles to understand the meaning of the quotation marks.”
“The second contribution concerns our understanding of far-right media ecosystems. Before the climate summit in Copenhagen 2009, several neoliberal think tanks connected to the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, and the network the Stockholm initiative, spread doubt about climate science. These actors often accused legacy media of censoring the climate debate or being propaganda nodes for climate alarmism, in a similar way that the nationalistic far right repeatedly accused media of being corrupt and leftist. When the far-right movement created its own ecosystem of digital media, this also became a key communications channel for what I call the climate change reactionary movement, which obstructs all climate politics.”
“The third contribution concerns why the opposition to climate politics has become so central within large parts of the Swedish, nationalistic far right. Previous research has described how the ideology’s nostalgic gaze is towards the idealised 1950s and 60s, and proponents of the ideology see themselves as the true defenders of the People’s Home. This helps explain the opposition to climate politics, since these were the fossil fuelled record-years of economic growth. This was a period before there was widespread knowledge about the negative environmental side effects of industrial production, and when there was a strong belief that continuous industrial expansion would lead to ever improved welfare. It was also a period when men had exclusive access to influential societal positions, and when the demands for equality were less forceful. As this glorified national community is incompatible with the results of climate science that show the need for a transition of both lifestyles and technical systems, these results must be downplayed or distorted by the Swedish nationalistic far-right, who portray them as being manufactured by an elite in order to control the people.”
What do you hope your research will lead to?
“Hopefully it will contribute to a deeper understanding of how climate denial is spread, and the ideological drivers behind it. This can make it easier to both counter disinformation, by illuminating the structures upholding it, and to shape climate policies that can gain widespread support. To counter an anti-establishment rhetoric about climate being something that is pushed upon the people by an elite, it is necessary to shape proposals that are perceived to be fair, and where those with the highest emissions must reduce these the most and fastest.”
Read the thesis: Fuelling Denial: The climate change reactionary movement and Swedish far-right media
Public defence: 31 May 2024 at 13.15, see link above.
- Senior Researcher, Science, Technology and Society, Technology Management and Economics
