Communicating risk is a challenge. It is also, according to Ulrich Beck, socially constructed, in that what we perceive as risk (or not) is very much to do with what is presented, and how it is framed.
Earlier this week, Framing Science ran a piece on how communicating climate change as a security issue has shifted the Virginia Senator, Republican John Warner, from sceptic to advocate for action. (The recent bill was of course called the Climate Security Act). As Framing Science continues, “It’s a leading example of what can happen when climate change is switched from the mental box of just an environmental issue and recast for Republicans as either a national security issue or as an opportunity to grow the economy.”
This is not new. Anabela Carvalho at the University of Minho points out how Margaret Thatcher did exactly the same back in 1989 when she gave her speech to the UN on climate change. Thatcher used the “rhetorical strategy of ‘securitization’, representing climate change as an existential threat” to align action on climate change with neoliberal economics. What this allowed Thatcher to do was:
[tie] the government’s initiative to situate the risk within a neo-liberal economic programme, sharing the costs globally while reaping potential economic benefits nationally.
So while it may seem like a useful and successful strategy, the Democrats are willingly creating a situation where America, the biggest polluter, only acts if they come out of it without paying their share. See George Bush’s consistent claims reiterated on the eve of the G8: no movement without China, India. And not only the US: the Japanese are now also claiming that Kyoto was unfair on them.
Energy and the cost to the economy of climate change are perhaps the biggest blockages on US action. See Climate Sceptic on this. Will connecting it to energy and security overcome the obstacle? Maybe that’s what it will take.
But it might be worse than that. As the Economist picked up 10 days ago, there is less common ground between the climate camp and the (energy/national) security camp than might at first seem likely. So while the Democrats and environmental actors give up the core focus of climate change migitation to at least get something, anything out of the Republicans, they might be giving away more than they think.
The point here is: frames and rhetoric are not everything. It may convince the sceptics into action to link climate and security, but if the solid linkages around pragmatic action are not there (e.g. will acting on security deal directly with emissions reduction?), then it will continue to be security that is action upon, and the warm words about the climate will remain that: words.
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