Journal article
Where Ideology Meets Private Interest: The Three-part Composition of Climate Obstruction in the United States
Environmental Research Communications, v 6(8), 081003
10 Jul 2024
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Abstract A network of organizations working to oppose climate action, called the climate change countermovement (CCCM), has long been a critical yet highly opaque subject of study for social scientists concerned with climate politics. We leverage a new combined dataset of boards of directors, financial contributions, and texts produced by CCCM members to characterize its sources of support and social structure. We show that foundations tend to make more frequent and larger donations to CCCM nonprofits when they are linked through a board member. We also show that CCCM nonprofits which are more distant from each other in the social network of board members produce different climate change discourses. Community detection methods robustly detect three communities within the CCCM: conservative think tanks (CTT), oil and gas trade associations, and utility, coal, and manufacturing trade associations, each with unique goals within the countermovement. The findings suggest that the climate countermovement is an interface among these communities which together ensure that climate action obstruction is achieved on different but complementary fronts, through both discursive and more concrete policy efforts. This paper also introduces a new way of understanding organized climate obstruction and makes significant methodological contributions in the study of social movements and countermovements.
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Details
- Title
- Where Ideology Meets Private Interest: The Three-part Composition of Climate Obstruction in the United States
- Creators
- Galen HallLoredana LoyRobert J. BrulleKennedy Schell-SmithMing-May HuStina Trollback
- Publication Details
- Environmental Research Communications, v 6(8), 081003
- Publisher
- Institute of Physics
- Number of pages
- 12
- Grant note
This work was funded by a grant to the Climate Social Science Network from the High Tide Foundation, with administrative support from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.DAS:The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the following URL/DOI: https://github.com/ClimateDevLab/cccm-structure.
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001294046400001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85201854954
- Other Identifier
- 991021893570504721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Environmental Sciences