Mapping the Terrain and Avoiding the Minefield: identifying the antagonistic constructions and socio-emotional motives of climate change contrarianism in the United States

Sammanfattning: Since climate change reached public attention in the US, contrarian platforms have successfully established a counter-narrative to plant an illusion of deep controversy around the reality of climate change, effectively reproduced in conservative media. Despite growing scientific knowledge, a trend of enhanced, rather than decreasing, affiliation to contrarianism is paradoxically evident in the US. Through combining Mouffe’s political theories of antagonistic relationality and political affect with Lakoff’s linguistic conceptualizations, an appealing framework to analyze the antagonistic constructions in the counter-narrative, and the socio-emotional dimensions these consequently activate, is outlined. Through narrative analysis, antagonistic constructions at play in the counter-narrative is reconstructed into dominant trends, revealing that doubt in antagonistic characteristics or dishonest motives attributed to the ‘other’, outshines scientifically rooted argumentations about climate change. The paper argues that facts alone, regardless robust scientific bases, could be insufficient to sway contrarian attitudes when socio-emotional identification at play are not considered.