'Carbon compounds'

‘Carbon compounds’: Tracking the emergence of a new language of climate change in English speaking print and online media

Brigitte Nerlich* and Nelya Koteyko**

*Institute for Science and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, UK (brigitte.nerlich@nottingham.ac.uk)

** Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester, UK (nk158@le.ac.uk)

Summary of findings from a research project funded by the ESRC, 2008-2010

https://sites.google.com/site/carbonesrc/

“ . . . the crucial role of science often lies in how it is ‘represented’ and how it is employed within social movements, interest groups, regulatory agencies, epistemic communities, international organizations and ‘regimes’, and so on. Scientific knowledge thus often tends to be enmeshed with social symbols, political ideologies and discourses, social movement ‘frames’. How this occurs makes an enormous difference in terms of environmental policy and politics.” (Buttel, 2000: 28)

Introduction

“Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years” (The Hartwell Paper, 2010: 5). This is the conclusion reached by the authors of an influential paper commissioned by the London School of Economics, known as The Hartwell Paper. They attribute this failure in part to the wrong framing of the issue and they appeal to policy makers to change framing radically. What they see as the wrong framing is partly based, they argue, on focusing almost exclusively on ‘carbon dioxide’ and on trying to reduce it in the atmosphere through market-based mechanisms, such as carbon trading, carbon pricing and so on. They also claim that “the carbon issue has been overloaded with the baggage of other framings and agendas” (p. 9), which means that there was at one at the same time a single focus and a focus that was diluted by trying to fit it to too many purposes. The authors propose instead to approach the goal of emissions reductions more indirectly through multiple framings that are relatively independent of each other and focus on human dignity instead of carbon (see p. 10) (see also Pielke and Sarewitz, 2005; Rayner and Malone, 1998). The problem with the focus on ‘carbon’ was, they say, that it framed or conceptualised climate change as a single problem amenable to a single understanding and a single solution (see also Hulme, 2009). The ‘carbon’ frame became, in a way, a conceptual prison for policy makers, making them overlook the complexity of the problem and the complexity involved in solving it. Similar to Wittgenstein, the authors seem to see their task as ‘showing the fly the way out of the fly bottle’ in which it is trapped (Wittgenstein 1958: 309), where the fly are policy makers and the fly bottle is the carbon frame.

Our project, funded between 2008 and 2010 by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and entitled ‘Carbon compounds’: Lexical creativity and discourse formations in the context of climate change, has traced the emergence of this framing and this focus on carbon through a study of language use and language change. In a way, we wanted to find out why the fly found the bottle so attractive in the first place. This too is similar to Wittgenstein’s attempt to show philosophers how they built their conceptual fly bottles by looking at the language they use. In our case we examined how climate change communicators from journalists to bloggers to politicians use language, that is, we tried to illuminate the language games they play with lexical carbon compounds in particular, the meanings they created and the functions they served.

We observed, at first incidentally, an apparent increase of so-called lexical ‘carbon compounds’ or phrases that combine ‘carbon’ with other words (from ‘carbon awareness’ to ‘carbon zealots’), from about 2004 onwards in the print and online media and began to study emerging patterns of language use around such lexical compounds. Our focus was not directly climate policy, although our results could provide policy makers with insights into how their policies are talked about and disseminated, but on the way that traditional mass media and online sources communicate about the complex issues related to climate change and climate change mitigation.

To find patterns, clusters and trends in the language used when talking about climate change in English, we employed lexical ‘carbon compounds’ as linguistic tracking devices. As Mike Hulme, a well-known commentator on the social and cultural impact of climate change has noted:

"Climate change" involves far more than a measured description of evolving trends in regional or global weather statistics or an uncomplicated account of the changing biogeochemical functions of the Earth system. How we talk about climate change - our discourse - is increasingly shaping our perception and interpretation of the changing physical realities that science is battling to reveal to us. At that same time, discourse is always embedded in evolving cultural, political and ethical movements and moods. Not only is our climate unstable, but how we talk about our climate is also unstable. ... Just as the physical climate-system responds both to slow-changing natural rhythms and also to more rapid human-induced perturbations, so will those human artefacts we use to make sense of climate change - language, metaphors, policies, beliefs - respond both rapidly and slowly to […] new financial and economic mood. (Hulme, 2008)

