Jonas Anshelm

The Last Chance to Save the Planet? An Analysis of the Geoengineering Advocacy Discourse in the Public Debate

Geoengineering, i.e., the deliberate manipulation of the global climate using grand-scale technologies, poses new challenges in terms of environmental risks and human-nature relationships. Until recently, these technologies were considered science fiction, but they are now being reconsidered by researchers, leading to an emerging public debate. Our aim is to improve our understanding of the public discourse on geoengineering in mass media. We analyze 1500 articles published from 2005 to 2013, constructing four coherent storylines that represent most of the geoengineering advocacy in the public discourse in mass media. We scrutinize inconsistencies in this discourse and argue that geoengineering may be the first example of a grand-scale technology that in some important respects has clear postmodern tendencies: geoengineering advocacy, for example, is not based on objective truth claims of the natural sciences and does not promise a better world.

Climate Change and the Convergence between ENGOs and Business: On the Loss of Utopian Energies

The conflicts permeating the environmental debate since the 1960s have mainly involved two actors: multinational companies and international environmental organizations (ENGOs). Today, there are signs that the antagonism is ending with regards to co-operation and strategy. We argue that this convergence is no longer limited to specific joint projects, but is also prevalent at the idea and policy levels. Both actors have begun describing problems in similar terms, articulating the same goals and recommending the same solutions. Such convergence offers advantages in efforts to counteract climate change but also some problems: declining citizen trust in ENGOs, risk of intellectually impoverished environmental and energy debates, and loss of alternate visions and values.

Among Demons and Wizards: The Nuclear Energy Discourse in Sweden and the Re-Enchantment of the World.

In 1956, the Swedish Parliament decided to invest in a national nuclear energy program. The decision rested on the conviction that it would be in the interest of the nation to use the assets of natural uranium, the advanced reactor technology, and the expertise on nuclear physics that the country had at its disposal. Since the decision concerned the largest investment ever in Swedish industrial politics, the scientists and engineers had to promise that it would lead to a prosperous future. In this article, the utopian discourse and the rhetoric that were developed to support the Swedish nuclear energy program are analyzed. An important conclusion is that the scientific, technological, political, economic, and moral discourse was not sufficient to create political and civil support. Instead, the scientists and engineers had to turn to the world of myths. Thereby, the conflicts between nuclear physics and magic, scientific objectivity and demons, and rationalistic belief in progress and irrational ideas of faith were dissolved. In Sweden, as in many other Western countries during the 1950s, the world was not disenchanted, but re-enchanted.

(Re-)constructing Nuclear Waste Management in Sweden : The Involvement of ConcernedGroups, 1970–2010

Sweden constitutes a leading nation concerning developing technological solutions for final disposal of spent nuclear fuel. The KBS-3 solution that is now to be implemented in Osthammar, northeast ...

A green fatwā? Climate change as a threat to the masculinity of industrial modernity

From the autumn of 2006 and until 2009, climate change was described in Sweden as having apocalyptic dimensions. There was a parliamentary and public consensus that anthropogenic climate change was real and that society needed to take responsibility for lowering greenhouse gas emissions, though a small group of climate sceptics did not agree with the majority of the scientists or the need for drastic changes in the organization of Western societies. This small group, with only one exception, consisted of elderly men with influential positions in academia or large private companies. In this article we discuss how they described themselves as marginalised, banned and oppressed dissidents, forced to speak against a faith-based belief in climate science. They characterised themselves as having strong beliefs in a market society, great mistrust of government regulation and a sturdy belief in engineering and natural science rationality. We contend that climate sceptics in Sweden can be understood as being intertwined with a masculinity of industrial modernity that is on decline. These climate sceptics tried to save an industrial society of which they were a part by defending its values against ecomodern hegemony. This gender analysis of climate scepticism moves beyond the previous research of understanding this discourse as solely an ideologically-based outcry against science and politics, and highlights the recognition of identities, historical structures and emotions.

Making sense of climate engineering: a focus group study of lay publics in four countries

This study explores sense-making about climate engineering among lay focus group participants in Japan, New Zealand, the USA and Sweden. In total, 23 qualitative focus group interviews of 136 participants were conducted. The analyses considered sense-making strategies and heuristics among the focus group participants and identified commonalities and variations in the data, exploring participants’ initial and spontaneous reactions to climate engineering and to several recurrent arguments that feature in scientific and public debate (e.g. climate emergency). We found that, despite this study’s wide geographical scope, heterogeneous focus group compositions, and the use of different moderators, common themes emerged. Participants made sense of climate engineering in similar ways, for example, through context-dependent analogies and metaphorical descriptions. With few exceptions, participants largely expressed negative views of large-scale deliberate intervention in climate systems as a means to address anthropogenic global warming.

Has the grand idea of geoengineering as Plan B run out of steam

Paul Crutzen’s 2006 call for geoengineering research triggered public debate in the mass media of several countries. Since then, a common belief among numerous involved scientists has been that more geoengineering experimentation or research is needed and that geoengineering should be carefully considered in a precautionary way as an emergency option or ‘Plan B’. Despite the controversial potential of geoengineering in terms of mega-risks, ethical dilemmas and governance challenges, public geoengineering debate in the daily press from 2006 to 2013 was heavily dominated by accounts of scientists’ arguments for more geoengineering research or even deployment, only about 8% of mass media articles expressing criticism of geoengineering. However, based on a reading of 700 articles published worldwide in 2014 and 2015, we demonstrate a gradual shift in the coverage, and the daily press now primarily reports critical views of geoengineering technologies. The patterns outlined here point in the same direction: It seems as though the grand idea of geoengineering as Plan B is fading.

The making of mining expectations: mining romanticism and historical memory in a neoliberal political landscape

ABSTRACT This paper investigates a greenfield mining project in a peripheral region in northern Sweden through the analysis of how different actor groups formed their own ‘horizons of expectations’ that temporally became fused, only to crumble together with the mining company in a short period of time. By focusing on the co-evolvement of expectations, we show how expectations are differentiated along geographical and temporal scales, reflect upon how these differences relate to interests and historical memory, and finally what these differences mean for the development of large-scale, long-term, raw materials-based projects devoted to industrial production in depopulating areas in an economy otherwise orientated towards neoliberal governance and post-industrial development. By doing so, we make a theoretical contribution to the literature on expectations through the introduction of the concept ‘horizon of expectations’, and a contribution to the literature on neoliberalism and its cultural-geographical implications.