Abstract

Over the past two decades, the environmental issue has become mainstream, and climate change, in particular, has become the central focus of the problematic environmental condition the Earth faces. Nevertheless, despite scientific concern and alarmist rhetoric, climate parameters continue to worsen. We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation where ‘despite knowing the truth about climate change, we act as if we do not’. This form of denial indicates that access to knowledge and facts does not guarantee effective action. This presentation will argue that the dominant depoliticised form of climate populism can explain the current climate deadlock and propose ways to transcend it.

My presentation focuses on what I refer to as Climate Populism. We argue that climate populism is not just the prerogative of right-winged, xenophobic, and autocratic elite and their supporters, but will insist on how climate populism also structures not only many radical climate movements but also the liberal climate consensus. I argue that the architecture of most mainstream as well as more radical climate discourses, practices, and policies is similar to that of populist discourses, and should be understood as an integral part of a pervasive and deepening process of post-politicization. Mobilising a process that psychoanalysts call ‘fetishistic disavowal’, the climate discourse produces a particular form of populism that obscures the power relations responsible for the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. I shall mobilise a broadly Lacanian-Marxist theoretical perspective that permits accounting for this apparently paradoxical condition of both acknowledging and denying the truth of the climate situation, and the discourses/practices that sustain this.

Erik Swyngedouw is a human geographer who has contributed greatly to political economy, political ecology, and urban geographies. He has published several books and over a hundred papers in top journals. He earned his MSc from the Catholic University of Leuven, before completing his PhD at Johns Hopkins under David Harvey. Swyngedouw has taught at Oxford as Professor of Geography and is now Professor of Human geography at the University of Manchester.