Although the earth’s climate has changed and fluctuated for millions of years, concerns about the contributions that humans make to climate change in terms of, for example, increased carbon (dioxide) emissions (as part of increases in greenhouse gas emissions), only emerged relatively recently, about two centuries ago (see Boykoff and Rajan, 2007). During the last century concern about what is called anthropogenic climate change has fluctuated but gathered pace since the late 1980s when climate change science began to intersect with politics and media coverage (see ibid.). Most recently concerns about climate change peaked around 2007 (see figure 1, based on google searches, see Nerlich and Valdez, in prep.), both in the US and the UK, as well as globally.

Figure 1: Concern about global warming/climate change in the UK, the US and globally according to google searches (this research is still ongoing and tentative)

This short peak in alarm seems to have been driven by a conjunction of events, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the release of former US presidential candidate Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 (Al Gore, 2006), the Stern Report on the economics of climate change in 2006 (Stern report, 2007) and, most importantly perhaps, the release of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2007 (IPCC, 2007), the fourth in a series of such reports and one that expressed the strongest certainty about various aspects of human-induced climate change and its possible consequences, followed by the sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize between Al Gore and the authors of the IPCC report in 2007 “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” (http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/).

However, all this seems not to have changed attitudes to climate change as profoundly as policy makers may have wished and concerns or a lack of concern returned to something like ‘normal’ after the infamous ‘climategate’ affair at the end of 2009 (see Nerlich, 2010). This is not surprising given that, as one observer noted at the beginning of 2009 and referring to a poll carried out by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press in the US: ‘Climate change [is] dead last among public priorities’ (Nisbet, 2009). This also means that although public opinion about climate change may be influenced by the media, having more or more intensive media coverage or media campaigns about global warming or climate change issues does not necessarily lead to profound changes in public attitudes or public perception.

The findings we report can therefore not directly tell us anything about public perception or attitudes but they can tell us something about what issues and what words were used in the media (by journalists as well as policy makers and scientists) to attempt to shape public perception and attitudes, in our case through the creative use of lexical compounds around ‘carbon’ as a hub. We have investigated climate change through the lens of language, the only tool humans have to radically shape the world they live in. As the sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote in 1993, social life is “produced by its component actors precisely in terms of their active constitution and reconstitution of frames of meaning whereby they organize their experience” (1993: 86). New words and new concept provide people with new ways of experiencing themselves and their world, with new ways of being, new ways of knowing, and, most importantly, new ways of acting (or not acting) on the world.

Methodology

An in-depth study of the coinage and use of carbon compounds across a range of public domains, from print to online media, necessitates a multi-method approach. We therefore developed a novel methodological framework based on the synergy between cybermetric and corpus linguistic methods to collect and analyse the web-based data in quantitative terms on the one hand, and techniques of discourse and metaphor analysis to explore the interpretative context of the compounds on the other. Techniques of webometrics, which can be broadly described as the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures, and technologies on the web were applied to retrieve and classify RSS feeds - summaries of the daily updates from blogs, news sites and other sources that were found to contain carbon compounds. The data were then studied with corpus linguistic tools such as collocational lists and concordances to reveal broad patterns of use. This methodological combination is innovative in that it introduces a novel way of collecting and studying RSS feed-based data in linguistic and socio-cultural research which allows a more tailored approach to internet data mining than currently available Web concordances and has an important advantage in the permanent storage of texts under analysis (see Koteyko, et al. 2010; Koteyko, 2010/in press).

We also used a novel combination of text mining and conceptual mapping, based on a specially written computer programme, to map similarities and differences between the use of carbon words in the US and the UK between 2000 and 2009. This research is ongoing at present (see Nerlich et al., in prep.). In parallel, we extracted information about rises and falls in concern about climate change in the US and the UK using google trend searches in conjunction with existing opinion polls (this work was quite experimental and is also still ongoing, Nerlich and Valdez, in prep.).

