Max Boykoff

• University of Colorado Boulder

News media influence how climate change is represented, understood, and discussed in the public sphere. To date, media and climate change research has primarily focused on Annex I countries, or treated non-Annex I countries as a homogenous bloc, despite the global nature of climate change and its geographically uneven impacts. This study uses a mix...

What kind of ancestors will those involved in climate change countermovements (CCMs) be? Among CCMs, the Heartland Institute has been an adaptive conservative think tank in the United States (USA) over the past decades, with funding from carbon-based industry-linked groups that has amplified the reach of their claims while shaping their power and i...

In this chapter, we survey how legacy and social media representational practices shape the cultural politics of knowledge, information and news coverage on climate change around the world. Mass media stitch together formal science and policy with everyday activities in the public sphere, yet expressions vary across cultures and social, environment...

Many U.S. states have taken significant action on climate change in recent years, demonstrating their commitment despite federal policy gridlock and rollbacks. Yet, there is still much we do not know about the agents, discourses, and strategies of those seeking to delay or obstruct state-level climate action. We first ask, what are the obstacles to...

Social media are prominent channels to foster the social debate about climate change. This research explores the strategies that institutions supporting scientific consensus on climate change undertake in order to communicate through social media. We conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with community managers and communication directors of orga...

Through this research, we systematically updated and expanded understanding of how the print media represent evidence of human contributions to climate change. We built on previous research that examined how the journalistic norm of balanced reporting contributed to informationally biased print media coverage in the United States (U.S.) context. We...

We interrogate fast fashion in the 21st century in the context of a changing climate, assessing emergent trends in sustainable fashion as an alternative consumption pathway through the annual ‘Trash the Runway’ event in Boulder, Colorado. In this research, we interviewed and surveyed designers and analyzed workshop activities that led up to their a...

We found that the proportion of media coverage that mentioned COVID-19 (with terms such as COVID or coronavirus) in early 2020 increased dramatically within 102 high-circulation newspaper sources across 50 countries around the world. This topic emerged as a dominant media storyline just as media coverage of climate change dropped precipitously over...

The journalistic norm of balance has been described as the practice of giving equal weight to different sides of a story; false balance is balanced reporting when the weight of evidence strongly favors one side over others—for example, the reality of human-caused climate change. False balance is problematic because it skews public perception of exp...

We are living through momentous times as we confront issues surrounding digital cultures and communications about climate change. There is urgency derived from our recognition that climate change is ‘here and now’. Inequalities of power and access – in both digital cultures and in a changing climate – disadvantage individuals and communities who se...

Societal transformation is one of the most topical concepts in sustainability research and policy-making. Used in many ways, it indicates that nonlinear systematic changes are needed in order to fully address global environmental and human development challenges. This paper explores what sustainability transformations mean for lay focus group parti...

Highlights Anglophone media portrayals marginalized local climate vulnerabilities. Technocratic conservation agenda, mythmaking drove semantic drift in media accounts. Anglophone media representations failed to articulate poverty, inequality, justice. Anglophone media discourses were found to promote neoliberal conservation agendas. Absence of...

Against a contrasting backdrop of consensus on key issues on climate science, a heterogeneous group dubbed climate «skeptics», «contrarians», «deniers» have significantly shaped contemporary discussions of climate science, politics and policy in the public sphere. This essay focuses on the USA context, and explores some of the intertwined social, p...

Against a contrasting backdrop of consensus on key issues on climate science, a heterogeneous group dubbed climate «skeptics», «contrarians», «deniers» have significantly shaped contemporary discussions of climate science, politics and policy in the public sphere. This essay focuses on the USA context, and explores some of the intertwined social, p...

Given the potential for uncertainties to influence mega-projects, this study examines how mega-projects are deliberated in the public arena. The paper traces the strategies used to promote the Dead Sea Water Canal. Findings show that the Dead Sea mega-project was encumbered by ample uncertainties. Treatment of uncertainties in early coverage was do...

How have mass media covered issues of climate adaptation over time? How has climate adaptation garnered media attention amidst associated issues of climate science, mitigation, impacts, politics, and policy activities? By way of media, how do adaptation strategies connect across scales – from the individual and local up to the national and internat...

The New Carbon Economy provides a critical understanding of the carbon economy. It offers key insights into the constitution, governance and effects of the carbon economy, across a variety of geographical settings. Examines different dimensions of the carbon economy from a range of disciplinary angles in a diversity of settings Provides ways for re...

The public rely upon media representations to help interpret and make sense of the many complexities relating to climate science and governance. Media representations of climate issues – from news to entertainment – are powerful and important links between people’s everyday realities and experiences, and the ways in which they are discussed by scie...

The coverage by E. Kintisch of the Copenhagen Climate Conference (“Projections of climate change go from bad to worse, scientists report,” 20 March, p. [1546][1]) follows the dominant mode of media reporting that has emerged in the weeks following the conference—that of impending doom. As

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.