In terms of qualitative methodology, drawing on the frameworks of cognitive linguistics, metaphor analysis and discourse analysis allowed us to explore the nature of lexical creativity surrounding individual key ‘carbon compounds’, a novel approach that demonstrated how lexical creativity can be a vehicle for driving forward and reflecting various debates about climate change. Overall, the project successfully combined a macro-level analysis of usage patterns in online and print media texts over time (and across nations divided by the same language) with a micro-level analysis of arguments, metaphors and discourse coalitions.

Findings

Clusters and trends

As one way to establish patterns, especially lexical clusters or trends in language use, we studied the online use of carbon compounds through RSS feeds, as described above. We identified 34 compounds that were used most frequently and were also used creatively. For example, 'carbon diet' is considered creative because 'diet' is not usually associated with carbon, whereas 'carbon emission' is not considered creative. By using two online search engines we combined both a quantitative analysis of the usage of these terms from 1992 to 2008 with a qualitative analysis of the context of their uses (see Koteyko et al. 2010).

The results showed that the number of uses of all compounds rouse from 2000 onwards and peaked around the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 (and seems to be falling at present). Those that combined 'carbon' with words from the world of finance, such as 'carbon budget', ‘carbon market’, ‘carbon tax’ or 'carbon credit', appeared to be the oldest and were in use between the early 1990s and 1999. From 2003 onwards the frequency of some of these compounds increased to 1,050 occurrences per year, probably because the economics of climate change began to become a central issue at this time in policy making. Most were coined to conceptualise 'carbon trading' between countries and businesses. Economic management of climate change then entered a second phase characterised more by person-centred activities. This may have contributed to emergence of compounds more focused on lifestyle that first came into use in the period 1999-2005, such as 'carbon diet', 'carbon friendly' and 'carbon addiction'. The term 'carbon footprint' was particularly prominent. It was coined in 1999 and with it came a new language centred on calculating individual and collective impacts (see Nerlich and Koteyko, 2009a). From 2005 onwards compounds became more emotional and evaluative, even critical or sceptical, such as 'carbon dictatorship', 'carbon crusade' and 'carbon morality'. This indicated that climate change mitigation was no longer framed in terms of scientific observations but considered to be more about morality. These attitudinal compounds tended to be used more by blogging and news sites, whereas financial and lifestyle compounds were used across a range of domains. Both the presence and absence of these three types of compounds can reveal the nature of positions taken by various stakeholders seeking to communicate climate change.

We also examined the use of carbon compounds in UK national newspapers during the same period (Koteyko, in prep). Drawing on the methods of corpus-assisted discourse analysis which combines corpus linguistic techniques with discourse and metaphor analysis, the study corroborated the trends established in Koteyko et al. (2010) (the emergence of clusters populated by finance, lifestyle and attitudinal compounds in public discourse). We then focused on the most lexically productive clusters spawned around finance-related lexis, ‘carbon neutral’, ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘low-carbon’ compounds to analyse the ways in which their use may have enabled the linguistic construction and discursive dominance of market-based solutions (see Nerlich and Koteyko, in prep.). The study of finance compounds between 1990 and 2004 demonstrated how their use was consistent with ideological assumptions identified by Levy (1997): namely, the environment can and should be managed; market-based mechanisms represent a winwin opportunity, and traditional accounting tools provide the means to do the managing. A perhaps more surprising and worrying find was that these assumptions continued to underlie more recent discourses on ‘carbon neutrality’, low carbon economy, low carbon society and low carbon futures, as the use of these compounds between 2004 and 2009 revealed (see also Nerlich, under review; see also Thornes and Randalls, 2007). In contrast to finance-related carbon compounds (e.g. ‘carbon market’, ‘carbon economy’) the labels ‘carbon neutral’, ‘zero-carbon’ and ‘low carbon’ appear to signal a departure from the ‘market-driven’ sustainability and emphasize reduction rather than mere ‘management’ of carbon emissions via carbon trading and offsetting mechanisms. However, our study of their lexical surroundings showed that such compounds as ‘low carbon business’, ‘carbon neutral’, ‘low carbon solutions’, and so on represent a new, hybrid form of compounds where the ‘green lifestyle’ is combined with ‘profit/market’, and which has allowed the corporate rhetoric to continue permeating the climate change mitigation discourses. This poses ethical challenges to policy makers engaged in climate change mitigation. Inherent in economic or market-based mechanism trying to tackle climate change seems to be a clash in values based on a clash of frames between common interests and competitiveness and between markets and morality which cannot be easily resolved. The market metaphor or frame becomes a conceptual and political trap into which policy makers can fall very easily and once inside it becomes almost impossible to see beyond it (see Crompton, 2010; Cojanu, 2008).

As Nerlich (under review) has shown, the strategic use of ‘low carbon’ as a compound in industry and policy making, first as a modifier than as a noun, has created discursive frames linked to expectations of great future riches to be made and of technological fixes to climate change that can be ‘bought’. The market metaphor, and related economic and technological metaphors, have come to frame the dominant discourse about the future of our world. This might frame, what Donald Schön (1979) called ‘problem settings’ in such as way that only certain solutions are seen as possible, solutions that may be neither sustainable nor just.

As early as 1995, a contributor to the journal Ecological Economics stressed that in the context of an “economics of avoided carbon emissions” (Wiman 1995: 26), it was dangerous to rely exclusively on technology to adapt to climate change (see p. 27). He warns us that we overlook the social dimensions of climate change at our peril, which are for example explored by people involved in so-called ‘low carbon communities’. The framing of climate change mitigation through the dominant lens of low carbon markets and low carbon futures makes it extremely difficult to ‘see’ the social, historical and cultural dimensions of climate change mitigation, and makes it much easier to believe in future financial and technological miracles based on highly seductive economic models and metaphors.

Single compounds, creativity and discourse formations

Another part of our research focused on studying particular carbon compounds and their social and cultural significance in framing certain aspects of the climate change debate, such as ‘low carbon diet’ (Nerlich et al., in press), ‘carbon goldrush’ (Nerlich and Koteyko, 2010), ‘carbon rationing’ (Nerlich and Koteyko, 2009), ‘low carbon’ (Nerlich, under review) and, ‘carbon indulgence’, for example.

In the case of ‘carbon indulgence’, we traced its use in traditional media and online (Nerlich and Koteyko, 2009). We found with relation to what the authors of the Hartwell Paper call the “flawed manufacture of a market for carbon” and its “Byzantine complexity” (The Hartwell Paper, 2010: 27) that overall the debate about so-called ‘carbon indulgences’ in our corpora tended to denigrate carbon trading and offsetting schemes as a cynical exploitation of people’s feelings of guilt in the context of climate change, a guilt that can be related to moral or dietary sins or both. This was done rather creatively, especially in blogs by inventing ever longer compounds around ‘carbon indulgence’ itself, such ‘carbon indulgence pixie dust’ or ‘travelling carbon indulgence circus’ for example.

We also observed the emergence of four distinct clusters or discourse formations around ‘carbon indulgence’ as the rhetorical hub. The first and ‘primary’ discourse formation of what we call environmental offsetting sceptics has evolved around the use of ‘carbon indulgence’ in the sense intended by George Monbiot, for example, when he talked about medieval ‘indulgences’. According to this discourse formation, carbon offsetting schemes do not work because they resemble medieval indulgences that absolve you from sinful behaviour but do not prevent sinful behaviour in the first place.

As the debate around economic and social implications of climate change mitigation progressed in time and through Internet space, three other related but at the same time distinct discourse formations seem to have emerged. Although related to environmental offsetting sceptics in terms of their focus on the criticism of offsetting, economic offsetting sceptics point out the rather cynical exploitation of carbon offsetting/indulgence schemes for the purpose of personal enrichment rather than as a means to mitigate climate change, sometimes also referring to a potential spread of corruption or fraud.

There are also climate change sceptics who fear the ‘church of green’ and argue that carbon indulgences in the medieval sense are actually tithes or taxes that will drag us economically back to the Middle Ages.

And finally there are what one might call Al Gore sceptics, that is people who accuse Gore’s campaign of climate change education of hypocrisy and vain-glory, especially when constructing Gore’s own energy behaviour as over-indulgent. This discourse formation is closely linked to the climate change sceptics who see carbon offsetting as a corrupt practice similar to the indulgences sold by the Catholic Church.

It is interesting to note that at least the last three discourses seem to have been prompted by the Al Gore phenomenon in the US which then launched ‘carbon indulgence’ on a rhetorical path which it might not have taken had Gore never released his film. What is also notable is that the film seems to have sparked various waves of climate scepticism rather than achieving its intended goal, namely spurring people into action about climate change.

This general rise of scepticism in a variety of shapes and forms from about 2006 onwards also seems to have paved the way for an event we could not have predicted, but for which language change had paved the way, namely the crisis around climate change policy and communication after ‘climategate’ (see Nerlich, 2010). We would however predict that what the Hartwell paper proposes as part of its radical reframing of climate change policy after climategate and the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009, namely a “slowly rising hypothecated carbon tax as a path to a “low-carbon economy” (p. 35), might hit some resistance.

Communalities and contrasts

A third part of our research focused on possible differences in framing issues of climate change (mitigation) between two countries speaking a common language, the US and the UK. We found that the UK used carbon compounds more frequently and more creatively, especially to frame policies, strategies and solutions, from building zero carbon housing to creating low carbon futures, whereas the US still uses them to define climate change is a problem.

Conclusions

Communicating climate change is a complex activity in which many different stakeholders are involved (Nerlich et al., 2010). Understanding how people converse on this issue is essential to gaining insights into how both popular understandings and misunderstandings emerge, which in turn will have an influence on whether climate change policies are accepted or rejected.

At the beginning of this overview article we said that we wanted to explore what made the carbon frame so attractive to policy makers and the media, especially, it seems, in the UK, or, as we said, to find out what made the fly bottle of carbon so attractive to the fly. There seem to be at least two reasons for this, related to a dialectic relationship between complexity and simplicity of language use. As we have shown in Nerlich et al. (in press), lexical carbon compounds and metaphors can reduce the complexity of climate change to human scale, make it communicable and cognitively manageable through language. This process involves mapping various aspects of climate change onto more familiar aspects of human life that people understand and can cope with, such as religion or dieting or finance or even footprints, that is, boiling them down to ‘human scale’ and connecting them up with established cultural (and embodied) knowledge. (The influence of visual imagery, used alone or in conjunction with verbal images, in this context should not be forgotten, especially with regard to ‘carbon footprints’, but we did not focus here on visual images.)

The use of lexical compounds, such as ‘carbon footprint, ‘low carbon diet, ‘carbon detox’, ‘carbon market’, ‘carbon fascist’ or‘carbon guilt’, to talk about issues related to climate change seems to be a unique trait of the English language. These compounds offer users a way to compress and integrate complex information into two or more simple words and to think and talk about issues related to climate change and global warming in ways that are denied other languages, who have to resort to much longer paraphrases and much more diverse and sometimes obscure compounds, such as‘Treibhausgasbilanz’ (greenhouse gas balance) in German for example. Having once‘discovered’ that compounds, such as‘carbon footprint’ can convey complex information very efficiently, users of the English language, especially those writing for the media or those writing blogs, quickly used, it seems, this lexical and conceptual tool or schema and applied it to a host of other related issues, thereby constructing an entire‘carbon lexicon’ that is at the same time very simple and easy to use but also complex, coherent and flexible enough to allow for creativity to flourish, which means speakers cannot only talk about a ‘low carbon diet’ for example but also criticise carbon offsetting by saying that this allows people to have their ‘carbon cake’ and eat it.

Lexical carbon compounds have become efficient verbal and conceptual tools for making sense of climate change and users engage in numerous creative ways of modifying, varying and extending these compounds to achieve a variety of discursive ends. There is a danger though. The use of such carbon compounds may provide the illusion that a simple (economic) solution is available for a complex problem. This is however, as we have seen when referring to the Hartwell Paper, the wrong way to think about climate change mitigation and other activities related to climate change. This means that in English lexical carbon compounds may make it easier to ‘communicate green’ but that there is also a darker side to this apparent ease of communication.

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